I don’t even know where to begin. I don’t have enough time to cover everything that happened this week, but I’ll do my best to cover the main stuff.
So this week we’ve been pretty limited due to the mile alottment that we’ve been given, so it’s been difficult to find enough rides to go everywhere we need to and fill the time that we have to. But because we’ve been relying so heavily on the members to take us to lessons, we’re able to introduce our investigators to the members and it works out well. One lady we have been meeting with lives about 50 miles away from us. So we always try to get a member to take us to see her. We had one lesson on Sunday of last week where we walked in and she saw us as an answer to her prayers. This week we saw her with another member, and she sat us down and explained how she wouldn’t be seeing us anymore because the Book of Mormon was not true. We were able to ask her questions enough to find out what her concerns were, and we tried to address them. She finally allowed us to teach the lesson of the Restoration and explain more about where the Book of Mormon came from. By the end of the lesson, she decided that even though she had a hard time with 3rd Nephi with Christ’s ministry to the Americas, she thought Joseph Smith must’ve been a true prophet. We were surprised when she said that because of how hard she’d been fighting that, but we were excited to hear it. We asked what made her feel differently, and she got up and left the room. We looked at each other and wondered what to do, but she soon came back in with an armful of spiral notebooks. She showed them to us and we read them out loud. She explained that they were her prophesies about the destruction of the world and her revelations for the earth. She was starting to believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet, but was apparently having a difficult time understanding what exactly a prophet was. We tried to explain more clearly that a prophet is a man who holds the priesthood authority and the keys to be God’s mouthpiece on the earth, but she seemed to miss the first part and jump to the conclusion that she was a prophet too. So we’ll continue to work on that, but we know as she reads the Book of Mormon and prays to know it’s true and gains that testimony, the rest of it will be taken care of. She even gave us some referrals to some other people we plan on teaching soon too. That’s usually how it goes, that once you meet one hispanic they lead you to more, because the same thing happened earlier that week. We met a lady at Walmart and set up an appointment with her. We ended up teaching 3 of her co-workers before her, and she had invited her brother and sister to her appointment. And after their appt. they pointed us across the street to a housefull of men they worked with as well. We went over and taught them as well, getting a return appointment to teach 8 of the people that lived there too. There are lots of rules we follow to stay safe in many different situations, so we’re always taking precautions when we teach or do anything. But I guess there are always risks associated with teaching anyone. Physical safety is often the first that comes to mind, but there are others that we as missionaries just don’t even think of when going about the Lord’s errand. Which is why the phone call the next day was such a shock. One of the muchachos called us the next morning and started talking about what we thought was the Book of Mormon and how much he liked it. We were very excited and for some reason he kept asking if we understood him. We kept saying yes, but he still seemed unsure. After a few more minutes of conversation, we were ready to commit him to baptism. But he had a different kind of committment in mind. Finally we realized that he wasn’t talking about the book, he was talking about ME. Once that clicked I immediately explained about our rules and how we didn’t have relationships as missionaries, and no, not even if they got baptized, he finally understood and then asked if he could still read the Book of Mormon anyway. So after explaining the situation to our District and Zone leaders, we were given permission to continue to teach the men in their house as long as we brought members with us, did it in daylight..etc. So more precautions, but at least we’re still teaching them, because out of that day alone we had 9 new investigators! We’re definitely starting to see more and more miracles happen every day and I’m so grateful to be in this area. We have a pretty busy week coming up, so hopefully we’ll see even more! Take care everyone and I’ll update again next week!
Love,
Hermana Karson
Called to Serve 