Week 22

HELLO everyone!  Another great week!  We had an awesome member take us to a super nice pizza place on Alki Beach.  Afterwards we went to Top Pot Donuts.  I guess it's a really big deal here because Obama endorsed them when he came here.

Picture courtesy of Jo Sivley

For Thanksgiving we spent the day with other missionaries and President, then we went to a member meal.  There was lots of people and lots of kids!

This week I went on my first exchange as a district leader!  I stayed in West Seattle with Elder Packer, from Highline Somoa.  He's only been out her one less transfer than myself, and he's a really great missionary!  It was funny how we had never worked together before but we were pretty united in our teaching.  We found 7 new investigators that day.  The best experience came later that night when we were out tracting some apartments.  We weren't having much success, so we walked up a different hill.  We knocked some doors and still no success, so we decided to just say a prayer for guidance at one corner.  We ended up walking up this staircase that led us to a different neighborhood, and the first door we knocked, this guy was in the process of moving.  We talked for a while and turns out he's an inactive member who was baptized 4 years ago.  Elder Packer and I were blown away!  We're going to be working on getting him back to church now!  We said another prayer and ended up knocking on the door of a lady who let us in and we taught the restoration to her.  It's super rare that this stuff happens, you could call it a coincidence, but I just can't.

We're teaching a 97 year old lady from Louisiana.  She apparently has already read the entire Book of Mormon and she's going to come to church with us next week hopefully!

This week a really great scripture that hit me was Mosiah chapter 5 verse 2: "And they all cried with one voice, saying:  Yea, we believe all the words which thou hast spoken unto us; and also, we know of their surety and truth, because of the Spirit of the Lord Omnipotent, which has wrought a mighty change in us, or in our hearts, that we have no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually."

It's really great how the spirit and a knowledge of the words of God can make us change to be better.  It's been a cool experience to serve a mission and grow!

Love you all!

BEN