Famille,
Remember how I said it was cold last week? Yeah... We went sledding for young men's last wednesday. It was roughly -15 degrees, Farenheit, with a fierce wind. I took off my gloves really quick to adjust my scarf, by the time I had reached up to my scarf and found the zipper of my jacket to unzip a little (to give me room to adjust) I had lost motor control of my hands/fingers. So I gave out a quick "oh" and jammed my hands in my pockets. I was rather stuck for a moment or two-just looking at my gloves on the ground, waiting for my hands to feel again. Carter's Russian hat has come in handy and works quite well up here against the wind. It's also a great conversation starter, because it's kind of ridiculous.
We pulled another investigator out of the area book. She has had pages upon pages of visits with Elders going for about 3 years now. Goodness me. But of course, I think to myself "It's about time then, for her to get dunked." I wasn't going to meet with her, until I found part of a manuscript under my bed. It looked like someone was writing a book, so naturally I read through it and edited it, slashing words and the like. I had read somewhere in the vast records of th new investigators records that she was writing something. We met with her and it turns out she is an author to be, and is writing a book. After explaining myself and giving back the partial manuscript, she looked over the corrections and inquired of my assistance. I have the first three chapters of her book in my backpack, soon to be corrected and handed back. SERVICE. Enjoyable service. She has a lot of questions concerning the apocalypse and book of revelations, and cavemen. I decided the other day to take an hour and read all of Revelations. BRAIN EXPLOSION. It was ridiculous. Of course she has a lot of questions. E. Johnson started explaining to her the entire facet of caveman-ism and how it relates to the gospel. I cut him off and told him to run it by me later, so as to avoid blasphemy again.
Later in the apartment he explained to me how cavemen had actually evolved from apes and that they weren't actually human, they just thought and walked and acted like humans. We had a little chat.
Cavemen question won't be answered by us, looks like.
I have found that Val D'or is the Twilight Zone of missionary work. Things work in mysterious ways up here. Elder Johnson and I have been praying very hard with great wrestling in the spirit to find a new investigator, and all the doors we knock each day are angry, sometimes violent in response. No one responds well to us.
Then, lo and behold, after sitting down Sunday morning and realizing we had no investigators coming to church, we hear someone walk in behind us and sit down in the back row of our little cultural hall. Immediately the members, all 8 of them, start talking to this man.
"Oh hello, are you the journalist?" (we had told a member and his wife about the journalist we met) "Nope," this new guy said, a little weirded out.
Two other people asked him the same question, by the end he was introducing himself as "a visitor, not the journalist."
We pulled him into investigator class, and lo and behold, he's from Salt Lake City. Apparently he works for Rio Tinto, the company that owns the Enormous copper mine in SLC and he's up here for work, for a long time. He speaks english too, thank heavens.
We asked him why he came to our church and he said "I dunno, I asked the Holy Spirit where to go to church today and he said to come here--so I googled your guys' church and found the address"
BAM.
He seems extremely responsive to the Gospel and has committed to read the book of Mormon, and we all know what happens when you read that book...
So what we learn from this is that God in fact does answer prayers, and when you thrusteth in your sickle, you will harvest. Your harvest there might sneak up from the other side of the field and catch you unawares, but it still comes.
Oh yeah, our 95 year old investigator that we gave a blessing too, is in fact in the hospital. She might become a pass off to the elders on the other side of the veil here pretty soon. Ah well, she'll get the message all the same.
So E. Johnson and I are down in Ottawa now, for zone conference, that was a really long drive. This is the first time we've been with other missionaries for about a month now..actually closer to five weeks. And they had cut nightly calls as well a couple weeks back, so we didn't even talk to other missionaries on the phone except on Sundays. Needless to say, it's nice to be around friends again.
Well that's about all I have to talk about this week, except that I cannot believe that Carter got a MASTER SWORD. Goodness.
Till next week,
E. Holm
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