When the subject line is longer than the blog text....

June 26, 2017

Great week and many miracles! 

Love y'all! 

S/O to two of my great friends, Jake Anderson and Hans Lehnardt who return home this week!

You never know who's listening

June 19, 2017

Hello from the great city of Longview!

This was my journal entry from Saturday night: "Tired. Taco Bell. Nice apartment. Book of Mormon." Need I say more?

In reality "nice apartment" is underlined in my journal because it is still making me so happy. Even though we're staying in Mint Valley they had us move apartments so we could be closer to the second area that we are covering. It used to be a sisters apartment and dk what I was expecting, but I forgot that sisters are generally really good at decorating haha and these were no exception! There are like motivational sayings all over the place and Easter decorations and an entire drawer full of candy! Haha it’s awesome. I think we had one motivational quote written in our last apartment ...and it was sharpied onto the back of an old t-shirt.

We had a really cool miracle this week; After church, following a prompting of the spirit, I Asked Sister Moses if we could set up a time on Thursday to meet with the family. My intention was just to share a thought about missionary work. But then later that day we were driving down the road and got an impression that we should park the car and talk to someone across the street. We did it and the person was not interested. But right after they said no, a family friend of the Moses' drove by and we talked to them for a bit. He said he had been wanting to talk with us. Conveniently we already had an appointment with the Moses on Thursday so he said he would come with us and we could teach him the first discussion in their home!

Something else that was pretty cool was that we have been going to all the members and asking them to pray for missionary opportunity every day, and then following up in a week to see if they have had any cool experiences. We stopped by the Cook family last week and had dinner with them yesterday. When we asked if they had had any experiences, the parents both responded in the negative, but their 7 year old daughter, who we thought had not even been listening, said that she had been praying for an opportunity and had invited her friend at school. You never know who is listening!

Also, Elder Lawrence of the 70 came to visit our mission. Here is the best definition I learned from the Conference: Spirituality = the ability to recognize truth and act on it.

I love this work, I love the savior, I love the Book of Mormon, and of course I love my dad - best dad in the world!

Elder Paul Thomas

Trust your promptings and you'll see the Lord in action!

June 5, 2017

Really great week this week. We taught a lot of people and were super
busy. Idk if I mentioned this in an earlier email, but unfortunately
Alex who got baptized a couple of weeks ago has moved to Bellevue
Washington to get a better job. We were pretty bummed about it. The
cool thing though is that the sisters that are now teaching him called
us to get some more info and when they introduced themselves I
realized that one of them is the sibling of one of my previous
companions - Elder Sander-Smith. Small world!!

Another cool thing that happened also came from a phone call from a
missionary outside our mission. This one worked at a visitor center
and I guess makes calls about referrals too. She was calling us to
tell us about a referral we had received.  As she was calling we
learned that she herself was a convert of like two years. Then the
next day I saw Brianne - a recent convert of a ward adjacent to ours. We
talked to her for a little bit and she seemed pretty down. For
whatever reason that made me think of that visitor center missionary. 
I challenged the recent convert to give the visitor center
missionary a call and ask about her experience being a convert. Like
30 min later we checked back to see how the call went and Brianne was
crying and said that call had answered a big prayer she
had. The Lord works in mysterious ways. Trust your promptings and
you'll see the Lord in action!

Much love,

Elder Thomas

Hot dogs and s'mores for dinner

Bald eagle for dinner