The Voice

Elder Rasmussen & I Jan 13th

Big surprise today.  I brought along the voice recorder which I purchased as my new journal and am now going to email you my journal entires so I no longer have to spend forever typing out a huge letter.  This is probably one of the best investments yet, I haven't missed a day for 17 days straight!  I could never do that with the old journal.  

I'm a year old in the mission!  Thanks for the package I love it!  Thanks a ton!  I've already read John Bytheway's book and am working on the other one.  They're sweet, thanks!

We had a great lesson this week!  We taught J.  She had read a lot of the gospel pamphlets we had left with her. We taught her the restoration and had a really powerful lesson. She had good questions and she said she understood everything, even though we threw a lot at her. We set her for baptism on the 23rd of next month.

We went on a 48 hour exchange with the elders in Norton, Kansas this week. We spent about three hours in the car just making the long trip and then going to Phillipsburg. We filled our tank right before we headed out to Phillipsburg and now again today just two days later we’re at a quarter tank left. That tells you how much time we’ve been spending in the car and how sick and tired we are of it. Road trips are nice but when you’re on a mission and you have no good music, it’s very long and very, very tiring. So we’re grateful to be back in Lexington able to work in our own area.

Church was really good.  We had ward conference and so a lot of member of the stake presidency came down and I had the cool opportunity to meet the stake patriarch – he is actually the father of Brannick Adams back in Roseburg.  He and his wife were all excited that I was from Roseburg and that I knew their son.  They took a picture of Elder Rasmussen and I, texted it to Brannick so that was really cool! 

We reset an appointment to teach H’s son in law.  They cancelled on us because of the flu earlier this week so this will be round two.  We got decently suited up in our cold weather gear and we went walking trying to go see D and see how the YSA went, to see W, and to see Sister P because she wasn’t at church, but none of them were home and it was freezing cold! We didn’t have our hats, scarves, or anything so we were freezing when we got back to the apartment and tried to defrost. .

We still had a good hour so we decided to gear up more this time, and go see a couple investigators across the bridge. So we headed that way, neither of them were home. As we were walking we passed a Christian church near the hospital and a guy yelled “hey, are you guys cold?”, we turned around and yelled back “yeah we are!” He asked if we wanted some coffee. We yelled back to ask if we could have some water, he said yeah and invited us into his church. He’s the associate pastor there and he’s really cool because he knew who we were, but he didn’t act any different. He had some people there watching a movie, and some youth just chilling in the church. He just invited us as members of another faith over and it was completely relaxed and extremely charitable. He was accepting of us and it was the most accepting of any person of any other religion I’ve I felt during my mission. It actually made me think of something that I have read in a book that I got from my family, it’s the Missionaries Little Book of Answers. It mentions a quote from Pres. Jimmy Carter “I think that among the worst things we could do as believers in Christ, is to condemn others who confess faith in Christ and try to have a narrow definition of who is and who is not an acceptable believer and a child of God.”  For me he exemplified that, because the majority of the people out there really condemn us and fight against our cause, but he didn’t and he accepted that we were fellow Christians and he just did what Christ taught. It was really refreshing and great to feel such brotherly kindness from a complete stranger. We thawed out in the church, had some water, and headed back out.

That’s about it.

E’Harker