Week 27

HELLO EVERYBODY!!

Hope you all had a great new years.  I know I did.  We spent it planning. :)  It was a good first week of the new transfer!  My fifth already!  It's crazy to think there's only 17 of these.

So some good news, "B" committed to be baptized!  We had a great lesson with her about having confidence in the Lord, and then she told us of an experience she had wile watching some Mormon messaged on lds.org the previous night.  She told us that she felt like God came back into her life and that she felt His presence for the first time in a while.  We were so happy for her, and she totally recognized this as her answer.  She even ended up picking her own date.  She was planning on coming to church and everything was looking good for her.  Sunday morning she texted us and said she wouldn't be coming to church.  Her parents talked to her about the baptism and everything and felt like she was rushing into it.  It's such a bummer but it is OK.  Everything will work out in God's time.

This week we went on an exchange with our District Leader, he serves in the Seahurst Spanish branch here in Seattle Zone!  He's super cool.  He actually ended up going with Elder Woolf, while I went with his companion to their area.  It was a good time!  They cover the whole zone, some of their investigators speak English so I could teach sometimes.  I learned some Spanish while I was there!  I learned how to bare my testimony, that's all you really need.  Dad would be proud.

Our district's goal this transfer is "furthering our faith to find."  That's something Elder Woolf and I have been working on.  We got to a point where we were just doing the same thing over and over again.  It's like we were just throwing up lobs for people to reject us.  Saturday night we changed our attitudes and had so many good conversations.  We were handing out copies of the Book of Mormon left and right!  Heck, we even passed out a Spanish Book of Mormon!  We found some new people to teach and we were so stoked.

Yesterday after church we went over to "R"'s house.  She's a member who lives in our area but goes to church at the Stake Center.  She LOVES missionaries, so she told the sisters in that ward to give us her info and have us come over.  She's from Ethiopia and she's literally the nicest lady in the world.  We got there and she just gave us so much good chocolate, then she cooked an entire meal for us of salmon and rice and so much more.  Not what we were expecting!

The past couple of weeks I have been studying the first book of Samuel and I found a really great verse that I could probaby call one of my favorites now.  It's good enough that I added it to the whiteboard above my desk.  It's chapter 16, when David is chosen by the Lord as King of Israel.  Pondering this verse helped me love other people more.  It helped me have a better attitude about going out to find.  It helped me try my best to see other people as God sees them.  Verse 7 reads:  "But the Lord said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart."

Elder Robb