Monday, October 26, 2015

Service and Stake Conference -October 26th, 2015

Hey everyone! This week has been interesting yet again!  

But first a little update on my ankle. It's A LOT better. I finished therapy this last week and it's been getting better and better every day! I can fully walk on it now, without the brace and the swelling and bruising is almost completely gone! The therapist was amazed at how quickly it healed and how well it responded to the therapy. It's been such a miracle and blessing. I know that it wouldn't have been possible without all the prayers, support and love that everyone has shown me. 

So this week, like the subject says, has been full of service. Which has been so great! We volunteer at the Gurley Public library so we got to do that at the beginning of the week, then we went to our weekly frozen yogurt run. While we were there a girl came in and said that she locked herself our of her car and her car was running... How you ask? I have no idea... but it happened. So we called around and spent some time trying to figure out how to get into her car. All the stores that we called were busy or closed and nobody was able to come help. We spent a while brainstorming and asking people and couldn't come up with a way to get into her car. Then the owner of the Chill Factory told us to go ask Bill next door. Bill is the owner of a liquor store night next to the frozen yogurt shop. So we went (didn't actually go into the store) and got bill and told him the situation. Bill is this hilarious old man that has lived in Alabama his whole life. He has hair down to his back and sits on his beat up car outside of his store all day. After we explained the situation to him he explained to us how he was a retired car thief and that we'd be in that car quicker than we could be if we had the keys! And trust me, he wasn't lying! He ran over to his car, got his tools and some wire from another store and was able to pry the door open and get it unlocked. While he was doing this he actually taught me how to do everything too...so watch out. I am now a threat to society. 

This may sound like a pointless funny story but believe it or not we were actually able to do missionary work while this whole thing was going on! The girls that had locked themselves out of their car were actually Pentecostal. So we were able to have some great discussions with them about their religion and ours and were able to actually teach them a lot about the LDS church (all while Bill was breaking into their car lol). So all around that day was just great and I learned a lot;)

The rest of the week was also filled with service that we were able to do and it was awesome! Anything from helping an old man change his car tire to cleaning and moving a 19th century hospital bed for a lady in our ward, it was all a blessing to be able to serve. 

Then this weekend we had stake conference which was the coolest thing ever. Have any of you heard of Elder Fred A. Parker of the seventy? He was presiding at the meeting and I absolutely loved him! I kid you not, he is the closest thing to a Baptist preacher that we're going to get in the Mormon church. It was the coolest. We walked into the Saturday night session early and stumbled into the leadership training that was still going on. My very first thought was that they were having a guest speaker that was a baptist preacher come talk to everyone. But nope, it was a member of the seventy, preaching the word of God to the leaders of our church. At the end of the adult session I went up and talked to him with another missionary. He asked us to try our hardest to have an investigator at the session tomorrow because he was going to talk about baptism and invite anybody that wasn't baptized to enter into the waters of baptism. We accepted the challenge and I pulled out our phone and texted the first investigator that I thought of. We've been teaching him for a long time and the only thing stopping him from being baptized is basically stubbornness. But we love him to death so we've continued to teach him. Anyways, I sent him a text asking if he was coming to stake conference tomorrow. No reply. The next day we show up and he's no where to be found. We go through the awesome conference and at the end Elder Parker talks about baptism and extends the invitation of baptism. We were pretty sad because we hadn't seen our investigator and thought he missed the awesome talk. We close the meeting and guess who comes strolling up to us as we're putting away chairs, our investigator! He explains that he arrived 15 minutes late to the meeting so he just sat in the back, further explaining that he head the whole meeting! We were so happy that he was there and we made an appointment with him on Wednesday to talk about the invitation and what he thought about the meeting. 

This conference was so amazing and I absolutely loved listening and learning from Elder Parker. I know that he is truly called of God and that all the leaders of this church are as well. 

Anyways, regardless of how slow the work is going, we were still able to have an awesome week and help a lot of people! It was a real blessing and a privilege. 

I hope you all have a great week and I'll talk to you next week!

Love,
Elder Honn 

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