Christmas is around the corner... and yet here in New York it is green and sunny, 61 degrees and NO snow! Super weird, but I am not complaining. It makes missionary work so much easier.
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| Kylie, currently serving in Horsehead, NY |
This week has been pretty good. We have a few break through with some investigators and we've been quite busy. I was going to go on exchanges to Ithaca and Owego this week, but due to a recent bed bug problem in the Upstate, all exchanges are cancelled for a while. #warmweatherprobs. But instead we used the time to go finding. Our teaching pool is quite funny right now. Either our investigators are super solid and going to be baptized so or they are not interested at all and dropped us. I prefer to work with the super solid of course!
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| Kylie and Her Companion |
So here is some of my favorite people in the Universe, that we have been teaching this week.
Will: He is a single widower in his 50's that we tracted into 2 weeks ago. OMG. So Golden. He is my favorite tracting investigator ever. We taught him everyday this week and he is progressing immensely. He keeps every commitment. He is committed to baptism in February and he can do it. We have been working on the Book of Mormon and commandments, and with his research on Mormon.org he asked us about the Word of Wisdom and actually said he wanted to give up coffee because with his diabetes, coffee is killing his kidneys with potassium. He doctor actually told him a week or two ago that he needed to live the WOW... so when we taught it to him, he loved it. It is rare to have this attitude in New York! We wanted him to come to Church, but he was like "I don't know.. I am not ready." I knew that he not broken any commitments, and he sure enough, he showed upon Sunday 30 minutes early, all shaved and in perfect church attire! He stayed only for the first hour, but he loved it and the members love him already. We saw him yesterday and he bought us Snickers because he said the "Church was sweet." It felt so good to be at church and that he had been waiting and looking for it his whole life and now he thinks he has found it. Ahhh! So cool! I love him so much! Just gotta keep him away from "Anti" literature and he will be baptized soon!
J, Oh J. He is the coolest Jehovah's Witness ever! We also have been teaching him every other day and he is so sincere. He is in his 70's, is African american and from the south. He is the funniest old guy ever. We have been reading the Book of Mormon, and he is praying about it. We are trying to work with comprehension and after December he wants to come to Church then go to the JW Hall in the afternoon to compare and contrast the beliefs. He asks great questions and he truly wants to know what we know. It is just hard, because the beliefs are so different that he gets confused sometimes. I have learned more in 2 weeks about the JW's than in my whole life. We tracted into another JW, and their proselyting van knows who we are and they wave and say Hi. They give us their magazine and we give them Ensigns and Books of Mormons. It is quite funny. We have a bible of theirs and we looked through it. We can barely understand what we are reading it is so different from our Bible. ha ha talk about loosing plain and precious truths. He has talked about baptism and if everything goes well, over the next couple months he will get baptized!
Jim, he is the recent 50 old single cute convert. He wants to dedicate his life to the Church, but he works as the city clubs janitor and head dishwasher and can't retire yet, so he is quite busy. He is the most humble heart ever. He is currently working on his family history and temple work so we can get him to go with the youth in January.
Meg, a part-members girlfriend, super cute and has the cutest border collie puppy ever. We teach her simply and she wants to be baptized, she just wants to know everything first... ha! She came to church for the first time in months this week! Woop :)
Nadine - Craziest lady ever. Super sincere desire to know the church is true. But every time we teach her, something crazy happens. Either her cat has a seizure and dies in front of us, or she has her legs go paralyzed, or her ex-neighbors who she said did black magic or haunt her house, or some crazy weird comment that make us laugh so hard that we cry. She loves reading the Book of Mormon. She loves to get hung up on random subjects that don't quite matter to her salvation, like the gift of tongues or the 3 Nephites. Never a dull moment with Nadine. She is on schedule to be baptized in March.
Tom - Super cute old man! His wife doesn't like us at all. He smokes, but he is giving it up to be baptized! He has lots of health problems. If it wasn't for his smoking, he would be baptized now. Everything is all in the Lord's timing. :) Super humble too and he loves Sacrament Meeting. He has a mustache that kind of looks like a dead rat.. :P but that is okay, it's what his heart is like that matters!
Other than that, this week we have been trying to find investigators. We have tracted. We even OYM'd at a mall with the cards "A Savior is Born", but we haven't had too much luck. Lots of rejection with that this week, but it is bound to happen and people are just down on their luck and most actually don't care for Christmas. They said it too commercialized, and yet they are spending away for others. Darn Babylon! Hopefully after the holidays, people lighten up and start welcoming us in more or be nicer! Who knows. Tracting just makes me laugh, we run into the craziest people. All of those jokes about Walmart people, aren't have as bad as what I've dealt with. Tracting an apartment complex is so much wackier! We meet drunk people, naked people, people who think we are JWs no matter how many times we say we're Mormons, old people with 10000 health problems and the list goes on!
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| District Meeting |
We had a great District meeting this week. We had to walk around blind folded with dirt on our hands and our companion had to lead us around the Church to "Baptism" aka the sink and we pretended to be investigators. It was harder than I thought.... lots of distractions!
Oh, Christmas.mormon.org. Watch those cute music videos done by famous Mormons! So much fun!
Taught a few LA's and no progressing investigators this week too. It's all about hearts, either you are humble or you aren't, or open to the gospel or aren't. There is no gray area. We did find this one lady late at night. She let us in and we did a short message and gave her a BofM. She kinda freaked out when we asked if we could meet again and she was like, "Is this going to be a regular thing? I let you do your schpeel..." ha ha some people just do not understand our purpose even after we tell them.
We have been ding dong ditching our people with Secret Christmas Scriptures and presents... that has been really fun!
Well, gotta go. More things to do. I love you all and have a merry Christmas!
Sister Kylie Williams.
