Dinkytown week 17

Hey y'all, this email might be a tad short today. we are going to the state fair and we had a miscommunication on picking some elders up which caused us to lose a bit of time...sorry! If i dont reply to your emails this week i will for sure next week.

 

So a super sweet miracle that happened this week was with an investigator that the spanish elders in our zone are teaching. He has been in a limbo stage for the last few weeks where he wanted to get baptized but he didnt want to set a date and the elders wanted some help. We all felt strongly impressed that elder wall should go teach him. So we exchanged and elder wall went to go preach the good Word. I went with one of the spanish elders to our own lesson. When we got out of it at 9:00 I read a text that said something like this: we will meet you at the institute at 9:45. The investigator is getting interviewed for baptism right now. what. (also, dont worry about us being all disobedient and being late and whatnot. President Forbes said we can get home any time now if we are teaching a lesson. we just have to be in bed by 10:30). Elder Wall later explained that they went in to teach and Baltazar said he was just full of fear. So they quoted President Clements' and said "dont take counsel from your fears. have the faith to fail." the investigator thought about it for awhile and said he wanted to get baptized. So elder wall interviewed him on the spot and he got baptized a few days later. so sick :)

 

So i got to eat hmong food this week. i didnt particularly like what i ate due to the fact that the pork i had still had hair on it. I like my animals de-haired before i consume them... but i ate some really yummy purple rice!

 

I also had some liberian pepper soup. it is a really tasty and spicy soup that all the africans love. It is really convenient i finally got to eat some because if you tell an african person you like pepper soup they immediately love you. In andover i had been teaching a Liberian guy for 3 months and we were good friends. Then Elder Hawkes came in and told him he LOVED pepper soup and our invstigator liked him more than me. Elder Hawkes accomplished more in ten seconds than i did in 3 months... that dawg.

 

I also played a cello duet in church on sunday! A cello Major from BYU was back for the summer and he has 2 cellos so we played an arrangement of "Love One Another." oh how i love playing the cello...

 

We also got to teach a super sweet guy named DH. He is a PhD student here and is probably one of the most humble truth seekers I have ever met. We taught the plan of salvation and he stopped us after the Pre-earth life and told us he was on the completely same page as us. Which is incredible because a lot of other churches have very different doctrine on that subject matter. After we taught about adam and eve he gave the same response and then he said, "yes! I agree! Adam was one of our spiritual leaders before we came to earth. He were very supportive of him being the first man on earth. We trusted him to make the right choice." My jaw dropped a little after he said that. i have never heard anyone outside of our church say anything remotely similar to that. So sweet :)

 

As always I had a run in with a few drunk people this week. One of them kinda freaked out that we were proselyting because the bible apparently says that is sin. The elder i was exchanging with quoted a scripture about how sharing the gospel is a commandment (from the bible) and the man was quite literally dumbfounded. He was like, "that is really in there...???" so good.

 

i would love it if everyone would think about the aforementioned quote from President Clements: Do not take counsel from your fears. Have the faith to fail.

What does this mean for each of us individually? How does fear affect our faith?

If we succumb to fear we cannot complete the will of God each day. We cannot be his tools in the work of salvation.

 

i love you all! Have a great week!

Elder Damron