Another fun fact, my current companion was my first ever Facebook friend. What are the odds?
We got to go to a new missionary training and have also been pretty busy with all the missionaries going back to their original assignments! We're taking another missionary to the airport to go to Mexico bright and early tomorrow morning. The last time we did we got back to our apartment around 4:30 and crashed back into bed for a few hours. I mumbled something to Elder Stewart like, "We can't forget to do (something or other) tomorrow morning." He replied, "You mean today?" Yes, I suppose so! What a life we live.
This week I saw a prophet's words change someone's life. There was a less-active member that the missionaries had contacted a little before I got here. She never answered her ministering sisters, and when the missionaries called, she said she was not interested in talking. However, she told us that then the missionaries just asked, "why not?" and she was able to start a dialogue and express her different concerns. Later I got to jump into the story. We had another phone call with her, and she was super nice but just had some doubts about things like prophets and how to know they speak for God and about whether the Doctrine and Covenants was really scripture. She is an English teacher and wanted to really be able to check sources and prove that it was true and everything. She was super friendly and just had some sincere questions, but we were kind of stumped on how to help. We did a little studying and decided to send her a talk by Ezra Taft Benson that talks about the Doctrine and Covenants. When we called her next, she said, "So, I read the talk." She then proceeded to go through and highlight herself every point of the talk that we had wanted to bring up and talked about another talk that she searched up after. She was just answering all her own questions and was so excited about it. It just made sense! You could almost feel the spirit of revelation. It was a super neat experience to be part of. Prophets truly do speak for God. Their words have power.
The attentive reader may remember that probably about four months ago, I came on exchanges here for an evening, and after a long experience of street contacting very unsuccessfully, we found one really cool young man. The missionaries taught him for a while and later lost contact. Well, fast forward to now, we called him up and had a super powerful lesson on the restoration. He loved it and told us after that he felt so much better after we came by. We invited him to church, and were a little worried when the meeting was going to start and he still hadn't made it. Then we got a text and he told us that he had been trying to get to church so fast that he got pulled over. He did finally make it a few minutes late. He was blown away by how high-tech the Gospel Library app is and after the meeting sincerely thanked us for helping restore his faith. It was so much fun, especially because he is just a year or two older than us.
One last exciting thing was something that happened in my last area. We had tried being modern missionaries and finding people to teach on Facebook, but after a while we were pretty unsuccessful and gave up in favor of teaching English classes and the gospel, which we were much better at. There was only one person we almost started teaching on Facebook. I had found them on a group of people from El Salvador in Las Vegas, but every time we were about to set an appointment, something came up. Now, a month or so later, my old companion reached out again and this time, the guy came to church! After church, they taught him the restoration in the chapel, and later the same day they visited his house where they taught him and his sister-in-law, and they both said they wanted to be baptized! He actually asked if he could serve a mission, even though he's a little old now.
I think from all of these stories this week, it just hits me that truly "by small and simple things are great things brought to pass." A small thought to send someone a general conference talk helped someone find an answer. A night of mostly unsuccessful street contacting helped one young man have a powerful experience at church. And what I thought was some totally failed efforts to share the gospel online actually could help an entire family be baptized. God really can consecrate our small efforts for our own and others' good. We plant a lot of seeds that we may never really know about, but when you can see one start to grow, it is a pretty special thing.
'Til we meet,
Elder Harris
P.S. - saw this Chicken Shack surrounded by like three different types of sin.
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