This week was SO great! Besides some run-ins with thousands of angry fire ants and a super hot apartment, it was excellent.
We have seen a ton of miracles! Our investigator Steve is in Toronto right now for specific training on how to fly a particular aircraft. He has been trying to quit chewing tobacco for some time now. We've been sending him text messages of passages from the Book of Mormon for him to look up, but he's been doing a lot more reading than just those selections. He reads (or has his iPad read to him) the Book of Mormon during P.T. and throughout the day. One night he read a lot before he went to bed. The next morning, he woke up without even having a craving to chew! He's continuing to read daily and still no cravings. What a miracle!
Another miracle: back on July 4th, we were walking around and we saw a lady named Lynette. She had a lot of really false ideas about the Church because of different things she heard about the Mormons that her church had told her. When we corrected her understanding, she felt a lot better about us but was still too hesitant to let us teach her more. We left her with a Book of Mormon though, and decided to call back in a while and see how things were going. Well, we called her the other day and she had read all the way up to Mosiah (the first 150 pages or so of the Book of Mormon)! She loves it! She was very impressed with how it's all about Jesus Christ, it is similar to the Bible, and it is easy to understand. She agreed to meet us at a member's home down the street so we could talk to her more about it. Unbeknownst to us, before our appointment she did some Google research to see what a visit with the Mormon missionaries was like. The article she read "warned" her that we would be inviting her to be baptized. She came to the appointment determined to reject our invitation. However, as we taught her the message of the Restoration and the importance of the Book of Mormon, she felt the Spirit and accepted the invitation to be baptized anyway! That was a miracle too.
So many good things are happening here. We should be seeing 6 people entering the gate of baptism in September and October together. In fact, I'll be surprised if we don't. The Lord has provided us with so many great blessings and I feel so blessed and honored to be able to help these people learn the true and restored gospel and live the Doctrine of Christ.
Other stuff:
We had zone leader/district leader council meeting up in Knightdale, near Raleigh. We woke up just after 5:00 am to pick up our district leaders and drive up to the building. It took us even longer to get back because we had to drive up to the Raleigh stake center to pick up a cactus, which one of the sister missionaries in our district forgot to take with her from the transfer meeting earlier in the week. The meeting was really good, though, and it was really neat to see a lot of these younger missionaries taking on the Lord's call to assume leadership positions. One other neat thing is that there are now 4 zone leaders from Davis high... me, Elder Simmons, Elder Jake McRae and Elder Fry. It was neat to get a picture of all of us together.
Let's see, what else?... Oh yeah, how am I doing? Uhhh.... pretty good I guess. Nothing has changed medically but I'm just doing what I do! The days have been rough but I feel good about being here so until something changes for the worse I'm not planning on changing my mind.
Hope all of you are doing well! I love the restored gospel of Christ. I'm so grateful for the Book of Mormon, which restores the plain and precious truths of the gospel that were lost over time. I testify that the Book of Mormon is true, that Jesus is the Savior, and that there are living prophets today with all the priesthood keys necessary for the salvation of the human family.
Write me!
With love,
Elder Schank
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| DHS Darts - Elders Schank, Simmons, McRae and Fry |
