Follow His Promptings

The week here was good! We had a really good weekend. Crystil and Anthony were able to join the youth for the temple trip. They were able to do baptisms for the dead and have a really enjoyable experience. The Bishopric asked them to bear their testimonies about it on Sunday at church, so that was awesome to hear! Crystil is excited to continue taking her family back to the temple. Her daughter, Angelica, joined the youth as well. But since she hasn’t been baptized yet, she went to the visitors center and hung out with the visitors center Sisters. The Sisters there talked to her about a Baptismal date and invited her to pray about one. The Sisters were able to really connect with her and talk with her, which was great! She went to a tree on the temple grounds and prayed about a date and had a really cool experience! Her answer was that she should be baptized this upcoming Saturday! We are really excited for her. She has been doing really well and it is great to see her reach this point. 

We had a good week with lots of experiences. We had an exchange on Wednesday. During the exchange, we were driving back to our apartment in the morning to come back for lunch. As we were driving, we felt prompted to pull over and talk to someone. At first we didn’t do it, but then it stayed there, so we followed the prompting and talked with her. She turned out to be really cool and it was a great conversation. We were able to send her as a referral to the Sisters in the neighboring area. It was just another lesson that a) Heavenly Father is always aware of us and He will prompt others to do things to be of help to us. And b) that we need to always follow His promptings. At first we didn’t, but I’m grateful that we did. We just have to always learn to follow the first time it comes, which isn’t always easy! 

Great Things Happening

Things here are good with the work. It has been amazing to see the ways that our investigators are progressing. Ashley, who is Crystil's neighbor, is doing so good. She was able to make it to the full day at church for the first time this week and she had a really good time. The Spirit has been working with her so much. She has absolutely started to love reading the Book of Mormon and has been cruising through it so fast! We were able to read the Book of Mormon with her in a members home this week, and that was so good. That is something that can really help investigators, reading in members homes. We have really been focusing on reading the Book of Mormon as a mission recently, and it has helped a lot. It was really cool this week because the Relief Society in our ward threw a baby shower for Crystil's daughter and apparently it went extremely well. Crystil's daughter felt so loved and the sisters in the ward did such a good job at fellowshipping her. Crystil and Anthony are going to be going up to the Portland temple this week to do baptisms for the dead! The youth are going up for a temple trip, so it is going to be a great opportunity for them. Ashley and Angelica are also going to be going up with the youth and are going to be visiting the visitor's center while the rest of the them are doing baptisms. 

We had a cool miracle this week with one of the newer investigators that we are teaching. His name is Andrew. He has been having a rough week, so we went and visited him on Saturday. We had a really good conversation with him and invited him to church. He said that he would try to come to church, but wasn't sure. On Sunday morning, we received a text from him and he said that he was going to come! He showed up to church and stayed for Sacrament meeting and he really enjoyed it. The ward did a really good job at helping him feel loved and he said that he wanted to come back again. We were excited about that! 

Staying in High Desert

The week has been really good. We definitely saw a lot of miracles. Crystil was able to go to the temple visitors center this week with Anthony, so that was really good for them. We had a lesson this week with Crystil’s neighbor, Ashley. We did it at the church and had a church tour with them. It was really cool because Crystil, who has only been a member for about three weeks, was bearing a lot of testimony and helped out a lot. We showed a little video about the Relief society and Crystil said, “Oh it’s much better than that!” So it was really good experience for Ashley. She was really excited to come to church on Sunday, but then Sunday morning she messaged us saying that she had to help her mom with some car problems. We messaged her back saying that she could come late if she could make it. We got a text with about 5 minutes left in Gospel Principles saying that she was in the hallway! She went to relief society and had an awesome time! She is doing really well and is progressing towards baptism in May. 

We had a lesson this week that we were bringing a Priest with us to and when we were walking towards the mans apartment, we saw another guy and started talking to him. He invited us to come upstairs. He recently started attending another church because he is trying to get his life on track. We were able to teach him the Restoration really briefly and use the Book of Mormon and he said we could come back Wednesday. It was cool too because right as we were starting to talk about modern prophets, I saw that on their entertainment center they had a quote and the author of the quote was James E Faust! So we told him that he was a modern Apostle. So that was cool!

Elder Holt and I will both be staying here in High Desert for a third transfer. We are excited to be able to keep working together and to hopefully keep seeing more miracles. Elder Patterson is staying in Redmond, so I will be able to see him at the Zone Conference next month before he goes home. I’m excited for that. Next month our Zone Conference will be a mission tour with Elder Whiting of the 70. That will be good. 

Things this week went well. We had Anthony’s baptism, which was really good. He bore his testimony at the end and it meant a lot to his mom and sister. It was really good for his sister to be there and to feel the spirit there. It made her think more about being baptized and now she is working towards that. The baptism went really well overall! There was a good showing, especially from the youth in the ward and the young men’s leaders. We had interviews with President after the baptism. Those went well. It’s always good to be able to be with them and talk with them.

We had Zone Conference this week too, which was a lot of fun. We talked a lot about the Book of Mormon and why it’s important to use the Book of Mormon. It was actually really fun because at one point, I mentioned that Elder Patterson was really good at that, so President asked that Elder Patterson and I get up and role play it. Elder Patterson is serving in Redmond now So we were able to go up and do a role play together of using the Book of Mormon to someone we just met. That was fun! Elder Patterson also bore his final testimony at Zone Conference because next Zone conference will be a mission tour and he won’t have the opportunity to do that there. It was really crazy to see him do that. It was pretty emotional for me!

The week was good. We had an exchange as well, and during that exchange we had some good experiences. We saw one guy across the street, so we went over to talk with him and he didn’t really want to talk. He said he was in a hurry, so we walked fast with him until we could give him something. It was cool because the Lord led us straight to another guy who had met with the missionaries in the past and was willing to have us come back this next week. 

Good Week in Bend

The week overall was good with the missionary work here. This week we had a really good lesson with Crystil and her neighbor. Her neighbor has been really impressed with the ways that Crystil has changed. She says that she has seen a huge difference in her and that she has a light about her, which is so true. She said that she wanted that for herself, so this week we had a lesson in Crystil’s home with this Sister. It’s pretty amazing how she has only been a member for a week and she is already fellowshipping and reaching out and inviting others into her home to learn more. She bore a lot of testimony as well, so that was really cool. 

Anthony is getting excited for his baptism on Saturday! He asked one of the Priests to be the one to perform the baptism, so we are excited for that. It will be a great experience for him. Tanner is even going to either leave his rugby game early or skip it to be able to baptize Anthony, so that is really cool to see. The ward is excited as well, so that’ll be great. 

It was great to be able to go back to Newberg this week for the District Leader Training that we had. It was good to be able to see a lot of missionaries that I served around and just everyone there in general. It felt good to be back in the mission home around President and Sister Tateoka. I think the highlight of my week was being able to talk with President one on one for a few minutes after the meeting. That was really good.