Monday, October 26, 2015

Portlandia

October 26, 15


Yes, as the tile implies, we got transfer letters and unfortunately I
will not be staying in Lake Sacajawea. And apparently nobody took my plea seriously to pray for "anywhere but Portland" cause that's where I'm headed! haha I’m actually really stoked about it. I'm going to the Alameda Portland Ward and apparently missionary work is so crazy there right now that they're putting four missionaries just in that ward! It'll be an adventure, and I've been told that all the good stories come from Portland, so if you're bored don't unsubscribe from the blog just yet!

Besides transfer letters, we had a lot of other cool things happen
this week. I think that I mentioned the M**** family last week as a
family that was slowly making their way back to church. Well they are that, and they are also now the fellow shippers for our best new
investigator. What? yeah.  I don't really know how it happened either. We were just teaching them on Tuesday night like we always do when their good friend Heidi walks into the house. The M**** introduced us to her and they were casually like "oh yeah and by the way Heidi came with us to stake conference last year where Elder Hales was speaking. Before the stake conference he met her and later that day he concluded his final speech with a testimony born directly to her." Then Heidi was like "yeah I didn't really understand why that old guy was talking directly to me, but it felt really cool." Then Heidi told us that she's already read the book of Mormon and everything and knows that it's true. Wow. Heavenly father really prepares people!

On Friday we had another cool experience with an investigator named L****. L**** is kind of really an Eternal Investigator. She has been meeting with the missionaries for like a year and we haven't gotten anywhere. Well, since I’m leaving the state, it kind of fell upon me to tell Lisa that we couldn't come by as often if she couldn't keep commitments. Oh man. But as I started talking to her, I realized that it wasn't really Lisa's fault that she's never received an answer as to whether or not the Book of Mormon is true, cause she had never even been taught to pray! So we spent like the whole lesson teaching her how to pray and receive answers. Then Lisa told us that she had had a dream last night of her grandma coming and telling her that she would "be with her every step of the way through this process." It's awesome how the Lord prepares people when we as missionaries do our part!

I've got so many stories from this week and not much time to write, so I'll skip the story of the anti-ambush haha it was pretty much just
what it sounds like. One of the funnier stories happened just last
night, when my comp and I were tracting at like 8:00 at night. We were just going down the street when we knocked on a house that had a big glass square in the middle of the door so that you could see like half of a person's face. Well after we knocked, we saw part of a girl's face, and when she saw us she was like "oh no! It’s the missionaries! How did they find me here?!?!" and then she ran away and a really big man opened the door. He said he was catholic and quickly closed the door on us. So what would you do in this situation? Go back of course! We had no idea who that girl was! So we waited like 15 minutes then went back and knocked on the same house. Again, that girl looked through the hole and ran away but I recognized her this time as a totally active young woman in the ward.  what? So this time a mom answered the door and was like "how many missionaries are there? We just had 2 knock on our door like 15 minutes ago" We were like "oh yeah there's a lot of us out here" then we asked if Z*** W***(the young woman was there) and she came out from hiding under the couch and was like "oh man you caught me" hahaha it was the weirdest thing
ever and still doesn't make sense and you probably just had to be
there, so I'm sorry for making you all read this ha.

Well that's all for this week, quick S/O to Dave Heywood and Jake
Anderson who had birthdays this past week (I wore the birthday tie) and S/O to Skyline soccer for taking the state title and S/O to my cousin Joseph who got third in state for XC! (Getting third is kind of a family tradition)

Oh and learned a fun fact about Longview this week, my comp's uncle used to be a police officer in Longview and he has the record for the most times being shot at (5 times shot at and 2 times hit) and they were all in our area!

Love you all, hope you have a great week!
~Elder Thomas


The Fijian brother ran for BYU and still holds records there. I'm holding

pics of the stamps that he was on in Fiji. 




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