Fantastic Week April, 16, 2012

     Oh boy did we have a fantastic week.  To start it off we had our interviews with President Palmer, which was a spiritual boost, and it only got better from there.  First of all I had a couple real great experiences of being in the right place at the right time.  We were at a gas station and saw the truck of a member who comes to church maybe 15% of the time.  Maybe.  We were going to talk to him but couldn't find him so we went over to the church for some reason that I don't even remember.  About five minutes after parking, here comes this member zipping into the parking lot and with real excitement tells us he has someone for us to go see.  She was an old employee of his and she has been going through some real hard times recently and she had expressed interest to him in learning about the church.  We called and set up an appointment with her the following day and had a lesson with Jennifer (the investigator) and with Bro. DeShazer(the less active member).  The spirit was so strong in that lesson and by the end she was really excited to start reading The Book of Mormon.  We have called her up a couple of times to see how she is doing and have a church tour scheduled with her this evening and she is still very enthusiastic.  This experience is great for Bro. DeShazer as well.  He was able to bear his testimony to her a couple times and the whole ride back from Jennifer's home he just talked about how well he thought the lesson went and how much she needs the gospel.  Just leave it to missionary work to  rekindle the fire and spirit of the gospel in these people who have, for one reason or another forgotten it.  The other miracle we had this week was a referral from our bishop of a lady who was once a member of the church but had her name removed all the way back in 72.  He discovered her because her son IS a member of the church here and was baptized in his 20's.  We went over to try and find her home but we couldn't, so we went over to Bro Caldwell's(the son) house to find out where she lived.  No sooner do we pull up to their home does John Caldwell pull up behind us with....his mom.  We went into his home and began talking to her about herself and religious past.  Apparently she had gone through over a dozen sets of missionaries at this point and "ran them all off with questions" she said.  It got to the point that bro. Caldwell just gave up sending missionaries for a while.  After she had left the LDS church, she was baptized Jehova's Witness.  Because of her conflicting beliefs, she just said she was always confused and wasn't able to trust herself in making decisions.  We were able to read with her Moroni ch. 7 with her about how to judge (at this point may I just say it benefits to have chapter topics and verses memorized for situations exactly like these.) and know that it is a righteous judgement.  We set up a return appointment for the next day, said a prayer and left.  When we came back the next day to her home, what happened, you could call nothing other than a mighty change of heart.  When she had gotten home that evening she knelt down and prayed to the Lord and she said she had a "vision" of sorts where she thought back in her life to everything that had happened to her.  Mostly talking about her divorce she had said that she realized everything that went wrong in her life came when she stopped going to church (LDS church).  She said that was when her marriage started falling apart and when she started distancing herself from things and started questioning everything.  She was so distraught about the decisions she had made and told us that the Jehova's Witnesses just confused her more.  She said she wanted to make things right, but didn't know if she was able to be forgiven of her past sins that she had made.  We were able to teach her the Plan of Salvation and talk about the infinite atonement of Jesus Christ.  That no matter what you've done in this life, you can be forgiven.  To quote Pres. Packer's talk last conference "Only the atonement can heal what hurts,  but the atonement can heal what hurts, no matter what it is.(or something along those lines)"  After that she told us she wanted to get baptized again.  She said she would do whatever it takes to make things right again.  I love this gospel and I love being a missionary.  I am so excited to see how things go this upcoming week.  I hope you all have a great week as well.  Love you all