Watch Me Burn

Highlight of the week: carne asada at an investigator's house. Testimony bearing,
good food and good times and just everything I love about a mission all wrapped
up in a burrito.

Mis hermanos: The Spanish speaking missionaries

August 10, 2015

I can't believe it's been a week already....time is absolutely flying!

So this week was full of a lot of little tender mercies from the Lord. The couple we are teaching invited us over for dinner and we had an awesome experience there talking with them and the man's sister (who is actually a member of the church.)

Zone Conference was awesome and it was super fun getting to host it. President talked to us about faith and Sister Ahlander talked about hope. She used a clip from this DVD Jeffrey R. Holland has out called, "For Times of Trouble". If you haven't seen that DVD yet, I HIGHLY recommend buying it and watching it. I have used what I learned from that man's words in that DVD to help so many missionaries out here in the field who have been struggling. And, then the Assistants gave us a training all with the purpose to get us as enthusiastic about the work as possible. My favorite part of the training was a quote from a former pastor who was famous for his energetic sermons. When asked how he got so many people to listen to his speeches he responded, "With the word of God I light myself on fire and people come to watch me burn."

THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT!!!!!

Their training got me super pumped and so that is my plan for the next couple weeks, no...the rest of my mission! Vegas better be ready because this desert is about to get even more blazing!

We also had a really cool experience seeing one of our prayers get answered. Elder Walker wanted to test our faith one day so we told Heavenly Father in our prayers that we were going to go out and find and talk to as many people as we could today, and we tasked him to prepare a family for us. A family that we could begin to teach. We were feeling good all day and did a lot of tracting and chatting (as much as we could with MLC being in the morning) but we worked as hard as we could with the time we had. The very first door we knocked had a Peruvian family inside! I was certain from the faith bursting inside me that this was going to be the only door we would need to knock. I talked to them about my cousin who is in Peru right now serving as a missionary and explained what we do and talked about how families can be blessed eternally from the message we have to share.....and they weren't having it......fetch.

However! We left unphased determined we would still find them. We worked the rest of the day and got some potentials who said we could come back later. I was content. We had worked hard. I knew there wasn't anything extra we really could have done and accepted that one of those potentials was the answer to our prayer. 

As we were about to make the trek home we thought maybe we could stop by one lady we had talked to like 2 weeks earlier and try and set something up for later in the week. She answered the door! And then she let us in! And we sat down, and then next thing you know her husband came and joined, and then her son! And as they were all sitting there, it hit me: This was the family!! Heavenly Father had answered our prayer, just not in the way we thought. It was such a cool moment when it hit me there. We taught them the 1st lesson and they liked it and we have another appointment with them. God is good!

I may be on the downhill slope now of my mission, but get ready to watch me leave a blazing trail these next months! 

WATCH ME BURN!

-Elder Alley