Hey y'all,
So I am officially here in Baton Rouge and loving it! My companion Elder Jensen is from Washington, Seattle area and is a great guy. He loves rugby and so I have been able to relate a bit with my scrum formation and hook and ladder knowledge haha. Thanks Jake! We were also able to meet some of our neighbors this week and came to find out that our next door neighbors are twin brothers named, DaMarcus and JaMarcus. You can imagine how hard that is going to be :) They are both really cool! Rumor has it the neighbors below us are Billy and Bobby and also twins haha just kidding. That would be classic though!
This week was truly wonderful! It couldn't have started off any better either with the visit from Elder Golden of the area Seventy. I was a bit jealous that the Mississippi Mission got to hear from Elder Holland last week, but what can you do haha. Regardless, Elder Golden gave some incredible advice to us missionaries and I was thrilled all week to try some of his inspired tactics. Many things that he shared touched my heart, but if there is one thing that really touched me it was the continual emphasis on humility. When he shared the story of how over the years he was beginning to think it was himself creating missionary success, but then all of a sudden could hardly speak. He shared that ever since then he strives to give the credit where it is deserved, to a loving Heavenly Father and his son Jesus Christ. I know that this is true with all my heart. This is the Lord's work, and without him we would have no success in blessing the lives of others. There are also a few changes in the missionary schedule and what not, but mostly just narrowing our focus on the most important things.
One of our investigators is John and he is from the Philippines studying mathematics. He doesn't speak English super well, and so that has been pretty crazy teaching him. He is currently going to a baptist church, but isn't quite sure about it so we are hoping he is golden! This week we taught him in Alma 32 specifically on the part about the seed and having the faith to nourish it. He had a hard time grasping the experimental process, but we tried our best to bear testimony to him. It can also be a little tough to explain the priesthood authority, but we were sure to testify of the tangible evidence of the Book of Mormon! The Book of Mormon is true. I know it and could never deny it.
We were able to go on an exchange with the tiger bend elders, and Elder Gordon and I had some great success. I sometimes wonder why missionaries lack the faith to work their hardest, but time and time again I feel like the biggest reason is fear. Now I am most definitely not saying I lack fear, because that is definitely not true and I think we all have times that are tough in our lives that sometimes create fear. But what I do know is that WITH FAITH there is NO FEAR. So even though people might not have wanted to accept our message in the past, we put our faith forward and got out to find. It was so cool because when we started talking to everyone we could possibly see out and about we found this really nice lady out walking her two kids in a stroller. We shared a little bit of the restoration lesson with her and were able to lessen her worry of giving up coffee :) Now this lady might not have been completely ready to accept the gospel yet in her life, but I believe this was a blessing from on High because we were willing to exemplify our faith to find the elect.
I wanted to share one other miracle of the week: So here on LSU we go to what is called the Free Speech Alley on Wednesdays and Fridays to make more of a presence on campus and talk to as many people as possible. We set up a booth with tons of pass along cards and copies of the Book of Mormon and such and talk to everyone that walks passed. Well, on Friday we went and talked to so many great people and received tons of phone numbers and investigators to follow up with this next week. Although we were doing our best to stop as many students as we could, we didn't really notice the opportunity to talk to all of the other people that set up booths as well. We talked to the ones next to us, but not too many other booths. So the part of the story that is the miracle was on Sunday night. Elder Jensen and I were out tracting at an apartment complex and quickly found out that it was Superbowl Sunday. Well, we were a bit unsure of what to do since we didn't think we would have too much success, and we didn't want to be those guys that interrupted all of the parties haha. Nonetheless, we decided to just keep going! No fear! We ended up knocking on quite a few doors that were "understandably" uninterested. However, we knocked on one door and a guy named Josh opened and told us how we looked so familiar. We quickly found out that he had seen us at the Free Speech Alley and was actually manning one of the other booths. Coincidentally one of the few we hadn't talked to. He told us how he wasn't interested in the Superbowl and would love to hear our message. We had an amazing restoration lesson with him and he told us to come back on Thursday! We were super excited about that and it was so miraculous to see the spirit lead us to him. Even though we at first feared getting yelled at for bugging people on Superbowl Sunday we kept going, faithful that we might find someone that was ready.
Well, I hope everyone is doing well! I love y'all!
Love,
Elder Wilson
