This week has been a great and wonderful experience! I would like to thank all the prayers on my behalf and all other missionaries in the field looking back on each day you can see how much of an impact those prayers really do make each and every day! I hope that you all have had the same experience this week to learn and grow as much as I have felt! I found out that I will be here in this area with Elder Candland for the next transfer (which is 6 weeks) so I will be spending thanksgiving and Halloween in this area! That should be pretty awesome!
Its definitely getting colder haha, but no worries! When you're out on the Lord's errand you aren't thinking about how cold you are! Instead your thinking about your investigators in your area! Last Monday night through Tuesday I went on exchanges with some other Elders so Elder Mata from Texas came and worked in my area for the day! It was way fun! We were able to meet some really cool potential investigators that one day we will hopefully be able to start teaching them the message that we share! Its all a matter of timing when they are ready to accept commitments and progress!
Unfortunately our investigator Oredi didn't want to continue meeting with us so we have had to pull back and let him be especially when he was so close to being baptized! It was pretty obvious that the standards of living as a member of the church as a youth was just too much of a life change for him at the moment in High School. But we still work with his family so when the timing is right he will join the church with the rest of his family! After all he knows the Book of Mormon is true! But the law of compensation is real! When one door closes the Lord opens another window!
We meet with Cheryl and Phil who we contacted on the street one Sunday and they were willing to hear our message for ourselves and we had an amazing lesson with them! Its a testimony builder to me that we aren't trying to convert people as missionaries! Instead we invite them to hear our message and accept the commitments or challenges we leave with them and if they are truly looking to see if more blessings come into their life and ask God if its true THEN they will get that answer! When we contacted them on the street they weren't to interested until we just told them that its all on them if they don't want to hear it out they will never know for themselves and they changed their minds! I'm pretty pumped for our lesson with them tomorrow night! They accepted to be baptized when they get an answer that the church is true so we will follow up on that and see where they stand on the commitments we left them!
We also set a baptismal date for November 5th for one of our investigators! Her name is Shirley I talked about her before and she is someone that has the deepest desire to rejoin the church! She has one of the most incredible life stories you will ever her and its been cool to see the light about her change as she has been reading and praying more often! She Glows!! This weekend was probably one of the more interesting weekends I will have on my mission.. As it went from really hot, to really cold, to really windy, to really windy and rainy! So we had the pleasure to bike through it all and it was funny because after getting home for the night i realized that it rained dirt on us! It wasn't rain at all everything in our area is just super dirty from the rain! It was just super bizarre!
I would like to share an experience with another older lady named Beth. There are quite a few individuals that have taken their names from the records of the church voluntarily in my area, but the majority I have met have regretted it immediately. We were talking with Beth for the first time and apparently it's been awhile, since the missionaries have visited her. In fact it was the first time that missionaries have visited her while she has been living here in Boise. We were talking about the age of accountability and how could a child at the age of 8 really know what they were getting themselves into? It was in this moment that I felt the Spirit strongly overcome me as I bore testimony that though I may not have known what I was exactly doing at age 8 getting baptized, I knew one thing. That is as soon as those Priesthood holders laid their hands upon my hand to give me the Gift of the Holy Ghost, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that God was real. That this church had something special about it. And that was specifically that this was Jesus Christ's church on the Earth today. And because I was raised in the Church I could recognize what the feelings I was experiencing actually was!
Elder Candland and Beth were both in tears, because they could remember that feeling. We all can remember the feelings of this sacred ordinance that set us on the path to eternal life, but we can't dwell on the past instead we are on the path of eternal progression!
I gave a talk in Sacrament meeting this Sunday and I recounted a story where I was blindfolded and told to follow a distinct noise and after trying to follow the loud cowbell I realized that their was another sound being covered by the cowbell, and that was the soft sound of a triangle. Reaching this sound I was put on a rope that weaved through the forest, and there were multiple moments I was knocked off the path. The start of that path is our baptismal covenant we make with our Heavenly Father and that rope represents living the Gospel; however, when we get knocked off the path of living the gospel how do we get back on? Well we are taught that our Prophet Thomas S. Monson is our Prophet today and I bare testimony that he guides us onto that rope, as well as helps us continue on that rope! My prayer is for everyone to think about the things that our Prophet has spoken on in the past two General Conferences and ask ourselves are we truly following the Prophet? or are we like the people in the scriptures that we read about and wonder how do they not follow the prophets don't they know who they are!? Well we can be like those people even now! But we can always start heading towards that rope again and follow the prophet and start making the harder right decisions rather than the easier wrong decisions just like our dear prophet spoke on this past April General Conference! Pray for Him. He cares a heavy mantel.
Keep Smiling and don't forget to Pray!
Love Elder Gerrard
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