Saturday, May 21, 2016

It's Summer!

Dear Family,

We were planning to have a bunch of new investigators and lessons this week, but all but one of them dogged, so we spent a lot of time finding instead like usual. The one lesson that did go through went well though, so we can't complain. We also got let in a couple times tracting. One of them was a cool experience.

I have been thinking a lot about personal revelation lately, because I have thought about revelation through the priesthood line a lot throughout the course of my mission (see Dallin H Oaks, Two Lines of Communication Oct 2010  https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2010/10/two-lines-of-communication?lang=eng) and I feel like I have gotten good at that, where I search the words of the prophets (and other priesthood leaders) and the scriptures and trust that to be the truth, but I now need to work on opening up the other line more actively. So in comp study we were talking about where we were going to head out tracting in a short block of time we had, and I said this one place sounded good, and Elder Paul who understands how the gospel works suggested we pray about it and ask God if he has anywhere he wants us to go and if not we would go where I had said. So he said a prayer, and as he said it the image came into my mind of a street corner I had been to once on splits. So when the prayer ended I suggested we jump on the 102 bus and go to this street corner. He agreed. 

We then ended up being crunched on time later in the day, and it didn't look like we'd have enough time to go, but we went anyway and figured we'd push some other things back. So we went to this street and started tracting, after a couple doors a super cool older man let us in, we were able to teach him about the restoration. He was still firm in his beliefs, but he accepted a book of mormon and we gave him a couple chapters to read from. He told us to call him in mid-June when he will have had time to read and we can talk then. So I'll probably never hear of him again, unfortunately, because that is when the transfer is.  But hopefully he will keep meeting with the missionaries. And if not, at least I learned something about following the spirit.

Also, there was a mini transfer yesterday and half my MTC group went home. Now only 2 of us are left. That was weird.
In better news, if you count every day from 8:00-21:30 as missionary time, then I just passed my 10,000 hour mark as a missionary. So I guess I'm now a master missionary according to that one theory. I also am at my 2 year mark today, and overtime work should get double the blessings, which means we should have a great couple weeks coming up ahead of us.
Have a great week.
Love
Parkinson Elder