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| Half of the Zone. Photo by Elder Alexis |
So we're working with a couple interesting people now. First we had Stanley. He's the nonmember husband of one of our Haitian members. He still lives in Haiti but came up to visit for 10 days, and wanted to start taking the discussions. Elder Hatch and I were able to teach him about the Restoration and The Book of Mormon before he went back to Haiti. He's super solid and accepts everything, pretty much a free baptism for the Haiti mission. We gave his information to the mission office and they passed it over. Cool!
We also have the two B... kids, Sara and Denard, who were baptized a couple years ago but have been inactive. We randomly stopped by to visit one day a few weeks ago, and Sara said "because you stopped by I'll go to church again this week." She came by herself last Sunday and again with her brother to conference yesterday, is reading in The Book of Mormon, and seems committed to coming back to church. Once we can get them to meet with the bishop they'll be rescued!
Finally we have the N...-O... family. They're a less active family that the bishop is working to get back to church. The mom grew up in D.C. and her best friend was Mormon, and they even went to BYU together. She was going to get baptized there but her friend started to rebel against the church, and she didn't want to stay in school anyways so she moved out here (I think there's more to the story but I forgot it.) She didn't see missionaries again for years until some knocked on her door a few years ago. She had a girl in foster care that wanted to be baptized, so she and her family decided to be baptized with her. After that though the girl had to leave because of legal complications and it broke the mom's heart, so she suffered from depression and anxiety for a while and is just now getting out of it and wanting to get back into church. Very interesting story, and it seems like the whole family is ready to come back too (the dad and oldest son came with the bishop to priesthood session.) Nice!
But the highlight of the week was definitely General Conference. We were even able to get investigators to come! Yay! Between the two sessions on Saturday we went out knocking, and we met Bertina and her 2 kids. We shared a prayer and a little bit about the restoration (as usual), and she said she'd come to church (as usual). Except this time she actually came! She watched the Sunday morning session and seemed to really love it. We told her about how church usually is, and we're seeing her tonight to start teaching them. Very promising!
Now for a couple funny things. We talked to this one random old black guy in his front yard a couple days ago, and everything was pretty normal until he randomly stops and dramatically says:
"Lemee tell you a secret. I'm a minister.......gone bad."
It was super funny. It was literally like a movie. He even like looked away and walked a couple steps while he was talking, and then turned to look at us for the punch line. Probably one of the funniest things I've come across. Our whole house quotes it at least twice a day, and it's earned a spot on our quote board.
Another funny thing was that yesterday between sessions of conference we randomly had a TON of member food. A family fed us lasagna and salad and breadsticks at the church right after, and then we left to go to our actual meal appointment with a younger couple in the ward. (They had Disney music playing on Pandora for us, and I was in heaven. Definitely sang under my breath every song that came on. It was awesome, I decided that I'm gonna be the super chill member that feeds the missionaries when I get home haha.) We had sausage and pasta and mashed potatoes, and cookies. And then we went back to church for the next session and someone had ice cream sandwiches for us. We were all pretty full.
So as promised, here's some of my notes from Conference. There's lots more, but here's some of the first:
The use of the marvelous technologies that will come will require the Spirit of the Lord within us.
-President Eyring
(Prophesy???)
The phrase "The Atonement" is doctrinally incomplete. The Atonement is non an amorphous entity that we can call on for help. We must connect it to the life and mission of Jesus Christ.
-Russell M Nelson
(Haha this funny, something I've thought about before.)
Stand close to the Savior as you would stand next to someone with more perfect pitch
-Jeffery R Holland
(I loved his talk for all the singing analogies.)
When we are not all in or only partially in, there is a disturbance in the force.
-Gary B Sabin
(His talk was good too because of all the pop culture references.)
I'm so grateful for living prophets and for general conference, it was such a spiritually uplifting experience and very different as a missionary. Sorry for the long email, but there was lot's I wanted to talk about, so I did haha. Hope you're all doing great! Keep up the good work!
Lanmou,
Eldè Stevenson
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