Dinner appointment

 
We have struggled a little bit starting back at ground zero after L---’s baptism.  We are trying to find new investigators through the members, but the Lord blessed us for our efforts by sending a man named W--- who just decided to come to church yesterday! He apparently helped clean the building sometime a long time ago, and just remembered the warm invitation to attend a service on Sunday, and thought he might give it a try all this time later! 

We have gotten a good start on the new member lessons with L---. The T--- family (recent converts themselves) is having us teach them in their home and it has been great. We planned to teach about the Restoration using paper cups to "build Christ's church," destroy it, and build it up again, in hopes that L---'s little sister would be there and we could get a double whammy.  She wasn’t able to come, so we were about to teach something different, but decided to stick to the game plan anyway. As we went through the steps, we all felt the Spirit. At the end, Elder Griffin asked the mom what it meant to her to have all this restored in her life. She just started crying and bore her testimony that this was the first time she actually understood the Restoration and why it is so important in the Church! She has been a member for just over a year and has been confused about some things, but it finally clicked for her and she was so happy and excited because it finally made sense to her after all this time. It felt so good to hear her say, "Now I KNOW that the Church really is PERFECT." So we know that it was inspired to teach that lesson, even though we prepared it for M--, it was actually for her and God knows exactly what he's doing. :)

Elder Griffin has come to be one of my greatest friends. It’s sad to think we have been together for 3 transfers, and most likely won’t be able to keep our streak going for much longer.  Who knows-maybe we can ;) but I have enjoyed every day and learned so much.

We went on 2 exchanges this week.  First, I went with Elder Barlow. He is doing great as a new District Leader and Trainer! We tried to make Jesus Christ and the Atonement the focus of all our lessons, and in one lesson in particular, there was a time when I got somewhat sidetracked sharing some Bible scriptures with one of our investigators and the lesson just wasn’t really going in the direction we hoped.  Then, Elder Barlow stepped up and bore solid testimony of Jesus Christ and brought the spirit back into the lesson and allowed us to get back on track of what is really most important.

Zone Conference was awesome, and I wrote a lot in my journal. I’m not one to write much in my journal, but I made it count because Pres. Felix committed us to.

Love,

Elder Parrish