On a mission, on a mission.

It's so strange how time is passing by.  I've gone through a Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine's Day, and now a St. Patrick's Day all on my mission. On the way to Easter!

I'm super excited for conference.  That should be great, as I will probably pay attention to conference a lot more than I ever have! The reason is to find better ways to teach the basics. Other conferences I was always excited for "new" stuff. Stuff to learn. But now I'm looking for stuff to teach. And who better to take it from than the prophets of the church?

It's interesting how you are all participating in a 40 day fast.  I am too. I stumbled upon a talk written by president Maynes to leave behind all things that hold you back from serving with all your heart and put it completely on hold for 40 days. I had the impression to actually try it out, so I wrote down some things that might be holding me back and started this 40 day fast yesterday. And come to find out my entire stake back home is doing the same thing. Wow there is power there.

So this week was kind of slow again. But I have a cool story or two.  We got this Mormon.org referral for a guy. The text said he had been in a halfway house and was currently on parole. We went to the address, desperately tried to contact him for days, and no answer came. One day we got the impression to find the nearest Halfway house. We got the idea that a pizza delivery place might know, so we went there and they pointed us out to the place. We went there and wow I thought I was walking into Shawshank prison or something. There were all these angry looking guys just staring us down, smoking and tattooed up, super scary. We went to security, and they (being extremely rude) were being uncooperative. But finally I just said, "We are ministers, and this guy wants to contact us, just send him a message." and they agreed to send a message to him. Yes, he was there. Guess what? The next day, we get a call and this guy had been investigating the church and wants to be baptized. Wow, and guess what else? He showed up at church yesterday. The guy is kind of rough looking but we taught him before church started and told him we would talk to president about baptism (being in his situation requires a higher authority than us).  So that was cool.

Next story:  we tracted into this lady who has brain cancer, who had read the book of Mormon cover to cover but was turned off to the church because she asked a strange question in Sunday School and apparently they threw her out. But we established a common ground of belief with her and then just for some reason talked about Jesus Christ. It was really powerful. She said "you guys have convinced me to give this a try again.   I thought I was done with Mormons, but come back on Tuesday and we can talk more." She told us she was terrified of death and we plan of teaching her the plan of Salvation. Those were some highlights to my week and I'm glad we are on a syncopated fast!

Elder Bringhurst