Christmas Miracles

Well this week was a great week! We had a couple investigators at church and the 18 yr old Manuel got confirmed this week! WE saw a lot of tender mercies this weekend. We found a mother who is less active and not on the church roles, she has two daughters that are 10 and 8, they seemed really excited to come back to church, but they couldn't for some reason on Sunday. We also had an impression to knock a door this week and we found this one kid named Jesus (good bible name) that is 18. He is really interested in what we are sharing. He has gone through so much as a kid telling us some of his stories, but he is like a perfect saint. He is such an example to me and my companion. He unfortunately couldn't go to church this week because he got called into work. We had like 3 investigators who were planning on going to church this week, but got called into work.. FRUSTRATING, but count your many blessings :).. I am kind of finally learning on how to look on the bright side I think. I have been in some of the hardest areas in the mission (according to trends of the #'s) and I think the Lord is trying to teach me how to be grateful and optimistic. It is a very tough lesson for me. This week we had about 15 solid commitments for people to go to church and 3 came. But I am so very grateful for those 3 that did come! In my first five and a half months in the mission, I think I had only 2 investigators come to church all together haha. I have learned that when we are grateful, we are a lot more happy and that complaining and whining only make us less effective as servants of the Lord. We saw some miracles this week with member referrals. We had some cool referrals that we received a while back, but they just really never turned out. So during this week, we felt impressed to go visit one of those referrals that told us that "they would call us" for us to come back over, and they let us in and her daughter a blessing because she was sick. It was such a wonderful opportunity. Then yesterday we felt like we should visit a lady who was a referral and she came to church the week before, but we had lost contact with her after that. So we went to visit her and she had a friend there with her, they let us in to talk, but they wasn't a guy, so we just had to stand in the doorway and talk from there. The one friend of hers said that she took the lessons and almost was baptized. I asked her where she lived and she replied, "I'm not gonna tell you, you will come knocking on my door!" haha, she's good... And so we kept talking and then the referral started talking about how she went to church and how amazing it was and how much she liked it (I was stunned :)) and then we kept talking about everything we believed and the referral's friend said after a while, "You know what, I'm going to visit your church this Sunday." BOOOOOOOM! And then we said ooo that is awesome! Can we come by and explain more? She gave us her address and telephone number. Then we set up an appt with her tomorrow night. So we saw that miracle. And we were trying to get an appt with the referral too, but she just works a ton, but we finally were able to get a good time with her and she will be at the appt too tomorrow. We were blessed. This work is the best, hands down! And my companion got in another bike crash this week! Fifth crash in four transfers.. Pray for him please haha.

 

Love you and I appreciate all your prayers!

Elder Christiansen