Can I just say that writing weekly emails is really hard. I don't remember anything that happened when i sit down to write it and we have no time! Frustrating. But i'll try to get better I promise!
This week has been getting a little busier! Campus is starting to just fill up with people! School starts this week and I'm so excited!! When i got here, it was a struggle to find people to talk to, and now there are too many! Plus it's not even bad yet. So hopefully me and my companion don't feel totally overwhelmed by all the people this week. It'll be fun though :)
We've been doing a lot of recent convert and less active work lately. There are tons of converts in our ward and a lot of them go inactive and so we go visit them! Its fun to teach people my age though, I don't even know how i'm going to teach old people after this. :)
One of our recent converts is named Athalie and she is so funny. She ends every prayer even if its in church with, "Heavenly Father, we love you. You're the best. Amen." In the funniest diva voice, its hilarious. So we meet with you a few times a week and keep her strong spiritually.
We've also been doing a lot of finding this week by texting old potentials in the area book. A few days ago we actually text a guy and he said he would meet with us, but he had just moved to Houston Texas. We were like we have missionaries everywhere!! So he gave us his address and we got to send a referral to some missionaries in Texas. So that was exciting :)
While we're texting people though, we get some interesting responses. Everyone is ruder and weirder when they can just text you i swear. Someone told us they worship the devil, one guy said "no, this is jonathan's evil twin. i'm only interested in the three d's. destruction, doom, and devastation.", and other people just curse at us! So super uplifting i know :) Haha we actually got a few appointments for this week by texting though!
On Wednesday we got invited to a recent convert named Emily's house for dinner and she said she was going to have her non-member boyfriend named Ian come! We were like yeah!! So then she tells us that he's met with missionaries in the past and is very resistant to the church and is very argumentative. So then we were a little nervous. But we went a just shared a message about faith and how when we truly have faith, it leads to action. When we were done we asked to close with a prayer and he said, "wait can we go in the other room? i have some questions for you guys." We were like umm, yes! So then he starts telling us how he has prayed about which church to join and he never feels like god answers his prayers. So we start teaching him about receiving revelation and all that stuff and he's just not having it. Then my companion asked a totally inspired question! She said "Ian, I'm going to ask you a question and i don't want you to answer right away. Think about it first, then answer. Do you believe God loves you?" and then he just sat there for a minute and then said no. Then Sister Clonts said, "Well, shouldn't your question not be which church is true, but Heavenly Father, do you love me?"
Then he just totally opened up after that and told us how he never felt like god loved him and that he had ever been forgiven of his sins. He even started bawling hysterically. It was super awkward, but sad. Haha we were like, Ian we can help you with that!! So we told him to pray to know that god loves him and then make a list of all the things he is grateful for.
Then on Saturday we had another lesson with him. Oh my goodness, you could just see the difference in his face! We taught him about how god loves us unconditionally and how because he loves us, he sent christ here to perform the atonement. We showed him the patterns of light mormon messages by elder bednar and it was just one of the coolest lessons of my mission so far. He went from being totally against what we taught when we first met him, to telling us that he felt god's love and would pray and read the book of mormon. Plus he said that he would get baptized when he knew it was true. The only problem is he is very logical and has a lot of political issues with the church, so i guess we'll just get to that later. But yeah we're working with him and things are looking up!
Yesterday we had church and Ian came! Which was awesome. After church we had "sunday suppper" for the YSA's, so they feed the whole ward dinner once a month, so that was fun.
The work is going good! I'm out of time though, so i gotta go! I'll send pictures next week!
I love and miss you all!
Sister Fowers :)
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