Dear Family,
This week the other companionship in our district baptized, it was great! We are so stoked to be here in Sumter. This area rocks! The other Elders have another baptism planned for next weekend and we have one planned on the 9th and the 16th after that. Last week we met the young man who is being baptized on the 9th. His name is Marcus. He is a really cool young man (12 years old) so everyone thought he was already a member. He shows up every week at church in a white shirt and tie, but for some reason he didn't pass the sacrament. Brother Kilian asked him last Sunday why he didn't pass the sacrament and he told Brother Kilian that he wasn't baptized. Brother Kilian asked Marcus if he wanted to get baptized and Marcus said that he did. Marcus knows most of the youth really well so we are working with the youth of the ward to teach him. It would be so cool if one of the priests in the ward baptized Marcus! His sister is already a member and his mother really likes the church, but she is not a member yet. Marcus's mother drives him to seminary, church, and young men's each week already!
We are working with a few other people who just need to get married before they can get baptized, hopefully they will have the confidence to marry soon.
Just a few interesting stories: One day we came early to an appointment so we decided to contact a few people. We started down the street and knocked only on doors that had cars in the yard. We walked up and down the street with no success so we started to head back towards our appointment when an elderly lady opened the door to her home and started yelling something. Its common in that part of town for people to just yell across the street to their neighbors in the house next door so we didn't pay any attention. The yelling became louder and more persistent to we turned and the lady demanded to know who we were- "Who is you!?!?" she asked in broken English. I told her "Well, I am Elder Smith, and this is my companion Elder Goodrich." She then demanded to know what we were doing on "her street". She had apparently been watching us from her home while we walked down the street. We told her what we were doing and that we were sharing a message about how Jesus Christ has restored His gospel through a prophet named Joseph Smith. She then asked, in a tone the implied that she felt left out, "Well, why didn't you knock on my door?" Thinking that she was interested we began to walk towards her and we responded that we didn't think any one was home, but we would love to share our message with her. She hesitated, then replied that she was "busy" at the moment. We offered her a card to which she responded that she was not interested. hahaha There are some funny people out here in this world. I guess that she just wanted to know what we were doing.
We met another guy who asked us if we knew about some football player's death. We replied that we did not. He told us that he had died in his sleep. The conversation took another turn and we left that subject for a minute, then he told us that the foot ball player had died from an overdose of marijuana. The conversation took another turn as we tried to direct the conversation towards Jesus Christ. He commented a third time about the football player, saying that he shot himself with a shot gun. We gave up trying to talk to him about the gospel so we asked him how this football player could have overdosed on marijuana, died in his sleep, and shot himself with a shot gun. To answer that question he replied that the football player also shot himself with a pistol, as if that explained everything. :-) I made a comment about the likely hood of some one being able to die in their sleep, shoot themselves with two weapons, and die from marijuana overdose at the same time. The guy seemed to misunderstand my comment and told us that he was high on marijuana, so we thanked him for his time and moved on.
Both those stories came from knocking the same street. While on that street, heading out, we met another guy who wrote his own book. We gave him a Book of Mormon and he gave us his 25 page book. We glanced through his book and saw that he seemed to have just about copied many of his ideas from doctrine of Korihor in Alma 30, just not as well worded. We plan to read Alma 30 with him and focus on Alma's reply to Korihor, it should be an interesting lesson.
We have another four day leadership training meeting this week in Columbia. It is supposed to cover the same stuff we learned last time, so it should be interesting to see what new insights people have to share. President McConkie is amazing, I love listening to him. Last night we had a missionary/new member/less active/investigator fireside in Florence. It was great. Among many other things President McConkie talked about how the Bible gives us the "what" of the fall of Adam and the "what" of the Atonement of Jesus Christ while the Book of Mormon goes into great detail of the "why" of both the fall of Adam and the Atonement. I also liked how he mentioned that no other people loves the Bible more than we do because the Book of Mormon helps us understand its teachings so much better.
Well, I have got to get going, I have to leave for Columbia at 2pm today.
Love,
Elder Smith
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment