3/9/2021
Today we had Zone Conference. The conference wasn’t too eventful, but at the end Elder Gomez and I received an unusual request. A woman who’s moving into our ward showed us a bunch of paintings that looked like they had been done by five year olds, and apparently fell into the category of “contemporary art”, and she had paid a ridiculous amount for them. She pointed out one color blotch that she didn’t like, and asked if I could fix it. I told her, “technically yes, but these are rather… simplistic”, and recommended that we make some other changes as well. She is a woman of unusual tastes. We also had a few lessons today, and all of them went really well, but we were behind schedule on all of them because we accidentally stayed too long at our youth activities. Oh well.
3/10/2021
Today we did service for Brother Vargo, one of the people we’re teaching. We enjoyed getting to help Brother Vargo, but it took slightly longer than we originally thought it would. We raked the bases of trees for about an hour and a half, it was cleanup from pruning and the dead stuff from Winter, but it ended up being a good use of our time. Supposedly Brother Vargo sent a picture from the service to my mom, Elder Gomez’s mom, and us, but we haven’t gotten a picture yet so I’m not sure it went through. We also ended up preemptively saying goodbye to a couple of families today. I had them mark their favorite verses in my Portuguese copy of The Book of Mormon, and everyone loudly complained that I anticipated the possibility of leaving. I wasn’t enthusiastic about that chance either.
3/11/2021
Tonight we did a lesson where we taught Jacob 5. This was the end of the multi-part lesson that we did where we went in depth with every verse and helped everyone present to get a feel for what was going on in what can be a pretty confusing chapter. The read through went really well, and we had some grateful testimonies from those who were thankful for everything we were doing both to strengthen their testimonies and their ability to be Spiritually self-reliant and understand these scriptures.
3/12/2021
Today we had a few service projects. We got to help Sister Thompson as well as the Christensen family. Brother Christensen invited us over to his house for grilled cheese sandwiches in addition to our service project. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t the caliber of a sandwich that he presented to us. I feel like an entire new realm of sandwiches has been opened to me. We also had a District meeting today, and met a new member of our Ward. The family we met wasn’t new to the ward, but we assumed that they were part of another Ward because we had never seen them before. I referenced a service project that we did next to their house when I first got here, and their eyes ogled, they were amazed that I had been here for more than seven months and we had never crossed paths with them.
3/13/2021
Today we had a Bible bash. Elder Gomez recorded the whole thing. The meeting consisted of us, the Redlands Elders who we invited, and a man named Curtis. Curtis has had a lot of experience with missionaries, and unfortunately he wasn’t interested in much more than seeking to tear down our belief in God. I reached out to him over Facebook and he immediately sent the following:
“Did Joseph Smith actually see God in his first vision and live?
Exodus 33:20 And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.”
I told him that we didn’t have a lot of time to write out lengthy responses but that we could set up a time to talk and chat face to face, mostly because that puts an end to any of these pre-written questions designed to tear down faith. After pressuring me for a response I eventually replied to him:
“Alright, to answer your question I would recommend looking at the following:
John 20:11-18
Luke 24:36-43
John 20:24-29
Luke 24:13-34
1 Corinthians 15:6
Acts 9:3-9
All of these are accounts of the resurrected Christ appearing to people face to face, the same way that He did with Joseph Smith.
Also Exodus 33:11 which talks about the Lord speaking face to face with man.”
That was a good summary of how our whole visit went. He asked his questions, and Elder Douglass and I who are quite well versed in the bible tried to steer him in the right direction. Unfortunately he didn’t like our responses very much, although we felt the Spirit work through us a lot when we bore testimony of what we knew to be true. We gave him answers to his questions, but he rejected everything that we said under the blanket statement that the LDS church is false, and so we and everything we said as an extension was also false. That was the second major Bible bash I’ve ever had, but that one went significantly better than the first. After my first one I was mortified, I could feel that we had driven out the Spirit and that it had no place in us. That was a hellish feeling, but this time we bore testimony and it wasn’t so scary, we did what we were called to do, and still had the Spirit with us after our encounter. The full file is kind of long, so I’ll write up what some of the main questions and responses to make it easier to dissect if anyone is interested in listening to it. The discussion has already been shortened down a lot since originally it lasted about an hour.
The discussion can be found at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15iUl2gewd7BLN4jH6KwB8SXwKPjc1cca/view?usp=drivesdk
Question 1: How do we receive the gift of the Holy Ghost? (The scriptures he used were Acts 10:45-48)
Missionary Answer 1: The gift of the Holy Ghost is received through the laying on of hands and in no other way.
Elder Douglass stands up for Elder Anderson: 7:36
Testimony of Missionary Answer 1: 8:41
At this point he switched topics and started talking about the definition of Gospel for a bit, it wasn’t until 18:01 that we started to point our discussion in a better path.
Question 2 (Book of Mormon): Who is the church of the Lamb of God, and who is the church of abominations? 26:46
Missionary Answer 2: The church of God references all churches who teach of Him, the church of abominations references all who fight against Jesus Christ. 26:52
3/14/2021
Today was daylight savings, and that was the most noteworthy thing that happened all day, not because nothing good happened today, but because it felt like I got hit by a ton of bricks when I woke up this morning. I forgot very quickly just how much easier the sun makes it to wake up. We had a lot of lessons today, and all of the discussions went very well. We went pretty in depth in our discussions today, and everyone did a great job with it! We could see that even though a lot of what we were saying was really difficult to understand, that people were making a strong conscious effort to understand it, and that meant that the Spirit was able to impress on these people what they really needed to learn.
Today for a spiritual thought I wanted to share a scripture that I used during our Bible bash, in Matthew 23:23 Christ gives the warning: Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. Over the course of my mission I've learned a lot from the Scriptures. I had gotten to the point that I had confidence I could intellectually prove the validity of The Church Of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to anyone. I haven't ever heard a testimony though that someone came to love the Gospel because it was intellectually learned. Judgement, mercy, and faith are all meant to be felt, not just understood, because the Gospel isn't learned in our heads, but in our hearts. No small point of doctrinal knowledge bears more significance than the lessons that can only be learned with our hearts. My invitation to you today is to seek to learn the Gospel in your heart, for who can comprehend the depth of love involved in Christ's sacrifice? The love we're given was never meant to remain solely in our head, the depth of it can only be felt in our hearts.
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