Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Just walk on in....to a military base?


Wow, what a crazy week!  Looking at our area book to see what did happen this week and some things don't feel like it happened just this week.  Let's see if I can be concise enough for everything.  The weather has been crazy.  It rains, then it stops, then it rains ... then it stops.  My goodness.  Am I in Juneau?

Tender Mercies All in One Day:  So we were working on our training for zone conference for this Friday, and for our personal studies both Sister Richards and I found the same talk that touched on what we wanted to train about so that was so cool and inspired.  We spent quite a bit of time trying to fine one of our investigators house and couldn't find it for the life of us.  The street wasn't marked and we thought we would just try by a house to ask what street it was and it turned out to be his house!  #blessed.  Later that day we wanted to go try by the less actives on the military base.  We had asked some people what is the procedure to get on base, and by golley, that was so easy!  Who am I?  How do they know I'm not a terrorist?  They just see the badge and that's it?  How do they know I didn't just steal the missionary badge and put on church clothes?  Once we got signed in and we were on base we visited everyone on our list.  Lastly for the same day we saw the tender mercy of not getting ourselves shot.  We show up to an appointment with a less active with our mission leader and the Relief Society President and once we were out of the car this guy approached us with a gun.  It was the guy's brother who said there have been burglaries lately.  Once he knew who it was he put the gun down.  So we are all good. What a great day!
Lessons with Everyone:  We had a lesson with our only progressing investigator name DJ, with his best friend Hudson, who is a member who introduced him to the church. It was great and we taught about the Plan of Salvation.  He has a lot of questions that can be a little deep.  He wants the meat, but he first needs to swallow the milk we are trying to give him.  He is doing great though.  He prayed at church and apparently helped out during the Elder's Quorum lesson!

We went to visit a potential investigator the elders found who works at the knotty shop in the North Pole. (BTW, there is a North Pole, Alaska!  The place has light posts that are candy cane decorated and we visited Santa Clause's house !!!  So cute.)  So the potential investigator, his name is Roman, is from Jamaica and will mostly be returning but we talked about the Book of Mormon using the pictures in the front and committed him to read it.  Later that evening we had an appointment with a member in YSA to visit and we talked with her now husband about the BOM and he said the way we taught him was more clear and helped him understand it a bit better.  Because they are now married, they "graduated from YSA" so we are passing him over to other missionaries.  They are moving at the end of the month into the FBX 5th ward so he will have sisters there too to help him. We had a lesson with our recent convert named Tucker.  He is great and fits right in with members of the Branch.  He and another member stayed after church a couple of hours for a lesson we were having with a less active and Tucker invited him to institute.  That was awesome.  It is cool to have recent converts help with missionary work.  In a way they feel they were in the same shoes and know how to relate to the less actives and investigators more.

Zone Conference:  We had interviews and zone conference this week.  Interviews were a bit different since President Toone counsels with me more about STL stuff.  I am glad I can contribute to the mission and help make it better from my perspective on things.  For zone conference we presented our training and listened to others' too. It was really good and Sister Richards and I are implementing all that we can into our missionary work.  The following Sunday we were asked to teach the Gospel Principles/Doctrine lesson while the teachers had a meeting.  We combined the two classes and a few minutes before, decided to teach on something else.  We decided to just teach what our training was about which was mainly on prayer but following a pattern that we emulate from Christ creating the world.  The pattern is counseling with our Heavenly Father, executing what we had counseled about, and then returning and reporting to Him about our day and being accountable to Him.  It went well and we got some people to participate in the lesson/discussion.
Activities:  With YSA, we got a lot of activities to invite people to.  They had a wii night Monday and we just played Apples to Apples with some of the members. Saturday they had karaoke which was fun, especially since they didn't do it A Capella but we just sang over the peoples' voices.  This coming week they are starting institute.  They are actually having two classes.  One on Tuesday's which is on the Old Testament and another on Thursday's which covers the Book of Mormon. I am so pumped. Institute is basically just a scripture class where we dive into the scriptures and talk about it more in depth.  They are wonderful.


For the spiritual thought of the week I'm taking it from our vehicle coordinator: Because of the solar eclipse today, today's thought comes from Chapter 35 of, "Jesus The Christ".  "Jesus was nailed to the cross during the forenoon of that fateful Friday, probably between nine and ten o'clock.  At noontide the light of the sun was obscured, and black darkness spread over the whole land.  The terrifying gloom continued for a period of three hours. This remarkable phenomenon has received no satisfactory explanation from science.  It could not have been due to a solar eclipse, as has been suggested in ignorance, for the time was that of full moon; indeed the Passover season was determined by the first occurrence of full moon after the spring equinox.  The darkness was brought about by miraculous operation of natural laws directed by divine power. It was a fitting sign of the earth's deep mourning over impending death of her Creator.  Of the mortal agony through which The Lord passed while upon the cross the Gospel-scribes are reverently reticent. 

Sent from ALASKA!
Sister Shelley Willden


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