Thunder Road

Ark City Sky. The video below is up close and personal with a thunder storm!

This week was way awesome! There has been so much progress in Ark, Elder Colemere was saying that Ark is one of the fastest growing areas in the mission!

So on Tuesday during our weekly zone conference we got a text from the APs saying that they wanted to go on exchanges with us, which would be an awesome learning experience for both of us, so of course we said yes! So a few hours after the meeting ended we met up with the APs at a Wendy's, grabbed some dinner and headed out. We had two lessons for sure that night, one with W___ and another with S____'s son S____.

I ended up going over to S____'s house to teach S_____, while Elder Colemere went to teach W____. So we started out asking about the commitments; read, pray, etc. but he didn't follow through on any of  them. Bummer. But he did have questions about what was said in Priesthood session of conference. We addressed those questions, and we  started getting into the priesthood keys, and why it is important that  you are baptized with priesthood authority. So at the end we ask the  big question, "will you follow the example of Jesus Christ and be  baptized by someone holding the priesthood authority of God?". He told  us he'd rather just stick with what he knows. Bummer. We haven't given  up on him, but we need to find simpler ways to teach him, for he is a
simple kind of man.

After our lesson we went to try a few of our other investigators,
including T_______. But none of them were home. So we met back up with  the other two and exchanged back for the night. They had been meeting  with W____ for the entire two hours of exchanges, and it went super  well. He accepted the invitation to baptism!! So we are working with  him to be baptized on the 23rd, it's still not a definite thing, but  it seems pretty likely.

Wednesday and Thursday ended up being really slow for us. All of our  appointments fell through, nobody called or texted back, nobody  answered the door. It was really long and boring. But we did have one  exciting thing happen, we blew out a tire! Yay! We pulled over into  the McDonald's parking lot to change the tire, and everyone was giving  us funny looks, I mean changing a tire in nice white shirts? But  nobody offered any help. We haven't been able to get it fixed yet,  hopefully we will later today, so we've just been driving around on  the spare.

Friday and Saturday we spent most of our time walking around
proselyting talking to everyone we saw. We did pick up a couple people that seemed to be pretty solid, we placed a few Books of Mormon and restoration pamphlets. There was quite a few people that seems like we  can go back and have a lesson with. One guy accepted an invite for  baptism, we're hopefully going back to see him again today.

Yesterday was a super sick day though. We were able to get W____ and  his mom to church, he's never been, and she hasn't been in years and  years. It was an awesomely huge step towards baptism. They weren't  able to stay for all three hours, but they were there for the most  important hour. It was an awesome testimony meeting, and since I  haven't spoken yet in the branch I decided I probably should. After Sunday school the young men's president asked me to come help teach  about the restoration, piece of cake I do that all day!

After church we got an invite from W____'s mom, A____, to come over  for dinner! I was a little sad that we had to cancel dinner with the  Branch President, cause he cooked us lamb last time, but I was super  excited to have another lesson with W____. When we got there W____ and  his dad were just getting out their motorcycles to teach W___'s  sister how to ride. It looked like pretty fun stuff. We all went  inside to wait for the meat to finish cooking. Shortly after we went  in W____'s dad came out with these great looking pork loins that were  wrapped in bacon.  It was the most tender delicious meat I have ever  tasted. And they had is special sauce that they dipped it in, steak  sauce with a load of butter, that was crazy good. After our great  dinner we were able to see their massive collection of old knives and  guns. One knife was so rare it had a crazy price tag and they had this  sweet WWII Nazi gun, it even had the swastika on it!. After we had a  great lesson with the whole family! It was like a spiritual overload.

Then last night we had a crazy, like really crazy, thunderstorm. It
was nonstop lightning all night, and the thunder was so loud it shook  the entire house, it was definitely one of the coolest storms I have  ever seen.

Life is good, mission is good.