Great week here in Longview!
I can quite honestly say that almost half of my week was fueled by Mexican food and ice cream! You think im kidding. Not kidding. Friday for lunch we had ice cream. Dinner that day we had Maria's Mexican. ...then fried ice cream for dessert. Then we had a service project the next morning ...fueled by Taco Bell. Then a member made lunch for us ...tacos. Washed down by some ice cream. And so on, and so on. Hey its all good though, im really just making myself more soft and easy to hug at the airport!
Family History
So this week Longview has the biggest festival of the year and fourth biggest festival in the state! It is pretty much like a big fair at the lake with ton of people setting up booths and rides and food truck and stuff. Since this is the only exciting thing that happens in the city all year, pretty much the entire city turns out for the event!
All the missionaries got together this year and we decided to do a family history booth. Since about 30,000 people come to the park these three days, you can imagine we have been pretty busy! Probably the most interesting thing about the booth is the diversity of people that have stopped by trying to figure out some of their ancestry. I expected to mostly be talking to older people this week but over half of the people have been ysa age or young families that want to know their heritage. The spirit of Elijah works on the most unlikely people!
Another cool experience we had with the booth is that we have been looking for an investigator, Jadyn, for weeks. She stopped answering her phone and quit working at the place where we used to meet her. It was kinda sad but we continued to pray for the next two weeks to run into her somewhere. Lo and behold Sunday afternoon she walks right past our booth and we were able to talk with her and get in contact again. It turns out that her phone has stopped working, but that she had taken the pamphlet we had given her, read the whole thing, looked up all the scriptures in the back, and answered all the questions!
Holy cow! Out of a crowd of 30,000 people, when we were just working 3 hours out of the day, the Lord blessed us to run into someone we couldn't meet any other way!
Baptize your replacement
Recently I've been thinking about a thought from Elder Kopishke when he did a mission tour almost a year ago. He invited each of us to pray for the opportunity to baptize our replacement - meaning, baptize someone who will go on a mission. Like i said, I've been thinking about that a lot so on Sunday i fasted to find someone who could go on a mission.
During church a ysa I never met before got up and bore his testimony. We went over to talk with him after the meeting and he said he was working for Dish and that this is his first week in the area. Dish apparently hires a lot of people to go door to door and then rents a house for all of them to live in. He said he would check with the people he was living with to see if they were interested at all. He texted us later that day that they were interested and that we should come over. It was like a Book of Mormon experience preaching to this huge crowd of people. There were a lot of people at the house so i figured a lot would leave or start making dinner or something, but almost everyone stayed on the couches and listened to the first lesson and then asked for Book of Mormons after!
God answers prayers and he cares about the desires of your heart. Love you all,
Elder Thomas
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