Irradiating Love

December 30, 2013

So it's the post Christmas aftermath and things are back to the usual. They're great though. It's been a tough transfer because our number of lessons has slipped a lot, but what can you do? People’s agency can be frustrating sometimes, and biking around a ton in the cold from appointment to appointment only to find that everyone forgot can be a bit annoying.

But here's what's been up this week! Well, there's this family who I can't remember if I mentioned before, the Cs. (Pronounced like the fancy nice smelling stuff, not the bodily organ.) We met the son a while back through one of the D L C family's sons, and taught him, but then he disappeared. But we found out where he lived and visited the family. They were super stoked on our message and have been reading the Book of Mormon. The mom and one of the sons want to get baptized too! We've set them with a date for the end of January, on the 25th. They were also very gung-ho to go to church too, so we got a member of the ward out to pick them all up but when we got there, no one was home. That was frustrating, but we'll see them tonight and help them understand why church is so important, and everything will be amazing again.

In other news, I gave a talk in church yesterday! It was on missionary work, so that was pretty fun. Shared some experiences, and wore the tie the ward gave me and it was all pretty cool. I talked about why receiving revelation from the Holy Ghost as we teach is so critical. Also Elder B spoke about missionary work as well. So that was cool.

We were teaching C the other day, a recent convert who had dropped off the radar for a bit. She works for the Girl Scouts and is just a very friendly person and loves the gospel. So anyways we were talking about sharing the gospel with others and she says, “Well, I've felt the goodness and irradiating love of Jesus Christ and it's just changed me so much." I think she meant to say radiating, but irradiating is also a fairly unique way to describe the love Christ has for us too. It immediately conjured up for me the image of love mutating people like some sort of toxic waste deal. But when you think about it, if we are truly converted then we should be CHANGED by grace and should actually be different people. So that was accidentally pretty insightful, I thought. 

We also had a great testimony builder of seeing how the Book of Mormon can change lives as well. When I've looked back on it, those investigators who actually progress and get closer to baptism are those who read the Book of Mormon. If they don't, then they just stagnate. That's how it was with B. We received a referral from the McConnelsburg elders for a young girl, J, who had been going to church with her grandma up there. The grandmother had passed away so they thought it would be a good time to go over and see the family. B's the dad, and he's a pretty hardcore Baptist, so our first two lessons weren't too great, the last one was basically a Bible bashing fest. (On a side note, one of my favorite quotes from Elder Jeffery R. Holland of the Twelve Apostles is "We don't bash, we don't bash, we don't bash! But when we do, we win! That's why you study so much!") But anyways. We stopped by last night, and he was way different. Respectful, kind, pretty humble, so I asked him, "Did you read that chapter from the Book of Mormon that we left with you last time?" He told us he did, and he now knew the Book of Mormon was just as true as the Bible was. It was really incredible. I thought it was amazing to see his transformation. He felt the irradiating love!

I love you all!

Elder Wright