The Critical Difference



July 3





We had a crazy week. We did not get contact with the people that we planned to get in contact with. Our syrian family has been in Rotterdam the past couple weeks, so we have been unable to meet. We did find a 3 new investigators though, so that was really cool. 

We had zone conference this week. It was good. I got to see a couple friends on the mission I have not seen in a while. We have a lot of good missionaries here. We had a dinner appointment with the lady that had the birthday party afterwards, and got to have more lekker food from Suriname.






It rained a lot this week. I think we might get a couple days of sun soon though. There is a recent convert lady that we have been working with who has been making a ton of progress. She is awesome, but kind of the quiet kind of awesome. She got her patriarchal blessing last week, does family history and baptisms for the dead when she gets the chance, and she is only a convert of 6 months. It makes me really happy to see her push forward even thoguh she is the only member in her family. I am kind of scared that she doesnt have many friends in the church but that has not seemed to stop her. She is so cool. It stinks that we dont get to see our converts progress after their baptism very long. We can keep contact, but it is not the same as seeing them become spiritually self sufficient and move forward with their lives. Sometimes we dont keep contact too and then we never know that kind of difference we have made in peoples lives. I suppose we will see if we did a good job or not at the judgement bar. 


We have a really funny African guy in our ward from Ghana who is doing a project collecting clothes to send to the members their who don't have church clothes. He is super duper short and his name is Brother Anti. He gave a talk a couple weeks ago, and it was the funniest I have ever seen. He talks about himself in 3rd person. So he walked up and said "Today Bruder Anti want to talk about...de banana!" He was holding banana the whole talk which was about bananas. I will have to impersonate it for you someday. 



On Friday Elder Becktel went to Brussels to do some legality work so I worked there for the day. It was very different because Rotterdam is very modern. It looks like a real city. We street contacted a lot of the day. We went to a big plaza and split up to talk to more people at once. I saw a lady sitting on a couple steps in the middle of the plaza, so I asked her a couple questions and got a good conversation started. She is from Cape Verde, studying in Scotland and visiting her sister for the summer in Rotterdam. We started talking about the Mormon beliefs, because she had talked to the missionaries a couple times on the door in Cape Verde, and had actually been to a sacrament meeting in Portugal visiting her brother and his mormon girlfriend. Eventually she asked what made us so different that other churches if we believed in Jesus Christ. So she learned all about the restoration and the Book of Mormon. I also told her how I came to know the truth and how through reading the Book of Mormon, I found the peace that is not of this world that Christ promises us. She admitted that she had been feeling distant from God and everybody around her was trying to convince her ethat God does not exist, but she could not deny that she had felt him in her life before. We read from the Book of Mormon together right there in the plaza, and then the promise was extended that if she reads from the book she would also get that peace. After I said that she was totally silent for about 3 minutes. It was nerve wrecking but she needed the silence to comprehend everything and let the Spirit work with her.

When she eventually looked up, she said that she was going to read the Book of Mormon and pray to God to know if it is true. you could see itin her that she was really going to do that too, it was no half hearted acceptance of the commitement, she was truly determined. But the silence was absolutely critical for her to make that decision. She got the address for the church and is planning to attend church while here in the Netherlands as well. Another cool thing was that I had taken my bible out of my bag that morning to fit an english Book of Mormon, even though I have always carried my bible around with me for the past year straight. 

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