New way of getting people to chuch (July 26, 2010)

So I would like to start this out with telling everyone the new way of helping thier investigators come to church on Sunday. This is based of a 100% true story.

There we were driving in our car to Marisol's house. We were talking one with another of what we were going to teach her. We both came to the conclusion that if she hadn't read from the Book of Mormon or if she wouldn't commit to come to church then we weren't going to go back unless she contacted us. Every missionary has these discussions. So we get to her house. She is Hispanic and is married with 4 kids ages 3,6,11ish and 16. We get there and her cousin is there aswell who we have met a couple of times before. So we go over there and she tells us that she doesnt want to meet with us today because she has had a bad day at work and when she got home her husband didn't want to help her and things like that. So we were just talking with here trying to make her happy and I started being my normal self and broke some thing that she used to hang her plants on her porch and she started laughing saying it was okay and she wanted it down any way and then her sone the 3 year old was playing with a beach ball and kept throwing it off the porch so I would kick it back on and I accidentally hit her with it. So she was accusing me in a fun way of making her day worse when really it was making it better. Then I told her of an experience in which I was mad at Tyson one day and we were fighting and i was being really childish and he throw me into my room with a copy of the Book of Mormon and told me to read it and not come out until I was happy and as much as I didn't want it to work it did. So we told her to ready the scriptures and she would feel better. She has never read the scriptures before and she actually said she would take it to work and read it which was awesome. Then there was a bee flying around us going crazy and Marisol and her daughter Kiki the 16 year old were freaking out and making it more and more mad. All I wanted to do was kill this thing before it stung someone mainly me. So i saw land on her cousins head and with out thinking I slammed the bee with a copy of the Book of Mormon HARD!!! Well that just made all the stress go away. We left with in seconds after that with a committment that they would be at church and they were and they said they would be back next week. So the moral of the story is that in order to get people to church hit them with the word of God so they can learn it through osmosis!!!
The next really exciting thing is that we have neighbors!!!! Crazy isn' t it!!! I am just kidding that isn't the cool news. What is cool about it is that they invited us over to a dinner with some of their friends. Who when we got there we found out that they were all Catholic except for one guy who was Lutheran which is basically Catholic. Before we went over there though we talked and realized how it was going to be really tough to turn this dinner into a teaching opportunity with all of their friends there who we thought were just a bunch of work buddies. Well we ended up being there for 3 hours talking almost constantly about the truths of the gospel and how WE differ from them and our doctrines and what the Book of Mormon really is and things like that it was just really neat at how much they all knew and that they were all looking for truth and they all said we need to do this again sometime because of the things that they were learning they recongnized that we have truth just like they do. We also shared with them that the Baptist have truth and that the Islams have truth and that the athieast have truth it is just not alot. When they realize that everyone has truth then it is a lot easier to show why it is important to have all the truth. It was just really cool.
We have been blessed to have a lot of things happen this week that we are looking forward to checking out and to turn into baptisms. We were able to have 8 investigators at church this week. We have been having some success with the hispanic population here. We were able to see one family of 8 members that are hispanic come to church and they said they were going to be coming back. We are pretty excited about that. Gregg and his son Zackary also came which was really neat.
Gregg used to be a Baptist preacher from the time he was 16 to a few years ago. He is in his late 40s so he was preaching for a while and then stopped after getting fed up with how much religion has changed and how nobody does it for the Lord and just alot of the problems that good people will see when the are wanting to do what is right. We have had some really good lessons with him and he has been excited for our next lessons and the things that we are teaching him, mainly because he already believes them he has just never found anyone else that believes them aswell. They seemed to enjoy church and said that they would be back next week aswell.
We also have been seeing another Hispanic Family and they have been keeping their commitments and oppointments. Its weird though because not everyone in the house speaks spanish and it is usually just the wemon that do. We are hoping to get some spanish missionaries up here to start teaching them all.
That was basically our week. Oh!!! Elder Howard and I sang in sacrament meeting yesterday with two of the girls from the ward. I have it recorded so I will try to send off a copy of it so ya'll can hear it. We sang Let Zion in her Beauty Rise acapella. IT was lots of fun.
I love you all and hope you are staying safe and doing whats right. Love Ya'll
Elder Haws.