Many Tender Mercies

Things out here have been going pretty well! There have been a couple of really smokey days because all of the fires, but the past couple of days haven't been too bad. A couple of weeks ago when we were coming back from the zone conference in Bend, Elder Bills and I got stuck on the highway for 45 minutes because of the fires. It is pretty crazy the way things have been out here. Zone Conferences were really good. We are officially done with them for the transfer. Elder Bills and I talked about "How to Begin Teaching" from Preach My Gospel chapter 10. It went well. 

Overall things are going well with our area. The people that we have been finding are starting to progress and keep commitments, which is awesome. The week was full of tender mercies. Our Saturday was pretty good. I will try to explain the story of our crazy Saturday. Firstly, we had a lesson with a lady that we met at 840 at night earlier in the week. It was really dark and kind of an awkward encounter, but she said that she would meet us at the church on Saturday for a lesson. Unfortunately a lot of times in missionary work people don't show up for their lessons. Because of the weirdness of the way we met her, we weren't totally sure if she'd be there. 1130 rolled around and she was there! That was the first tender mercy of the day. We did a church tour and then had a quick lesson. She committed herself to read the Book of Mormon before we even could. She was telling herself that she wasn't interested, but I think she was more than she realized. That lesson was over at noon. Here is where the dilemma started to kick in. At 1230, we had a planned lesson with Camille. We had to finish teaching Camille all of the principles before her baptism, which is tomorrow, so it was a really big lesson to have. We also had a lesson planned with Brother Chuck, a man we met a few weeks ago who doesn't currently have a stable living condition so sometimes it is hard to meet him. After our lesson with Angela, we saw that we missed a call from Brother Chuck, so we called him. He answered the phone and said "I'm on my bike on my way, can't talk, see you soon" and hung up. It was 12 so we were really confused because our lesson was for 130. We decided that we would call Camille and see if we could push the lesson up to 1215, but it didn't work out because she wanted to go pick us up lunch, so she wanted to see if we could do 1 oclock. So, we felt like we should go wait for Brother Chuck by the tree we meet him at. We got there and waited for a few minutes. He didn't show up. We felt prompted to go and try and contact a lady a few streets away named Teresa. Our thought was we would go contact her, then on the way driving to Camille's drive by the tree to see if Brother Chuck showed up early. When we went to Teresa's, rather than parking in the trailer park, Jaden (the member who was driving us) parked on the street. Once we parked, we saw a bike in front of a car and a man in the car. We walked over to go talk to him and... it was Brother Chuck! It was crazy to see how Heavenly Father knew we were kind of in a mess and had a lot to get done, so He took us straight to Chuck. It was amazing. We shared a Mormon Message "Our True Identity" with him and he started to cry. He was definitely feeling the Spirit. It was really cool. After talking to Brother Chuck, we still had a few minutes before Camille's and we were able to find a new investigator in that time. 

Later on Saturday, we were walking in the evening in the rain (First time it had rained in a while). And a white car pulls up and a girl hops out and runs over to us and starts asking us a bunch of questions about the church. She is from Bulgaria and was in Oregon for the summer for an internship. We talked to her for a while about the church and the Book of Mormon and stuff. We found out that she goes back to the Netherlands on Wednesday. We also found out that she had seen the Oregon Temple but had never visited it. So we set up a Visitor's Center trip for tonight! 

This week will be really good. Another busy one too. We have Camille's baptism tomorrow night. We also have transfers this week, so we are going to have to do some stuff for that. It should be another busy one.