2017-03-29 Transfers

Ah transfers!! Maybe my parents can post the pictures but I got paired up with a sister that I (mostly just jokingly) asked President if I could serve with several months ago. I met her in the MTC and has literally followed me to EVERY city in my mission, whether it be in my district or my zone. So funny. So far it's been too much fun and too miracle-y I'm so lucky I get to serve with one of my best friends in the mission. So so happy! 

So let's just take some time and talk about Sunday. Sundays are always crazy in the mission. Day of rest? What is that? Even pday isn't really because we're running around wearing our feet out soaking up all we can of this amazing country. But this Sunday was THE craziest Sunday of my life!

So, we had,

A sacrament meeting talk, (me), (found out on Saturday)
A primary lesson to teach, (found out on Saturday)

A lunch in church with ~20 non-members to celebrate a baptism
A talk during a baptism, (me), (found out on Saturday)

A lesson with a less-active

A lesson with a new investigator

Race home and pack for spending the night at the senior couple's place

All with a study time grand total of :30 between Saturday night and Sunday morning. Ah.

So all of that actually happened minus the less-active lesson. Sooo crazy!! Add on top of it our amazing investigator fasting without being asked and praying to be sustained (awkward moment when you legitimately just tried to spell that word, "sustegned") by the Spirit and having it actually happen. Then she asked us if we could pray together :') so we did and then we went to relief society together. She is such a rock. She will be baptized one day I know it. She can't right now because of her living situation but we have high hopes for her and the guy she's living with

The sacrament talk went well and so did the primary lesson that was on missionary work. I was asked to speak on how the Book of Mormon testifies of Jesus Christ. An interesting find I made when studying is the connection one word makes between two verses in two different books. Allow me to elaborate; in the Book of Mormon, there is a chapter that quotes the prophet Isaiah that basically testifies of its own truthfulness. It is a prophesy of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. Many Christians reject the possibility of more scripture because of certain verses in revelation that say not to add to or take away from the Bible, even though historians agree that revelations wasn't even the last book written in the Bible and that certain gospels were written afterwards. Anyways, both the Bible and the Book of Mormon is the word of God and this verse talks about that - 

2 Nefi 27:14 Wherefore, the Lord God will proceed to bring forth the words of the book; and in the mouth of as many witnesses as seemeth him good will he establish his word; and wo be unto him that rejecteth the word of God!

So, God is saying that if He wants to establish His word with two witnesses/books then He will do it. But now, in the Bible, we get a new take on what it means to establish His word - 

John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

So Jesus Christ is the Word. So you could take the BOM verse again and rewrite it something along the lines of, 

Wherefore, the Lord God will proceed to bring forth the words of the book; and in the mouth of as many witnesses as seemeth him good will he establish Jesus Christ; and wo be unto him that rejecteth Jesus Christ!

So the Bible and Book of Mormon together don't just establish the Word of God, like, words we use for writing, but they also serve to establish the testimony of Jesus Christ as the Son of God, His life, and His sacrifice for us. Such a cool topic.

The baptism was cool, it was a member's daughter and a bunch of family friends were there. We got to do a little group teaching at the end when all the non-members sort of bunched up and were talking about our church so we just kind of sidled up and were like, "yeah we're like that because we believe this!" Basically taught the whole restoration it was a pretty cool deal. Then one of these friends was driving home, saw us at the bus stop, and totally gave us a ride to the station to get to our appointment with our investigator! So cool.

That lesson with our investigator Maria was so awesome. She wanted to know why we don't pray to the Madonna and so I had the opportunity to study that topic all week. Basically the best answer I could come up with is that there is absolutely no scriptural support in favor of praying to anyone besides God...so we shared an explanation from a talk and then we brought up different prayers and parables of prayer from the scriptures and shared them with her. The Spirit was so strong and she prayed at the end of the lesson to God. I love first vocal prayers. None of them are wrong, they're all good. And she totally wants to see us again! So so stoked about this one. All in all it was a good week, I mean, this was just one day in the field! Here's to five more weeks of laughing too much and flopping into bed exhausted every night! I love the mission and plan on working hard all the way through these last four months. Thank you for reading and I hope you all have a good one!