Elder Ben

Well this week has been pretty tough.  Everyday we had most of the day planned out with lessons to teach and investigators to see....and then nobody was home.  Seriously, every appointment on Friday and Saturday fell through, even our backup plans didn't work.  I guess God was just trying to get our attention or something that we weren't focused on the right people. These days all of a sudden became wide open for tracting! :)  We ended up knocking on alot of doors for those two days (crazy to see Spanish elders on foot).  It is really great to see the wide variety of people we run into. Some are interested, some say come back later, some talk with us for a couple of minutes (but you can tell they don't care), and some just open the door see us and then close the door.  We had some pretty different people to talk with though.  We met this Italian guy who had been a marine for 8 years. This man was smart, in that I think he has studied every religion possible (Including LDS).  He wasn't interested but he said he gave us 110% thumbs up for what we were doing at our age.  He said he liked that some one still talked about Jesus and bore testimony.  Cool guy! 

We also had a short meeting with a guy that LOVED his bible.  We talked for a bit about the bible and shared a couple of scriptures from it.  We then tried to share the message of the restoration and show him the Book of Mormon. Bad idea on our part. He got pretty angry and said something about us worshiping Joseph Smith (I guess he had heard some stuff previous), and how all he needed was his bible. We tried telling him we didn't worship Joseph Smith and  that we weren't trying to replace his bible.  Still was pretty angry so we left after that. 

 Don't worry the whole week wasn't like that though. We met some people that seemed very interested, and we ended up placing about 20 or so copies of the Book of Mormon. Hopefully some of them are home for return visits this week :)

Elder Wilkins and I wrote up a Branch mission statement this week.  It includes something that everyone in the branch can do to better improve in their individual, family, and church lives.  At the branch correlation meeting everyone seemed to like it.  So it will be presented to the whole branch in two weeks in sacrament meeting.  Right now we are just praying for a something to happen in this branch so people become unified.

There has actually been 2 days this past week with not even a cloud in the sky! Crazy but it is true. Perfect weather for a couple of days.....and then today it is raining again.  hahah

 

 

I wish that I had more time to write, but I don't. There are so many things that could be written.  I guess more will have to be written next week.

   Elder Howell