" The work here in Charleston is going great,
we've been teaching a lot lately and the church came out with the He
is the Gift initiative for us to use in our proselyting efforts. Its
been going really great, the video is amazing and its a great way to
invite the Spirit into peoples homes. What's even better is that it
gives you an opportunity to point out that they are feeling the Spirit
and have that be a template for how they may feel when they continue
to learn about the truths of the restored gospel. It has been a great
thing to be able to testify that Jesus Christ's life and ministry
didn't start in Bethlehem or end on Calvary and because of that the
miracles that were made available to the people then are available to
us now. Earlier this week we met a lady that hadn't been to the church
in a really long time. She said that she had done "research" online
about the early days of the church and after finding a lot of junk,
most of which probably wasn't true, she stopped going to church and
let her doubts take root. In talking with her it was tempting to just
go point by point and explain what misinformation she had gotten and
clarify what she had read but we quickly realized that she didn't want
to change how she felt about things. So we started talking to her
about her experience with the Book of Mormon, which she believed to be
true. It had been a long time since she had read from it with any
consistency and we invited her to read it daily and promised that as
she did so all of her questions would either be answered or no longer
matter. It was really neat how the Holy Ghost directed things. This
week we also had one of our part member families come to church and
they really seemed to like it. The wife, Virginia, is the member and
she hadn't been to a sacrament meeting since the standard church block
had been instituted and her husband Bill has been really absorbing the
lessons. It was about a twenty minute drive for them to come to the
church so it was big commitment for them to come and it showed a lot
of real intent. One of our investigators, John, has been doing really
well too. He's reading and praying and started coming to church
regularly. He's 23 and hasn't had really any religious background so
everything that we teach is a new concept and he just soaks it up. The
big stumbling block is that he currently lives with his girlfriend
Madison so this week we taught about marriage and the importance of
the law of chastity. Awkwardly enough in all of our other lessons
Madison has sat in the other room and just listened but this was the
first lesson that she sat in on. It went about as well as it could of
gone and the member that taught with us did a great job explaining
that missionaries ask people to do hard things because the Lord asks
us to do hard things. We're meeting with them again this Thursday and
we left them with the commitment to pray about it and make a game plan
for if they wanted to get married or get separate places and live the
law of chastity so we'll see how it goes. Another cool miracle we saw
was with a part member family. We've been doing our best to meet all
of our members and find through them so we called a lady named Sister
Elahi and she lives way up on the other side of our area, about thirty
miles away. She wants to get back to the temple and has talked to her
husband about having the missionaries over to bring her the sacrament,
Sister Elahi is disabled. Her husband was receptive and we've got an
appointment with them this Friday. This week we also got to work with
the Secret Santa organization here in Charleston. 1700 kids were given
presents this year by sponsors from the county. One guy spent over
$5000 getting gifts for kids whose families couldn't afford things for
Christmas. It was incredible to see all of the kindness and how happy
people were to be a part of the Christmas season. I hope you guys have
an awesome week, I love you so much and miss you all a ton. Thank you
so much for everything you do for me."
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