Dear family and friends,
This week has been the one of the most beautiful and stressfull and crazy but great weeks ever. Weeks like this make the mission worth it. We had this investigator named "Carly. " I cant remember what I called her last week when I told you about how we met her when we started jump roping with her kids. She is the one who went with us to a relief society broadcast in the same night that we met her. Her daughter wants to be baptized. Well, we had this really great lesson with her where she just flat out asked.. so what time is my baptism? We are so excited for her! Well, it so happens that they have to assist sacrament meeting 2 times before we can get any one of our investigators baptized, so getting them to church is just as important as their baptisimal date. The night before my companion and I started our fast. Yep, we fasted for our investigators of course. Well, we stopped by her house to pick up her up to go to church and she wasnt there. We could have just died. We ran to a payphone and called her. And called.. and called. Her kids at the house said that she had left but that she had her phone so we must have called her about 10 times. We decided to go back to the house again, and she still wasnt there. We walked dejectedly to the chapel. I tried to be positive. I thought about how just the night before she wanted to be baptized and was so excited that she just asked what time it would be. We missed the sacramet unfortunately and we just started thinking about how maybe we just didnt have enough faith. I started thinking that maybe we didnt really do everything we could. But we really did. We were fasting, praying, visiting her every day, helping her read the book of mormon, helping her feel and recognize the spirit, we got her friends at church. As we sat in the gospel doctrine class that day the door creaked open. IT WAS HER! I jumped up and gave her the biggest hug. My companion and I didnt know if she could still be baptized but we decided to have faith and talk to her about it later. Well, in relief society they announced her baptism before we could say anything, and all the sisters were congratulating her. AH! Anyway, that was awesome. We decided to call our district leader after church and ask permission for her to be baptized anyway. We had to know that night because we had another appointment at her house later that night. Well, our district leader didnt answer. We then called our zone leaders. They didnt answer. We then talked to the assistant to the President. He said that according to the handbook that would be a no. Classic of the AP just so you know. But thats a good thing. I told him I was going to call President. He said that was fine just as long as president knew he was following the handbook. Well we called president. We couldnt get ahold of him. He was doing a couple of meetings north de chico. I called back elder custer and asked when he thought we could get ahold of him. He said maybe at 9. Our appointment with carly was at 7! At 6:55 we call President again. HE ANSWERED THE PHONE! =D We explained about how great she was and how she came to church without help and how when she got in the door she was apologizing that she wasnt there when we stopped by and everything. President gave us permision as long as her daughter got baptized too. Im so excited for her!
Sorry that was long.. but that is just an example of one thing that happens in one day on the mission. So much stress, but sooooo worth it!
OkaY. Im going to write about "John".
This guy is incredible. Well.. when we first met him, he wasnt our most exciting of investigators. In fact we were kind of dreading going to his house again because his sister in law is a testigo de jehova. Shes not very nice either.
Anyway we were passing by on the street to get to another appointment when we saw him walking back to his house which is weird because we have never just seen him on the street before. We asked him if we could stop by if the other appointment that we had fell through. He said sure. Well, as luck would have it, or as God would have it, because there really are no coincidences, the appointment did fall through so we ended up walking over to his house.
But this is the thing. Neither of us knew what we were going to teach him.
We finally decided that we would just say a prayer before we got in because none of the lessons really felt right. Well, we get inside and his mom is there which is good and another miracle because we need a woman in the lessons when we teach a man, and his sister in law wasnt there. =)
Then, he had a bunch of questions about the Book of Mormon. We explained it a little bit more and then there just came this point in the lesson when both me and my companion stopped talking. We didnt know why. We just did and felt like we had to wait.
Well then he starts saying, "I had a dream. And in this dream there was this tree." We both kind of perked up our ears. He continued. "And then it was dark and there were two groups of people. It felt like the second coming. There were good people and there were bad people. And then there was this cable running from the tree to off in the distance and I couldnt see the end of it." At this point we both just JUMPED FORWARD and started explaining all about Lehis dream. "Do you know there is a prophet who had a dream that sounds exactly the same as the one you are telling us in the Book of Mormon?"
I mean we couldnt have been more excited. He couldnt have been more excited either. We had already been there about an hour and had to go so we were just going to let him read it for his homework and come back later and explain it some more, but then he just starts reading it in front of us. And when he got to the part that says that Lehi saw a man in white robes he stopped and looked up and said.. "That was in my dream too!" Okay, so to make a long story short, he has a baptisimal date and when we asked him if he knew the Book of Mormon was true he said, "Yeah, its the word of God!" Now we just have to explain a little bit about prophets again because he thinks he might be one. lol. =) The moral of the story.... listen to the Spirit, and never judge a contact by his or her appearance.
Love you all very much,
Thank you so much for your prayers. They are working miracles!
Love Always,
Hermana Bendixen
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