Ok, Hello Everyone and Happy Valentine's day,
I hope you enjoyed your time with loved ones. I spent mine with Elder Peel two days after he got dear johned!!
I am behind in my journal writing this week, so I don’t really have anything to go off of for this week, but I will try to remember the best I can.
Wow, I honestly have no idea what happened on Tuesday and Wednesday, but I know what happened on Thursday, so no worries. Thursday Elder Peel and I had exchanges with the Zone Leaders, Elders Laplante and Mendoza. I was fortunate enough to be with Elder Laplante who served in this area when he entered the mission! So our whole day was filled with visiting members, less actives, and old potentials that he had taught over a year ago! We saw great success with that and so many people were so happy to see him again. We randomly ran into about three or so people on the street that he had met before. The best part of the day was going and visiting the Family Cordier, who were potentials that Elder Laplante found, but since he left nobody has been able to get in touch with them. So we made it to their house and the wife was home, but the husband wasn’t and so we couldn’t enter, but just then Madame Cordier’s husband comes home and we had a lesson with them! They remembered Elder Laplante and still expressed a desire to learn more, so we got a phone number that was actually reliable and have since set up another appointment with them!
Then on Friday - what a day! We went and did our service at the soup kitchen and before we left the owner invited us to a party he was having that night for the volunteers that have been working there for quite some time. We were a little hesitant because he told us there would be alcohol, but we could really see how much it meant to him that we were there, so we told him we would come.
Fast Forward, later that day, after visiting with some members and visiting another person, we had a facebook video lesson with our investigator Jonathan and his friend who is serving a mission in Washington D.C. The lesson started and it was very last minute, so we didn’t really have a plan, but Jonathan starts by telling us that he has really been praying to know if baptism is right for him and if this is truly the restored gospel of Jesus Christ and he told us that he believes it is and wants to be baptized! So we gave him a date for March 17th!!! Super exciting, It is very soon, but we believe it can happen because he is doing so much on his own already. He is accepts all of the engagements without question and is reading and trying to make it to church. Unfortunately he didn’t make it to church yesterday because his train was cancelled! So happy for him. He expressed how grateful he was for this gospel and the missionaries because it has already changed his life. He is so nice, I am glad to witness his conversion.
So, after that lesson, we were both pumped, and ran to the Soup Kitchen for the party and made it a little late, but it was ok because the food hadn’t been served yet. It was actually just a bunch of old people, and wasn’t anything bad. So we sat down and started talking with the people around us, and ended up getting the phone number of a woman named Stephanie, who is recently coming back to religion and believing in something. She seemed very interested by our message and so we made an appointment with her and will meet with her later this week! The important lesson to learn from this experience, is that there are interested people in the Gospel all around us, we just have to be willing to open our mouths and share the amazing message of good news that we carry.
As far as everything else is going, I am very happy and excited to get the work moving here in Nivelles. We are meeting with our Bishop and Ward Mission Leader this week to discuss increasing the Member missionary work and less active effort in the ward. As I was preparing my thoughts to discuss for that meeting, I had no idea what to talk about, so I just started writing and idea after idea came to me how to increase efforts. It resulted in a, I think, really good plan of action to take. It is an incredible feeling to know you are being guided by the spirit. In all of our efforts to increase the member missionary work and less active effort here, we have felt the inspiration of the Holy Ghost guiding us. Every time we do not know what to do, the direction and course of action to take is given to us. I am so grateful for the Gift of The Holy Ghost to guide and direct us in our lives and to help those around us!
I wrote this all in about tenish minutes because I am pressed on time!! So I hope it all made sense and you can get something out of it!! :)
Love you all,
Elder Molinari
Photos are of the opportunity we had to do service at a members house cleaning out his Horse boxes and a random selfy I forgot I took on our new smart phone! It was really fun doing farm work, I have never felt more out of place in my entire life, but It was fun. Elder Peel loves it because he feels right at home because he is a farmer - I think that is so cool!!!!
Also here are some Carinval pictures. Everyone was dressed up and playing instruments and drinking large amounts of alcohol - it was interesting.
No comments