Marathon Letter / "He is carrying us!"

From: Joseph Weiss <joseph.weiss@myldsmail.net>
Subject: Marathon Letter / Journal Entry
Date: May 18, 2014 at 6:58:42 PM MDT

Dear Family,

This past Monday speaking with my yous was so good. Lucky for me yous have all been on missions and I think you knew that talking about home would be distracting so you just asked me questions about my mission and gave me advice. Dad rebuked me and told me there are people ready for baptism and you need the revelation to find them. Then you can have four baptisms this month. I laughed but I know he's right. So I've been seeking out what we need to do to find them.

So we went tracting and GQing (Golden Questioning) for a whole day until it was too dark. Nothing happened all day. My companion and I decided to go console ourselves with some pizza. On our way driving home we saw three Maori kids crossing the road. I recognized them as the kids of a kiwi lady I met emailing at the beginning of the transfer. Due to some confusion we thought she gave us a bad address. But they moved down the street and we got their new address. We invited them to ping pong night and told them we would stop by the next day.

The next day we did heaps of tracting again and nothing worked. But called one of our half Maori members and asked if he could come meet this family with us before we went to branch ping pong night. He agreed and we met them a half hour before at their house. We talked and the member and them hit it off right away. They trusted each other right away. We told them we had to go to ping pong night and asked them if they would come. The single mom said they didn't have a car. So our member gave three of them a ride and we called the senior missionaries and they took the rest of the kids. We had 18 people at our ping pong night! The teenage girls met our teenage Young Women and they got along great. They knew each other’s faces from school but hadn't really talked before. It was perfect!

Saturday we went back and asked them about their religious background and answered some questions they had about our church. We invited them all to come to church and they all said they would. We organized rides. Sunday morning came and the mum stayed home with her sick daughter but the other four came.

On Friday we taught another investigator Katelyne. Her family has been taught by the missionaries for 6 months or so but the first missionaries were better friends than missionaries so they didn't keep commitments.

On Monday we asked who was actually interested enough to DO things. Katelyne and her sister Danielle said they were so we said we would focus more on teaching them. It made the mum really angry because she took it as a personal, "We don't care about you unless you want to be baptized". Her husband is a less active member and calmed her down but she sent a few interesting texts. Katelyne was always stand offish about the Gospel because she didn't see herself as a "Churchy person" but my companion (through some inspiration in one of her lessons) was persistent and committed her to pray. She got an answer and now she is full steam ahead.

My companion asked her in our lesson on Friday how Reading and Praying is going. She told us that the other night her back was hurting really bad. She has chronic back pain. She prayed and the next morning she woke up with no back pain at all! She also told us that her mum earlier in the week called the family together for a family scripture time! (So glad she's taking responsibility for her spirituality instead of wanting to be spoon fed all the time!) Danielle said she wasn't going to join in because she had a bad head ache. Katelyne told her, "I bet if you read the scriptures your head ache will go away!" NIKMINUT! Her headache is gone!

Katelyne and her mum and little sister all came to church. As well her nan and old nan. We also had some less active members come and bring a non member grandson. In all we had ten non-members and 7 investigators at church! Our little chapel was packed! We did so much finding we taught only 4 lessons all week but it has been the best week of my mission! I realized that lessons taught can be an indicator of the work of the missionaries but doesn't always represent the Lords hand in the area. He is carrying us!

I am continuing to seek the revelation I need to be able to see all these investigators all the way through to baptism.
Things with my companion are good. We are really working together well. It was tough at first but now we are working like a well oiled machine in some respects. I know the Lord IS the priesthood key to missionary work in our area. I know there are people waiting for us. I love finding because I know someone, somewhere is looking. It's like "Hide and Go Seek". :)

Something that hit me in my studies this morning is that so many people look for signs or physical experiences to strengthen their belief in God. This whole physical body thing is so new why would God speak to it? Was our body in the pre-existence? NO! Why would he speak to our body that has no recollection of the spirit world. That is why he speaks to our spirits!

WOW that's a long letter.. but I haven't written my journal this week so I just made a summary for you!