January 5, 2015

"Hello 2015"

Hey Y'all!

This week was pretty good for us! Santa this week gave me the okay to go get a new suit and I got a really good deal at Macy's and I'm pretty happy about the gray suit I got. After that, we went over to a part member families house to have dinner and we were able to read from the Book of Mormon. This family is just the husband and the wife and the wife is the member. She has been working with her husband for a couple years and he has been able to come to church 2 times since I've been here. He accepted the invitation to read the Book of Mormon and we started to read with him on Monday. He is really awesome and I think he could for sure be baptized by this year. The next step for him is to come to church weekly instead of every once in awhile. He is one of those guys that if he feels he is getting pushed, then he will back away. So we are just basically guiding him right now to what he needs to do. He seems open for learning more about the church, but is really comfortable with his lifestyle right now. So he has some habits to break, but Christ can help him through that! 

On New Years Eve we had dinner with a really cool family. They have a son on a mission and they kept telling us that they are ready for him to come home. It kinda made me wonder if that conversation takes place at my home every now and then. But after dinner we actually had an appointment with one of our investigators afterwards. She is a foster mom and her house can seem crazy sometimes. But we planned to come over and teach the Plan of Salvation with her, but she didn't read the chapter in the Book of Mormon we gave her. So we decided to read it with her. It ended up being a really great experience. We read Alma 7 with her and she was confused almost half the time. So we are happy that she didn't read it because she probably would've lost interest. But after reading it with her she got more interested when she started to understand more. We are stopping by again this week and we are hoping to not only teach her, but also try to accept the invitation to be baptized. We prayed and decided that inviting her to be baptized will help her be more focused on learning about Jesus Christ and following him more. We are planning on talking about the Plan of Salvation with her this time as well. 

We also were able to go on exchanges this week. I went with a kid that went to school with me. His name is Elder Higgins. He's pretty awesome! He's funny too. However, on our exchange we were both dying of sickness. I got some bug that clogged up my nose really bad and he had some nasty diarrhea. So we didn't do too much on our exchange. We did decide to go our for a little bit. We went to dinner because they had a non-member coming and cooking for us. So we battled through it and it ended up being a great dinner with them. They weren't too interested in the church, but they were very curious about what we do as missionaries. So we were able to have a good conversation about that and tied a lot of it back into the gospel. After dinner, we exchanged back early and I went to bed at 8 because needless to say I was done with the sick day. But I'm glad that we were able to get our and work for the day. Other than those things, nothing too much happened this week. We have and awesome week set up for us those. We have appointments every night of the week and we are working on getting our investigators to progress and come to church because it will really bless their life! I hope all y'all had a happy new year and thanks again for sending emails as well! Love yall!

Love,

Elder O'Brien