Hope y'all are ponderizing!

 

Elder Mitchell was so excited to find these!

Hola,

Another week has gone by in Smyrna. Missions are full of ups and downs. You have up weeks and down weeks, and up days and down days throughout your up and down weeks. This week was kind of a down week. Just kinda slow. On Monday we had a chance to talk with O for a few minutes. We just kind of talked more about the Book of Mormon and recognizing answers from the spirit. We're going to try him again tonight, so hopefully it goes well. This week we also met with the V family. We taught them the plan of salvation, which they seemed to understand pretty well. We tried to commit them to baptism, but they didn't really understand the whole proper authority thing. That's kind of the problem with all of our investigators. Every Latino gets baptized as a baby in the Catholic church, so...it's kind of a struggle.

Those were the only lessons we had this week. Everything else fell through. Also, we are kind of in a sticky situation. My bike tire popped, so I need a new tube. We found a place to replace it, but we weren't able to bike this week. We also have had limited use with the car. We only have so many miles per month, and past missionaries went over their miles, so we've inherited their mile debt. So this week we've been walking...a lot. It's been pretty tiring. Let's just say we will be glad when the new month starts and we have fresh miles. We've been pretty limited this week as to where we can go, so we did a lot of tracting near our house, with very limited success.

Our goal for this week is to try to focus on the Book of Mormon. We want our investigators to gain a testimony of it, because then they'll know that everything else in the church is true. It all rests on the Book of Mormon. We'll see how it goes, but we really want to read from the Book of Mormon with our investigators.

The bright spot this week came yesterday. H came to church!! It was the first investigator that we've been able to get to church, which was super exciting. H has been to church before, but his health has been keeping him from coming recently. We weren't really prepared to teach a gospel doctrine class, so we just looked up the lesson for the week which was...the law of chastity. I'm thinking, "oh great, we haven't taught him this, this is just going to be great." Our ward mission leader Hermano. K actually did a really good job, and even though it took a while, H was able to understand it. Later during sacrament meeting there was a talk on pornography, so we were just hitting H with all the good topics. He had a good time though, talking to all the other members, learning more about the gospel. He is just progressing so well. He's awesome.

My ponderizing scripture last week was Isaiah 57:21 "There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked." My new scripture for this week is Isaiah 58:13-14 "If thou turn away thy foot from the sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on my holy day; and call the sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, honourable; and shalt honour him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words: Then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord; and I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy father: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it." Hope y'all are ponderizing, cuz it helps, it really does!

Hopefully this week will go a bit better. Hope y’all have an awesome week too!
With love,

Elder Mitchell



They carved pumpkins on p-day. Can you guess which is Elder Mitchell's?