December 5, 2016

Pretty sweet week! We did a couple of exchanges this week and those are always a lot of fun! One was with the Elders in downtown Clarksburg. We did a lot of tracting and decided to go to this apartment complex where a bunch of people lived. There we ran into a less-active member who we thought moved away! It turns out she is staying in Clarksburg! We were pretty happy about that because teaching her is absolutely hilarious! She is probably one of my favorite people to visit in this area. She was only baptized about a year ago so everything is still a little bit new to her, but she is doing pretty good! Hopefully we can get her coming back to church soon! The other exchange we had this week was with an Elder named Elder Richard. He has been out for almost 6 months and he was trained by Elder Larson! I dont know if you all remember Elder Larson, but I trained Elder Larson when I was serving in Hillsville! So because I trained Elder Larson, he is my son and because Elder Larson trained Elder Richard, he is my grandson! Ha! We had a lot of fun, and we found a pretty sweet potential investigators while tracting! Then that night we had a super sweet lesson with another less-active member in our area. He was having a hard time accepting the Book of Mormon as scripture and Joseph Smith as a prophet, but we just kept telling him to read and pray about it! Missionaries have been visiting him since before I've been here and he just started to listen to the Book of Mormon a few weeks ago! So when we went to visit him a couple days ago, he told us about what happened to him as he was listen to the Book of Mormon this week. He told us that everything just kind of clicked and he just recognized that the people in the book are real and it was truly God's word! It was amazing!! Experiences like that dont happen very often so it was really special to be able to witness it especially from someone who we are teaching! I love those kinds of experiences because they just reaffirm my testimony over and over again! The church is true! Haha

So some other things that happened this week was we had our zone meeting! It was Elder Clark's first time conducting a zone meeting and he was a little nervous, but it went pretty well! One thing that we talked about was being a consecrated missionary and the blessings that come from being consecrated. It was great! Then yesterday night before the First Presidency Christmas Devotional, our stake put on a huge Christmas fireside! A bunch of people performed and it was just really great! Elder Clark served in this stake before he came with me so he got to say hi to a bunch of people he knew. He was pretty excited about that. Ha!

Well thats mostly it for this week! Our top investigator didn't come to church this week so we need to push back his baptismal date... :( but hopefully he and his family will shape up and he can get baptized soon! I am doing well and loving my mission! Love you all, and have a great week! :)