Week 78: Good Start To The New Year | The Temple!!

 Aloha! 

Guess what? I got to go to the temple today! We didn't get to go inside because it's being cleaned. But I asked my mission president to let me go to the grounds and he said he was OK with it. It gave me the clarity that a typical temple trip gives and also gave me better counsel with being a missionary. I'm so glad we have temples!

In the last two weeks, I've been getting to know the people we're teaching, the members in our ward, and our area much more familiarly.

Brother Jamias recently got home from his trip so we don't get to go do gardening for his plants and get free oranges or coconuts .

 We've gotten a few missionary referrals from people who signed up online to hear from us! How it works is we reach out to them and try to set up a good time to reach out to them and answer their questions and share a message if they request it. One funny story is we tried to meet a media referred man named Miguel. We walked to his address and a guy standing outside put his hand up to us and said he wasn't interested. We asked if he was Miguel and he said that was his neighbor. We knocked on the other door and a guy came walking up from the side of the house. Then the guy through his window started lecturing us saying "He doesn't speak English! He doesn't speak English!" I knew it was a Spanish ad that he referred to so I was prepared . In Spanish, I introduced ourselves as the missionaries coming over to ask him about signing up to meet the missionaries. Meanwhile we heard silence from the other heckler . He said he didn't remember signing up but was still willing to here a message. We'll be teaching him soon.

With our friend Jolyne (candidate for baptism) we've been going over the Book of Mormon with her and she's been loving it! We read some with her and talk about what she learns from it and then we watch the Book of Mormon and look at other media related to it. She got covid recently though which is a bummer . Please pray for Jolyne that she'll do what she needs to do to prepare for baptism, feel healthy again, and gain a testimony of the Book of Mormon.

Another friend of ours, Patrick Harris, has been learning a lot from the Book of Mormon. Once we started going into it, he just got curious about everything! We see him every week now and he's learning at a high rate! We invited him to visit the temple with us and he seemed excited to! He wants to wait till he moves to go with us.

We have a friend named Mardy who calls us frequently to come by her apartment and say a prayer to cast out the bad spirits that she feels in her house. We said a prayer with her and shared a brief message. Then we gave her pictures of Jesus to give her apartment a brighter feeling and we invited her to pray frequently on her own.

We had our zone conference a week ago where we were told to become master teachers of the restoration and the plan of salvation lessons. Our leaders also had an awesome training for us about what conversion, true conversion, looks like and how we can help it happen.

This next week I will hit my 18 month mark. Oh no!  I promise to get better with writing every week. Thank you for all your love through 18 months of serving. Love you all!

Love, Elder Nielsen