Friends

 

Our week was full of activities, conferences, and invitations to everyone we knew or didn't know. We spent a lot of time trying to help some of our friends feel more included in the branch. With one of them in particular, a youth, we brought her to also make new friends. She has a baptismal date that we're really hope will go through but there is another church she's been going to for longer. She has a great desire to serve a mission and preach the gospel. It was great to see her at the youth activities and slowly start conversing with the other youth. It was a good start to help her feel more included. In another activity we saw a few families of members we invited too. That made me happy to see them and to see them doing what they've wanted for awhile. I was also very happy to see my little spanglish friend again. She became more and more excited to see us each time as she eventually hugged us shouting "ELDERS!!!" We're amigos.

 We've been teaching to the woman that said she felt the spirit strongly in the lesson we had about the Plan of Salvation. She also had her sister move in with her from Guadalajara. We happened to pass by them in the street and began to talk with them. We began to explain our basic beliefs to her and then they both responded with a wave of questions. We decided to take the questions one at a time and focus on her biggest one about why are there so many churches. They had lots of comments and questions as we taught them about the Restauration. My companion wasn't able to tell the first vision story because they had many comment and doubts about what we were saying. But by the end, I mentioned how they didn't have to believe our words on the subject but could pray to receive their own testimonies. They looked at me somewhat shocked and said "If the Bible is true of course the Book of Mormon is true. And we had prophets before so we believe Joseph Smith was a prophet." We sat for a moment and my companion and I looked at each other and said "Bueno". We still invited them and explained to them the importance of a testimony but the lesson was somewhat different.

 

We had our zone conference this week along with General Conference: both of which contained spiritual insights, goals, and crying children in our chapels. We had few friends be able to watch it and it made me happy to hear how some loved the messages and fell in love with the choir. I loved the message from President Nelson and its been nice to talk about it with leaders and how we can help not just the people we are teaching but the members and others to have this positive spiritual momentum.

 

Pretty young but still good for some high fructose corn syrup and trans fat,

Élder d'Evegnée