August 12, 2013

Dear folks,

We are getting fed pretty well here.

This week has been pretty good but kinda slow. A lot of people haven't been around because school was starting up again today and there was also a big car show called Hot August Nights downtown. We are still working on getting Cs recommitted with another baptismal date but his sister is fighting tooth and nail against it. She had a rabbi come talk to him and asked him go to Jewish temple services this weekend trying to convince him not to do it.

Dl is doing well, but he started school again last week so it's been kinda hard to meet with him. Ts is also doing very well, we have high hopes that he could be ready for baptism within a few weeks if he can quit his cigarettes. Cy came to church with us this weekend and seemed to enjoy it although she is pretty shy and doesn't like all the attention the ward members give whenever we have an investigator come to church. Sm is also doing very well, we had a good 2 hour discussion with her and she is super interested in the church. She had also been getting a lot of grief and hearing a lot of false information about the church from her neighbors because she has been meeting with us so she prayed and asked if having us teach her was a good thing. She said she felt very good about it and so didn't care what other people said about us. We also told her about the First Vision and she said it makes sense that a lot of people would hate Christ's true church because of the influence of the devil. We are pretty hopeful for her but there is a lot of stuff she has to change in her life first so hopefully she can.

We have anther lesson scheduled with a guy named Jk . I can't remember if I told you guys about him. He's been investigating the church for over 14 years and still hasn't been baptized. We took a different approach with him and fasted and planned for a couple hours the lessons we were going to have with him. We decided to be very blunt about addressing all the excuses he had and all the blessings he was giving up. He has been out of town for the last month or so so we haven't gotten to meet with him for awhile but the last time we did he said he didn't know why he wasn't baptized yet and that he would talk about it with his family, who are all members, which is something he had never done and would pray about it. Hopefully he has done the things we told him to do and that this next meeting will go well.

We also ran into a Messianic Jew, or a Jewish person that believes in Jesus Christ but still keeps a lot of the Jewish traditions. We were walking up to her and I asked her how she was doing and she replied "Shalom. Do you know what that means?" And we were like, not really, then she said, in a very mystical voice,"It means 'peace', peace that passes all human understanding." She started talking about her beliefs and that we should try to read a Hebrew Bible because a lot of the words can't really be translated into English and that we didn't really understand a lot of the Bible because it was mistranslated and that Christ didn't end the law of Moses but when he said that he fulfilled it, it didn't mean that he ended it, it only meant that he lived it perfectly and that we should as well (even though further into the New Testament it makes it clear that the law of Moses ended). At first I though, ok, she just really believes in her religious ideology and, you know, we do believe in the Bible as far as it is translated correctly which is why we have the Book of Mormon to provide clarity and further doctrine and we were going to talk about that but then she started talking about how we shouldn't call Jesus Jesus and should use the Hebrew form of his name and then told us she knew all about Mormons and that our religion was wrong and that no one had ever studied the Bible as much and as in depth as she had. She also had shaved her head because God told her to, and that he had told her to shave her head at least 3 times before and that something bad in the world always happened when she did and she also believes that the government is spraying us with chemicals mixed with human blood to control our minds and that the only reason we could talk to her is because God was blessing us with that ability. It was at this point we realized she wasn't all there and that we really couldn't convince her otherwise.

I hope you all are doing well and have a good week this week.