Week One of My Final Transfer

Wednesday Morning we got a call and President Heap asked if he could talk with me privately. I said "yes."  I found out my new companion is going to be Elder Benion.  The reason we got transfer calls early is because Elder Caldwell is the new vehicle coordinator.  He needed to be trained for a couple of days before the old vehicle coordinator got transferred out.  In the meantime I've been with the Spring Lake Elders in their area till transfers on Tuesday!  

We saw many miracles this week. The main one that comes to mind was a referral we got from church headquarters.  We gave her a call and she was super enthusiastic to talk to us.  We were able to set up a time to talk with her over the phone.  When we had that lesson she told us she wanted to join the church.  So we taught her the Gospel of Jesus Christ and invited her to be baptized!  She said absolutely she just had some concerns about the timeline of it all.  

I really wanted to share a Facebook miracle we had this week.  We have been messaging a lady that we met on Facebook for quite a while and for some reason we started exchanging recipes.  She started talking about her Italian background and how she wanted to learn more about her family.  We gave her instructions of how to download the family history app.  Hopefully we can get  her connected to her family!  

Second Facebook miracle.  We have been messaging this guy by the name of Andrew for probably two weeks now.  We were able to get an invitation to church extended and he said yes!  So keep y'alls fingers crossed that he makes it to church on Sunday!  

Okay a funny story from this week!  Yesterday we went to film a video where we reeled in a Book of Mormon with a fishing pole.  And when Elder Taylor first casted all we had was a bare hook and two weights.  While he was reeling it in he said, I caught a fish!  Elder Cardona and I were like there is no way, but sure enough there was a fish darting around in the water.  He caught a bass on the first cast with no bait and no lure!  What are the odds?

-Elder Compton

Lake Michigan

Earlier this week we had a meeting with the technology specialist for the Grand Rapids zone.  It was brought up that we needed to update the background photo for the Facebook page.  I suggested that we get a set of missionaries on the West coast to go snap a photo of the sunset and have them send it to us.  Then it was brought up that the mission bought a super nice DSLR for us to use.  Long story short Elder Caldwell and I got to drive out to lake Michigan.  We were able to take some photos for the background photo on the Facebook page.  We even got permission to stay out later and we got some amazing pictures of the sunset.  It was well worth the time!

We are still trying to find people to teach, but we were able to talk to David over the phone this week and he expressed that he would be interested in learning more.  We are hoping to meet with him over video call this week.

Another interesting story as far as people we are teaching!  We randomly had this guy by the name of Robert show up in our Area Book a couple of weeks ago.  It turns out that he wanted to be baptized.  We invited him to pray about baptism.  When we followed up on Saturday he said he felt peaceful and comforted.  We are meeting with him on Tuesday and we will hopefully be nailing down a date! 

-Elder Compton

pictures

-Lake Michigan!

I made it back to church! Yeeehaaaaaaa

We met with a part member family.  Our bishop went in full force and invited the Dad to be baptized.  It was good though because the Dad just needs to make the jump. It was crazy though because literally the wife and kids were begging and pleading with  him to say yes.  His daughters were saying Dad you need to get baptized so that you can come into the temple when we get married.  It was intense, not the usual approach I would take on part member families, but it was needed.  We committed them to pray as a family about when he should get baptized.  We will be following up with them next week and we hope all goes well!

Something that is exciting is we have started to master Facebook proselytizing, sort of.  We are at least starting to figure out how to do it somewhat effectively!  What we have started doing is we find prayer groups and we join them.  We then message people hi and if they respond we say 'do you want' to talk about prayer. We have actually gotten some pretty good results from it!  The next challenge is finding other groups that aren't religious and finding ways to make a normal and natural conversation.

Church was crazy. We texted our bishop and asked if there was room for us and he said there might be.  We ended up waiting outside of the building and one minute before he sent us a text and said come on in!  It was a throwback to West Branch; there were only about 17 people there.  After serving in larger and larger wards my entire mission it felt pretty scarce.

-Elder Compton

Week Two in Wyoming

This week we were able to meet with a part member family.  The dad isn't a member and we were able to have a super powerful lesson with them.  We both had the thought to ask him why he isn't a member because he comes to church pretty much every week.  We are hoping to meet with them again this upcoming week!

Besides meeting with members we have been doing our best to find through Facebook.  The new tactic we are trying now is to find local prayer groups in the Wyoming/Grand Rapids area.  We then join the groups and message everyone in the group "Hi how are you?."  If they respond we ask them if they would like to talk about Jesus and believe it or not we got 4 solid conversations going from that last night so miracles still happen! It has been a very interesting experience in isolation because I feel like I am being trained again, but I don't have a trainer.  It is very interesting!

Pictures

-out at on a walk!