One Month Left

Hello Everybody,

As you can tell from the email title I only have one month left until I come home. That's pretty crazy. It honestly doesn't feel like a month though, it kind of feels like I still have a lot of time left. Even though the fact that we are leaving is a frequent conversation that is brought up between the three of us. Elder Woodruff said the other day, "Can you imagine that in one month we are going to walk out of here one day lock the doors and not go in again?" So the fact the we are leaving is not being ignored but it just doesn't feel like I am leaving so soon (for me at least).

Anyway this week I have been in the Isaiah chapters in my scripture study this week so that is fun. But I have found that not everything doesn't make sense. I found a really cool scripture about acting on the first prompting from the spirit in The Isaiah chapters. It is in 2 Nephi 17:10-13 and it says:

10 Moreover, the Lord spake again unto Ahaz, saying:

11 Ask thee a sign of the Lord thy God; ask it either in the depths, or in the heights above.

12 But Ahaz said: I will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord.

13 And he said: Hear ye now, O house of David; is it a small thing for you to weary men, but will ye weary my God also?

And thus we see that we should always do what we are asked to do by the spirit so that we can have the spirit with us more and more.

I know that as we follow the spirit that we will become better and better as a person and we will have the power to help others become better and better. I know that all things are possible through Jesus Christ. I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

Buyondo at church on Sunday

I had a bunch of cool experiences this week. One of these experiences happened on Sunday. I went up to the Referral Center and my finger was hurting, so this made it kind of hard to type. So I said a prayer asking God to make it so that my finger wouldn't hurt so that I could do missionary work. I then finished my prayer and I heard a question in my head and it was, "Do you have the faith for me to heal you?" So I said another prayer and told Heavenly Father that I did have faith for Him to heal me. Once I had ended the prayer the pain didn't go away but when I started typing and using the mouse it did go away. This just showed me how much love God has for me and for all of his children.

Finding and teaching were super cool this week. We found and taught about thirty new people as well as the people that we have already been teaching. So it was very busy but that is good. I think the most we had was four or five lessons going on at once. We will be teaching a lesson and finding at the same time and then we will find someone and teach them as we are in the middle of two or three other lessons. There is never a dull moment in the Referral Center.

We found someone super cool this week and her name is Juli. She is from Rio Grande, Argentina which is like the very bottom of Argentina. We found her and asked her if she could talk in 30 minutes and she said yes. So we went and got our breakfast and then we did a video conversation on Facebook and she was at one of our churches. This was shocking. It usually takes a while for someone to go to church. We were curious if it was actually one of our church buildings or another church, but we faintly heard in the background the primary singing follow the prophet. So she is super awesome. We did find out later that she is already a member but has been less active for awhile and this was her first time back to church in a long time. She still wants to learn from us because apparently the first time she was taught, the missionaries were more interested in baptizing her than teaching the doctrine so she doesn't know much about the church. So we are still going to teach her.

Our schedule for this week - red boxes are people we taught, and grey boxes are ones that fell through

We also taught a man from Malawi name Bonongwe. He is super awesome. When we first talked with him about how when we are missionaries our name is Elder Stevenson, Elder Woodruff, or Elder Arndt. He responded by saying My name is now Elder Bonongwe. He is super willing to learn, and wants to do what we ask him to do.

We had a goal to have at least seven new people found and taught each day. So one day we were at six new people and it was nearing the end of the day, and Elder Woodruff said we need to find one new person. Right then someone responded to one of my messages to them. Her name is Lela and she said, "yeah, I want to increase my relationship with God," so we said, "do you want to talk about God right now?" She agreed. So we taught her about Joseph Smith since she had some questions about him since she had been to one of our church services a long time ago. So we taught her and met our goal of seven new people that day.

Something that we are doing is that we are working with the Referral Center employees to have two companionships, so that we can have a more balanced schedule. That was pretty good. It is interesting seeing other people's teaching styles. It really helps.

Something else that was super cool was that someone we taught last week, Buyondo, went to church and we were not even planning on him going to church.

Well I hope that you have a good upcoming week and a good fast Sunday.

Love,

Elder Stevenson