First off I want to tell you about my and Elder King's best friend. His name is Dale. Dale is a recent convert of about a year who, among other mental challenges, has some memory issues. He lives alone in an apartment and gets really lonely so he calls us literally every day to just talk on the phone, sometimes multiple times a day. And because his memory is so bad we talk about the same things every times which is normally about a member of the ward who he really likes. A typical conversation will go as follows.
*Dale calls us
Us: Hello this is the missionaries.
D: this is Dale.
Us: Hey Dale how's it going?
D: Good. When are you gonna come see me?
Us: We might be able to stop by later today. We'll see.
D: OK. Do you know Brother Sears?
Us: it sounds familiar, I think we've met him before, yeah.
D: You ever shaken his hand?
Us: Oh yeah we have, strong grip let me tell ya!
D: haha yep, strong grip. Got to be a strong man when you break horses.
Us: No way, he breaks horses?
D: Yep, he breaks horses. He's also got a brother, did you know that?
Us: No we didn't, tell me about him?
D: His name is Jody, He's the head football coach at Sacramento State.
Us: No way, that's pretty cool. Where'd you meet him?
D: I went to high school with him, graduated the same year.
Us: Nuh uh! Dale that is so cool.
D: Yep.
And then we'll go on for another minute or two about all the FB gear Jody gave him, and about how brother Sears gave him a signed picture of him playing football, and then he tells us about his Google home and about how his land lord helped him put it in and all sorts of stuff. Then we'll say we've got to get going and say bye. And this has repeated itself at least daily for the past two months. Well, there was one day this week where we were planning in the morning and Dale called us. We had a break in our schedule in the morning, and we asked brother Sears about him and he told us to stop by for a few minutes if we got the chance. So we thought, heck why not. Let's actually go see Dale today. We told him we were coming over and he was so excited. He called us probably 5 times on the half mile walk to his apartment asking if we were close, and then before we got to his apartment he walked out and met us on the sidewalk and walked us the rest of the way. We talked about brother Sears probably three times before we made it to his apartment haha. So we got to go see Dale and his google home and his signed picture of brother Sears and we talked about football and all sorts of stuff. He actually introduced us to his land lord which was really good. His landlord goes to an other church in town, but he was really nice and told us he had a lot of respect for us, the church, and what we do for Dale. It was a great opportunity to interact with a non member and hopefully continue building good pr. Pic below of Dale and I.
In other news we had some great lessons this week! We were able to have a church tour lesson with our Alaskan investigator Willaby. I think I mentioned her last time. Here's more of her story. Two of her older sisters had joined the church a while back and now as a graduate student, she decided to investigate the church. Unfortunately, she is moving back to Alaska the 3nd of this Month, but she'll be coming back in September. We're hoping to leave her with some good things to think about when she's gone. She's normally pretty shy and reserved, but we took her on a church tour and ended the tour at the baptismal font. There, elder King told a story of a guy in one of his last areas who was contemplating suicide that night, but because the Elders stopped him on the street and talked to him, he didn't go through with it. He eventually was baptized and it completely changed his life. While elder King told this story, Willaby completely broke down crying. We continued talking about baptism and addressed some of the concerns she had brought up and she opened up more. From what it sounds like, she has this internal struggle of believing and wanting the blessings of baptism, but being afraid of the commitment and life style changes she'd be expected to make. She said she wants to have a confirmation that baptism is what God wants her to do but doesn't feel like she will receive it until after she would get baptized which brings her back to her first concern, and it's just a vicious loop. She started crying again when she told us this so we could tell she's given this a lot more thought than we originally thought. What's cool about this story is, we didn't even plan on really having a thorough church tour. We originally planned to teach about the plan of salvation and then take her on a quick walk through the church so she knew where she was going on Sunday. But when elder King and I went to unlock the church before the lesson we thought, let's just do a church tour first and end up in one of the upstairs rooms to have the lesson so we're not awkwardly having the lesson in the dungeon like basement of the church. It was really awesome to see how God was able to guide us in the direction we were supposed to go, especially without us even knowing it was happening. We thought we were changing our plans just to make it more comfortable, but looking back I can see we were guided in our thinking because that was a powerful moment for Willaby. We didn't even have the lesson after because we felt like she had enough to think about. It was cool to see.
Sorry this is an epistle but love to all until next week!
Pics:
Dale, the colors of the Palouse, and little Charlie Sheffields rendition of Charlie brown. The kids got mad style.
No comments:
Post a Comment