Much Hard Work

August 15, 2016

Dear Family,

This week was filled with much hard work.

On Tuesday we had a zone conference in Moncton and at this point I didn't know a lot of the missionaries because the big summer groups are coming out so a lot of them are new...starting to feel old here, haha. But the conference was great. Our mission is focusing on familysearch.org and bringing it to the people as a way of helping people find their ancestors, and also to find people to teach. You'd be surprised how many people are interested in it, of almost any age (not just old, uh I mean, experienced people).

We found a few people to teach this past week. Matthew is a former investigator that was taught in the past but he had some experiences that caused him to stop meeting for a while. But then one day on facebook he reached out to us wanting to meet. He does seem a bit odd but super humble and kind, though his outward appearance doesn't show it, tattoos and piercings galore, but on the inside, completely different than what you think you would expect. Prime example of Don't Judge Others! He is very understanding of the gospel and was basically teaching himself, also he has never been baptized and wants to work towards being baptized in October.

A few weeks ago our Book of Mormon class was a flop, there were two people that came, one wasn't all there, and one was blind...but for our class this week we set some time aside to call people and invite them individually and we had almost twenty people at the class this week. We studied and discussed Nephi breaking his bow and his families need for food. It's amazing how much you learn from the scriptures, and when you study it with other people, things get brought up that you never would have thought about, it's so cool.

We met with Amy this week, a less active, at the library to review the Plan of Salvation, and while going over it, this guy, who overheard our conversation, came over to "discuss" some things, almost turned into bashing, which I don't like. But the coolest part was that Amy totally backed us up and threw down on him for trying to get us to think negatively about religion, someone who doesn't even believe in God or Jesus Christ, and she was so awesome. She was deflecting everything he had to throw at us with pure doctrine that she remembered from what she learned in her past. When he left our table I looked at her and said, "Amy, that was really cool what you did, defending your Faith, and also you got a little sneak peak as to what we do as missionaries everyday." She was amazed at that and felt more appreciative of us as representatives of Jesus Christ, to defend the Faith.

  #peopleareawesome
  #defendthefaith

Love You all, Have a great week!!

Love Elder Ray