WEEK 7 WYOMING (WEEK 43 OF MISSION)

hey everyone! hope you all had a great week!

Parker and his companion, Elder Pena

 we had a great week here in wyoming michigan! haha that looks kinda funny. anyway, we were able to see quite a few of our investigators and teach some really great people! many of them attended church, including the entire Strong family (our investigator Gary's family). his wife is a member, so they brought their whole fam and it was great. Jontay was also there and he made some incredible comments in gospel principles class. He is understanding everything we teach and is doing really well! 

we had a great day yesterday. we ate at the stake presidents house and taught gary there as well before dinner. we also were able to see a few other investigators. things are really moving along quickly with our investigators. We expect to see a few baptisms and commitments to baptism in the next couple of weeks.

I am so stoked for general conference this week!! its gonna be incredible! speaking of incredible, we found out some groundbreaking news this week. Elder Holland will be coming to speak to our mission on may 20th!! he and Elder Hallstrom of the 70 will be giving a 3-hour conference to us and the Detroit Mission in Lansing on the 20th. it is going to be simply incredible!!

i wish i had more time (and energy) to write! there is so much happening with each of our investigators every day though, it is hard to keep track of, let alone write up in an email a week later! here is one crazy miracle that occurred this week. During lunch the other day I was calling through the contacts list in the phone. I basically just call anyone we dont recognize as being our investigator or a member of the church, because that means they have had some contact with missionaries in the past. it is really fun cuz you just never know what you are going to get haha. so i called a contact named Joel. Well, it was a wrong number. but it is always fun to try and parley those into invitations to learn. so i started to do that. the girl i was talking to was actually named makiya. as i was setting an appointment to meet with her, i learned she lived in lansing but i told her i could refer her to the missionaries there. so i did and the AP's went and taught her the other day and had an incredible lesson on the Plan of Salvation because her grandma recently passed away. she is now on baptismal date!! crazy huh??? incredible!!! what are the odds!!

the other day when we went over to the parsai's home (the nepali family who sara shati is the mother of) some really cool things happened. last time we had  a translator in on the lesson, sara shati told us to stop asking her if she was going to come to church... cuz she said she will be there EVERY WEEK. we dont have to ask every time haha how awesome!! she has no idea what is being said but she comes every week for 3 hours without fail. and she is trying to bring her friends. so when we came in the other day, over by her pictures of all her family, she had a picture of the Savior! soo cool!!! 

this week i was just thinking about how simple the gospel is. it is so simple, yet you could study it for a lifetime and never get to the bottom of the well. it is so simple a child can understand it, yet so profound that we cannot understand it on our own. it is so much fun to teach it, especially when you have a great companion because you can really help to open peoples eyes so the Spirit can touch them. 

the Book of Mormon is true. it is so plain it can teach anyone the right way, which is to believe in Christ and serve Him with all your might, mind, and strength and your whole soul. anyone who rejects the Book of Mormon without honestly attempting to account for the origin of its pages somehow, especially without accounting for their powerful witness of Jesus Christ and the profound spiritual impact that witness has had on what is now tens of millions of readers, has been deceived. (most of that was me paraphrasing Elder Holland and the BoM haha not my own words) there is no reason that the Bible should be all there is. We meet so many people who have been blinded by the subtle craftiness of men into thinking God doesn't live, that He isn't a personal Being. But I know, first and foremost because the Book of Mormon is true, that God lives and the He loves us. I know that Jesus Christ is the Savior and that He is working today to bring about His great and eternal purposes. I know that God wants each of us to be able to have eternal life. as missionaries we invite people to have eternal life. It is that simple. The road is straight and missionaries can show you how to get on the road and make it to the gift of eternal life. 

have a great week!

love you all