May 19, 2014

Dear Family,
This has been a great week. We found three new people to teach, one is from a part member family. His name is Leander and we are teaching him again tonight and inviting him to be baptized! The other two are Dave and Christina, a couple who has a pretty rough past. We finally got in to teach them last week and they came to church yesterday! They are awesome people and want to get married and everything. We are pumped to work with them! Also at church was a recent convert family that we have been working with, and we found out they were taught by Elder
Brandon Royse!
We also taught a recent convert's husband named Mike last week who has talked to missionaries for a long time. He told us he didn't get anything out of missionary visits, and wanted to move on to some greater knowledge past what we teach. He said it was because he doesn't feel there is enough evidence to back up what we teach, especially from the Bible. We asked if he had ever read the Book of Mormon, and he said he'd never opened it. We promised him he would
never know what we taught was true, or not true, unless he read the
Book of Mormon, which is the true evidence of everything! He ended up
coming to church without his wife...so she didn't drag him there!
Hopefully he found some higher knowledge! :D It was a cool experience
for me, because I realized how small of a role we play as
missionaries, and how little we really can do for people. That's not
to degrade our role at all, but there comes a point where we all have
to act, and being acted upon is no longer enough. When we act, The
Lord blesses us with a knowledge that what we are doing is either
right or wrong. The gift of agency is amazing!

Well, we have been enjoying the Family History we've been working on.
A Chinese man sat by me in the library as I was working on mine, and
he told us he loved Mormon people. So we looked up his family on
www.familysearch.org with him and he thought that was cool! But then
he told us that 120 generations back he comes from a royal Emperor
Family, so he was satisfied with that. Haha oh yea then I found out we
weren't supposed to contact/proselyte in public places like
libraries...oops.

Well that's about it for this weeks update. I pray for you all each
day and feel your prayers for me! This mission is changing me slowly,
and that's really what the gospel should do to all of us! I know that
as we come unto Christ through covenants and continued obedience, we
can receive the healing and freeing blessings he promises us. It's
like a gift he's already given us, but because our agency is so
important to him, it's our choice to receive it or not.

Here is my favorite scripture of the week:
"And now, my beloved brethren, I would that ye should come unto
Christ, who is the Holy One of Israel, and partake of his salvation,
and the power of his redemption. Yea, come unto him, and offer your
whole souls as an offering unto him, and continue in fasting and
praying, and endure to the end; and as the Lord liveth ye will be
saved" (Omni:26).

Elder Collin Christensen