Sweet Hour of Prayer

Haircuts courtesy of Elder Ortmann

Things missionaries do...

Hello once more!

This week was pretty awesome! He had people at church, we have people preparing for baptism, and we found some awesome new investigators

So to start with the new investigators. Roy Knisley (nicely), we got a referral and they said he was super prepared and elect and that he wanted to come to church this week! Well we saw that he was already in our area book as a former. Missionaries met with him like 2 years ago and gave him a Book of Mormon, well he read it in a week and said he didn't believe it. Anyways fast forward two years, he was listening to the MOTAB on YouTube and there is a thing that says, "talk to mormons" so he started talking and said he wants to come to our church! Well we went over there that day, we found out that him and his pastor are butting heads a little and that's probably why he wants to check out our church. Side note his pastor is a woman and makes upwards of $90,000 a year! Anyway he committed to coming to church and praying about baptism.

So we currently have two people preparing for baptism. The first is John!! Well John is praying about a date, specifically the 22nd. We shared a quote from President Uchtdorf's talk "The Hope of God's Light" it says, "...spiritual light rarely comes to those who merely sit in darkness waiting for someone to flip a switch. It takes an act of faith to open our eyes to the Light of Christ". And so we invited him to act on his faith and commit to baptism.

The other person preparing for baptism is Danielle, she was also a referral, from the Zone Leaders and before them from her daughter. Her daughter was recently baptized in Wichita and moved back to Topeka because of a bad living situation. Anyways Danielle is a nice lady, but has a bad smoking addiction, so we committed her to living the word of wisdom. We also asked if she was still thinking about baptism, after her affirmative response we invited her to the 22nd of July. She checked her calendar to make sure she was free, then wrote it down! We are still working with her to live the word of wisdom, but she has cut down from 30 cigarettes to 10, so it's awesome progress!!

Hank, we haven't been able to see this week. Which sucks, so we don't know where he is progression-wise. Eddie, we didn't see until Sunday night. I was a little worried because he didn't seem super happy last time we saw him. But he was back to his happy, cheerful, self. He had like 6 people over at his house though, so it wasn't a good time to see him. But we said we'd come back Monday or Tuesday.

We had a really great lesson on the word of wisdom with Makila. She's a pretty heavy smoker, but she knows she needs to live it. We used he whole body is a temple analogy, showed a picture of a temple and compared how you wouldn't want to go in a temple all muddy and tracking dirt all over. Well it's the same with our bodies, when we violate the word of wisdom we are tracking mud into our temple causing it to be dirty. Makila was super committed to church this week, but when her ride came to pick her up she wasn't feeling good. Something about a dizzy spell.

Our district meeting this week we talked about consecration. And that's something that I've been thinking about a lot. We read a great talk called "becoming a consecrated missionary" by Tad R. Callister , so here's a few things I liked about that talk. When we become consecrated to the Lord we are not just changing our behavior but changing our nature. A mission is about what the Lord wants, not what I want. We must do more than tell Book of Mormon stories, we must live them. The Lord will not let us be content with our weaknesses. So there's just a few things that I took from the talk. The mission is such an awesome opportunity to learn and to grow, never again will I have so much of my time dedicated to learning and teaching the gospel. It's crazy how much he Lord help us to grow during these short two years.

Love y'all tons and have an awesome week!

- Elder Andrasko