Week 39

Hey everyone!

So my days here in Ravenna Park are over.  Tomorrow I'll head to my new area (TBA), and get to work there.  It's been a short stay here but I learned a lot, I feel like the two-year mission experience is like 10 years of life experience.  Anyways, it was a great last week!  Here's some of the highlights:

So we got a new move-in/less-active list from the ward a few weeks ago and we pretty much went through it in a week.  There was one family that we had tried a couple of times and with no answer we were probably just going to stop going, but we were in the area and figured we might as well try one more time.  When we knocked on the door, we could see him look through the peep hole and from behind the door we heard him say "No way?!"  Then he flung open the door and said, "How did you guys find us??"  He was was a super cool guy, he's actually a national champion ski jumper!  Anyways, he told us his conversion story and how he baptized his wife into the church about 10 years ago.  He said it was really funny that we knocked on his door that night because he was just thinking he should be reading hte Book of Mormon, and apparently he had just taught his 4 year old daughter about Jesus for the first time.  So we had an awesome impromptu lesson with him, his wife, and his daughter.  They committed to come to church for Easter and they did!

On Saturday we contacted a referral named J, we had a member with and we taught him the restoration lesson.  The spirit was really strong.  He's a really open guy who'd trying to get through a kind of weird time in his life.  He has an 8 year old son, too.  He told us that he'll get baptized when he comes to know the truth of it all.  We invited him to play basketball at the institute with us and some other missionaries and their investigators later that day and he came with his son.  Then he came to church on Easter and stayed the whole 3 hours!  Pretty awesome!

When we were in Gospel Principles, we randomly got a text from S, a girl we had talked to a few weeks ago and invited to church.  She texted us out of the blue and asked, "hey, is it too late for me to come the church?"  She actually lives in another area so it was perfect.  We sent her the address to that building and she ended up going and bringing her friends with her!  Then moments later we got a text from a recent convert who moved from Tennessee who we met on the street last week asking if he could have the address of the YSA building so he could go to church.  Everyone just wanted to go to LDS church this week!  Then Bishop approached us with pictures of a baptism for B and her family.  We taught her a couple of times at the beginning of the transfer until she moved to Iowa.  Really cool to see that they all got baptized yesterday too.  Just a good sequence of events at church.

One of my favorite verses I read this week comes from the Book of Mormon.  I've just been thinking about how important it is to be grateful for blessings that the Lord gives to us.  I think a lot of my life I saw the blessings but didn't recognize them as "tender mercies."  In high school seminary, every Friday the floor would be open for students to talk about a tender mercy they witnessed that week.  A lot of the time it would be small things and I would think, "that's just a coincidence, God had nothing to do with that."  Now I realize there's nothing too small for God to care about.  1 Nephi 1:20 reads "behold, I, Nephi, will show unto you that the tender mercies of the Lord are over all those whom he hath chosen, because of their faith, to make them mighty even unto the power of deliverance."

I love you all!
Elder Robb