The Miles Were Worth It

Hey Everyone,

We had District Meeting and a lesson with Colleen on Tuesday. We felt like we needed to read 2 Nephi 2 with her, since she's been having some trouble understanding. While we were reading, she would stop us and ask awesome questions about why we believe certain things, and we were always able to answer her questions with the next verse, or a verse on the previous page. It was amazing to see the Book of Mormon open her eyes to the truth. We also went to a funeral on Tuesday evening for one of the members of our ward. it was the third funeral I've been to on my mission and all of them have been very spiritual experiences. This one especially strengthened my testimony of eternal families and life after life, as President Nelson put it. 

We had an awesome miracle on Wednesday. We received a Bible referral for the geographically middle of our area, which we hardly ever go to. We drove out there after dinner, it took an hour to drive out there, about 23 miles. 23 miles probably doesn't sound like a lot to you, but when we only have 40 miles a day, 23 miles is a lot for one person. So we drive out there and knock on his door and naturally... He's not home. We knock on his neighbors door, who was also not home, but this massive brown dog came running around the house. My first thought was, "We're dead. We're trapped on this deck with no way out and a massive dog is running at us." But when the dog got to us, he started jumping around, wagging his tail. He was the happiest dog ever, he ran off the deck and grabbed his ball for us to throw for him. It was so cute! That was our miracle. I'm just kidding, after we left the dog we started driving back towards civilization and decided that we had enough time to go by a few people before heading back home. We felt like we should go by a referral named Paul that we received a few weeks ago. Elder Apgood and I had knocked on his door and he was very nice but told us to come back another time because he was really sick that day. We'd tried by about 4 or 5 times since then but he wasn't ever there, but on Wednesday we knocked on his door and he let us right in. He started describing how he has been led towards religion the last few months and how he has been led right to us. It was amazing to see how the Lord prepares his children for the Gospel. We talked about the Gift of the Holy Ghost with him and invited him to be baptized, which he accepted whole-heartedly.

We had return appointments for both Colleen and Paul on Friday, and we even were able to get Brother Soto to come with us to Paul, but neither of them were home. Paul called us afterwards and apologized because he got stuck at training for his job and wasn't able to text us. He also said he had some reservations about being accepting the invitation to be baptized so quickly but he still wants to keep learning, so we will meet with him later this week. 

I love you all,

Elder Howell

P.S. I came across a quote by Elder Richard G. Scott, I don't have it with me so I'll just paraphrase it: Everyone on this Earth has already chosen Jesus Christ, we are simply here to help guide them back to that original path. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Vastly Uneventful and Meet Your Neighbors

Image
Hey everyone, As my subject line suggests, not a whole lot happened this week, just a lot of walking and not a ton of results.  Yesterday was by far the most exciting day. Besides going to church and being able to talk to my dad, which was awesome, while we were doing call-ins, the fire alarm went off. So we quickly got into normal clothes, mostly because I didn't want to go outside in my fuzzy Captain America pjs, and followed the rest of the building out onto St. Paul Street so we could participate in the annual meet your neighbor event. Probably the most memorable neighbor was a girl who brought her fish with her in a tiny tank, and was just casually walking around with this big goldfish. The tower truck pulled up and the firefighters did their thing for a few minutes, then we all went back to our apartments and fell asleep. On a side note, we found a huge cemetery on the way to Dundalk. There was a massive crypt in the middle of it that peaked my interest, so we wal...
Read more

July 1, 2019

Image
Hey Everyone, This was a relatively uneventful week mainly because of Tuesday. So first Monday, we had walked around a ton that day, and Elder Parkinson had been having problems with his leg already, so needless to say, by Tuesday morning he was in a fair amount of pain, so we had Elder Stubblefield look at it after District Council, and he told us that he has shin splints, which is why it feels like his calf is about to rip in half. So needless to say, we've been resting and he's been putting icy-hot on his leg every couple of hours.  But we've still been able to go out for a few hours every day; on Wednesday we had to go down to the Inner Harbor Building so Elder Parkinson could do a baptismal interview for someone that the Inner Harbor Elders are teaching, and we were able to go to his baptism on Saturday. We needed to be there to fill the font, then members that I knew started coming and we ended up staying for the whole thing. Afterwards, Elder Stubblefield put...
Read more