Gooooten Morgan.
This may or may not but likely may be my last week in the WG. I feel a pregnancy coming on but I'll find out at transfer conference on Monday to see if I'm training a newbee. I looooove being a missionary on TS because we are constantly teaching. Like it's insane how much we get to teach. Luckily that's my favourite part about the work. We had some amazing lessons over the phone this week. I presume online teaching is like online dating except it's terribly different. It is amazing though because we can develop a relationship with someone without seeing what they look like. Our miracles of the week come in the form of Dana and Ivan.
Dana: Super precious 18 year old BOY not girl. Sister Mitchell has taught him over the phone for the past few months with different companions. His parents are Jewish and his biggest struggle is to talk openly with them about his faith in Christ. One time Sister Mitchell asked him what are some things he could do to strenghthen his faith in Christ. Dana's answer, "I don't know... raise a family in the gospel, maybe?" Riiiight? She was lookin for somethin like read your scritures but hey, we'll take raising a family in the gospel. Now we have officially taught Dana everything he needs to know before baptism, we just need to get his little booty to Church again. He really wants to serve a mission and get married in the temple one day. At the end of our latest conversation with him he asked us if we think his parents will ever join the Church. Guuuuuhhhh... I'm no fortune teller but we promised him that if he got himself on a mission and served with all his heart, amazing things will happen with his family.
Ivan: We had a do or die lesson with Ivan. If we got it right, he would keep learning and exercising his faith. If we got it wrong, no more tellular lessons since he didn't have a whole lot of patience or trust in us. Our lesson with him ended up being a DO! So now we teach him frequently. Ivan has an interesting history with the Church. He grew up as a very devote catholic boy and then decided to go to BYU for some specific program. Since he had to take a religion course there, he took a Book of Mormon class. The beginner BOM class was all full by the time he registered so he got into a class full of return missinaries. This is not a happy memory for him. Ivan is pretty outspoken so I'm pretty sure he was pretty vocal in that class. He told us about how the return missionaries all hounded on him for certain things and were unkind to him. Dangit. So he ended up storming out of class one day and left BYU. After that, he went a little crazy and made a lot of unwise life choices. Now he's facing a lot of medical scares. He's healthy right now but he is so worried that there's something wrong with him. I love teaching Ivan because he is so real. Because of his BYU background, he knows a lot about the Church. He gave us the most interesting rendition of the restoration I've ever heard. Through teaching, we discovered that he has a tiny bit of faith that he fears he will lose once his life is back in order. We narrowed his concern down to not knowing if Jesus Christ is really the son of God. He knows that the Bible contains powerful messages of hope but he doesn't yet know if the "tricks that Jesus kept pulling off" really did happen. Where I'm from we call those miracles. Through prayer, we can already see that Ivan is learning what is true. I love hearing about how his struggles in life have brought him back to God. He told us about so many bad things happened to his closest friends and he has been carrying the burdens of his friends. He thinks his conscience is telling him how to make his life better but thourghout the conversation he realized that his conscience is directed by Christ. Yeeeeeah, it is!
Yesterday we took a 45 people motor coach and it went well! We decided to stray from the youje things we say on a big tour because they get so repetetive and insincere. They loved us, they really did. After our MC, we talked to some interesting men who are here for a Porshe convention. Convention? Race? I don't know. Something car-y. They both knew a lot about the Church and were really easy to talk to. We had a nice time answering a lot of their questions and talking about expensive cars. Before we left we got to read a scripture with them. They wanted something about strength or speed so we read Alma 26:12. We described Ammon's incredible strength in the Lord. In the end, they told us that we should pray for Ammon's sins to be forgiven because he chopped people's arms off. Not the point! We told them that we would pray for them to do well in their races and in return, they needed to pray and ask God if the things we shared with them were from Him. One of the men told us that he's asked before but got no answer. We could tell that he had met with missionaries years before but his heart was hurt because he felt like he got no answer to know if it was true. I told him that if he asked that night, he WOULD get a direct answer. Then we discussed the many ways that he could recognize the Spirit.
I'm suppose to conduct the french meeting this week but the AP's haven't scheduled language meetings yet and I'm not about to remind them. However, I am taking Sisters Nixon and Steenblik on a fake french tour to see if they're good enough for real life. And since I'm the boss, EVERYBODY'S PASSING OFF IN FRENCH!!! If we have 20 french speakers in the mission, I won't have to take as many french tours. Beautiful.
ADIOS,
SISTER KYLE
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