I realized just this week that I'm actually back on my mission... buuuuut it's been good. Last Monday I got to play with some cows, I let a few suck my fingers and that's an experience.
We went to zone conference and I'm ngl as soon as we got chastised in the first "training" i zoned out, then 7 hours later and only half a sandwich, we ended with a sermon on repentance, so I left hangry and couldn't tell ya what the heck they said to us.
Other than that, we baptized Bill and he's gonna be receiving the priesthood in a few weeks. The baptism was awesome and we were able to get the first missionary that started teaching him to give the talks and she killed it. Bill is such a good hearted man and I'm so grateful I was here and had the opportunity to testify to him and to see him accept the gospel.
That's it, just tryna stay sane out here. The good thing is that my comp and I are still friends so meno male for that
Some other cools things happened that I didn't include. And sorry for the length.
The baptism on Saturday opened several doors for us. One is with a less active family with several kids. The oldest is old enough to go on a mission, but he isn't sure about it. We spent about 2 hours just him, my comp, and I talking about missions and answering his questions about them. We got a phone call from Bill actually, he was offering to buy us groceries and dinner, my comp muted and turned to me to ask what I thought and I said "dude, it's free food, absolutely we want it." And this kid said the way we reacted and handled that call looked really fun haha. But we got him hyped about serving a mission and he showed up to church yesterday. So we broke the ice with a kid that hasn't talked to the missionaries in a few years. We got through. The other door that was opened was with a middle age couple that had some hardened feelings towards the missionaries because of some comments from elders right before me. So I decided to talk to the wife because it sounded like most of the comments were made to her. I just asked her questions about her and her fam, how she met her husband and all that stuff. We talked for about 30 min before the baptism and then she helped me rearrange the chairs and we talked for another 30 ish minutes. Anyway, I got through to her and her husband and she asked me to reach out to her son who has kinda wandered off in a not so good direction. The ice is broken with them also which is incredible to me.
We talked to a ysa yesterday and as we were talking she had just mentioned that she has been dealing with mental health for a while and I shared with her John 14:18 and I opened up to her a lot about my own struggles with depression and how crippling it is and how it numbs everything but no matter how numb we are and no matter how far away we've fallen from Jesus, he's right there with us, he's walking next to us, just waiting for us to turn even a little bit and see him and find that he has never left us, he's always been there.
We liked that scripture so much that we shared it with another young couple. The wife is always interactive with us but he husband rarely says anything. I had a quick thought to ask the husband what that scripture meant to him and he opened up and shared so much with us. It was amazing and even though that thought came and went in about 2 seconds, it was still an inspired question. If I hadn't asked him directly, he wouldn't have said anything during that call, but he shared so much and we could see his own thoughts and words hit him as he kept talking. It was incredible.
We taught a lesson to a sister about prayer and we went deep into that subject. She's a convert from the catholic church, so she has learned that prayers are from the heart. She's been having some issues feeling like her prayers aren't enough. One of the things we mentioned was that even if we pray for one thing, with a sincere heart, that's more than a prayer full of a thousand things that we don't actually care about. She told us that the things we said answered her own prayers which is always so awesome to hear because it testifies to me that the spirit is real and with me. I wouldn't have known to say any of those things that I didn't if the spirit wasn't prompting me.
I read a talk that said somethin like if you don't have faith in yourself, you cannot have faith in God. Then the speaker said our hearts follow our minds. Meaning we believe in our hearts what we tell ourselves in our minds. For me, I told myself that I wasn't enough for God's love, I wasn't clean enough for the Atonement of Jesus Christ, and my heart followed and I believed in my heart what I told myself. Then when I started telling myself I do deserve God's love and I am worthy of the Atonement, my heart followed and here I am, serving a mission. Just some interesting points I found and thought I'd share.
But anyway, that's it for cool experiences. I have my next chapter of scripture underway. If you haven't had a chance to read the first chapter and if you'd be interested let me know haha.
i heard there's a statistic for my mission that the average weight gain for elders is like 40lbs, which is not good.