Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Stepping up the work in Nebraska

Dear Family and friends,
 This has been a good week.
        Nebraska is really getting into the fall weather. The cornfields are coming down and the soy fields are being harvested and all is wrapping up, unless you are a missionary and you work seven days a week and you work from 8:00-21:00 or on a lucky preparation day only from 8 to 10 and from 17 to 21, so the work never stops.
        This week I am not going to attempt to give you a day by day play of what happened, as that would be boring like my usual letters.
         This week marks the mission wide Step it up campaign in Nebraska. We had a zone training about stepping it up, having more effective studies, and inviting to be baptized more often. The trainings were fantastic. President Gardner showed up to interview us and see how we are doing. It was a very motivational meeting and setting. I was super excited to take it back to Crete and see miracles and as we got to work. Well the miracles didn't rain down from heaven, the people didn't jump and say Yes we want to listen to you. They grabbed their Bibles like the Pharisees of Old and clamored Blasphemy and tossed scripture at us with senseless fury.
            Now that is a dark and dreary and drab view of how the week went, but it wasn't all like  that. I will share a few of the highlights with you. Tuesday we had fantastic lesson with Miguel and Luis about scripture study and prayer, and that was really good. We got their aunt and our ward mission leader in on the lesson and it rocked. Wednesday our highlight lesson was with Crystal and Guierrmo and that was a good-ish lesson. Crystal's sister was there and she is an Atheist. She asked us how we can justify a belief in God when you can't hear him, see him, touch him, or smell him. Well we got talking and I pulled out 2 Nephi 2 and Alma 30, and basically said if the only things that are really are what we see, hear, touch, or smell then you neither believe in science or logic but there are things unseen which are true. Oxygen, atoms, magma, tectonic plates, sharks, gases etc.... Yet here I have a book called The Book of Mormon, which you can not tell me a farm boy wrote it because no farm boy is that smart and the archeologically evidence is there. So before we finished the conversation she just got up and left the room and Elder Infante said you had her that is why she left, she saw and she was scared.
            Next Thursday we went and saw Mary and had a good lesson on The Plan of Salvation, she just needs to listen to The Book of Mormon. Then we saw Celeste, she is the daughter of an investigator, we stopped by to see her parents but they were both gone and since we had a team up we had the opportunity to teach her about The Book of Mormon, which was awesome. She accepted it right off the bat, basically and that was sweet! She said she would read it even if she had to carry it around school, like she had been doing and at the end of the lesson. She asked "Can I keep this copy you just gave me? One of my teachers asked if he could have the copy I had at school, so I actually don't have one." BOOM! Miracle! I want his address.
             Friday, a lack of faith day, we taught our investigator Leonard. Yep his name is not lenard but Leonard. We had a lesson addressing his concerns and basically he is a stick in the mud, but he is willing to read The Book of Mormon. He tried accusing us of adding to the Bible and that the Bible was all there was and we had to talk about that, and that got us nowhere.
              Saturday we had a sweet lesson with Rashell. We hadn't seen her for a while, but we were able to find her and that was good. So we are going to get her to read because she is sincere about learning and visiting with us. She started noticing our absence and watched for us around town, so that is good.
                 Sunday we met with a very nice Hispanic man named Miguel. He jumped straight at our necks with Revelations 22:18-19. He couldn't remember where the verses were so I showed him ;) and basically it was him telling us to preach the bible only, so that was that.
       Have a fantastic week. I love you all.
Love, Elder Draper
#Ponderizer
Isaiah 53:3-5
D&C 121:41-46
Moroni 7:45

No comments:

Post a Comment