The hope is that through our friendship ...

September 9, 2013

Servus,

      I hope you all had a fantastic, rain filled week.  It was fine here until today and now it is starting to rain pretty hard.

     We had two great success stories with less actives this week.  The first, her name was Amelia.  She is the one I mentioned a couple of weeks ago who , to keep her story short, we ran into a couple of days before she was supposed to have an operation.  We offered her a blessing of comfort since she was really nervous for the surgery and wasn't sure what would come out of it.  She had also only had one other blessing her whole life since she had been in the church and the thought hadn't crossed her mind, but it sounded wonderful to her.  I had the opportunity to give the blessing and it was a very powerful and specific blessing and afterwards she was completely moved by the spirit and wanted to come back to church after she was out of the hospital and had gotten back from a family reunion.  She kept her promise and she was there yesterday and loved it.  The members were also very good to her and we will be visiting her again tonight and she plans on coming to church each Sunday from now on.  She told us she really wants to start putting her life back in order and prioritize her faith so that it plays a more prominent role in her life.

     The other success was with the Ward Mission leader's son.  He is 16 and had been inactive for a long time.  The Ward Mission leader was able to finally get his son to come to the ward family home evening last Friday and Elder Fletcher, Elder Mielacher and I started building a strong friendship with him as we played soccer together.  He told Elder Mielacher that he would come to church to see him before he left to England and to our surprise actually came yesterday.  We talked to him for awhile after church and we invited him to come play soccer with us on P-Days and he loved that idea, but then he asked if we could teach him English once a week or so.  After all that he even said he would come next week to church as well and asked his parents if we could come to dinner on Saturday (which we will be).  The hope is that through our friendship with him he can begin to see how important the gospel really is and how much it can help him.  It was cool to see both of them there at church and to see the spirit work with them.

     Elder Fetcher came this week and has already been a huge help.  We both have similar ideas about mission work and what we wanted to accomplish here in the ward.  We both have the attitude of wanting to do a lot of member work as well less active work and make that the major focus of our time together.  We came up with a good plan for helping members with making their own family mission plans as well as meeting with our Ward mission leader and going over all of the less actives in our ward to find out about all them, put together a list of them and try to work with as many less actives as possible.  So our vision for this transfer is really a focus on members, whether active or not, and accomplishing the work through them.

     Mom you would be really proud of me.  We were asked to do as much of the training program with Elder Melacher as possible before he leaves to England and so we have the typical extra hour of comp study each day that trainers and trainees have.  Because it is kind of weird for 2 trainers to do the program with Elder Mielacher, what we have worked out is that Elder Fletcher does the program since he hasn't had the opportunity to train yet and I spend that hour to make sure the apartment is in order since with 5 people it can get out of hand easily.  With remaining time I work on our area book.   Remember how hard it was for me just to make my bed?  I have learned something since I have been gone mom.

      For the Book of Mormon challenge, we should be finishing Alma 35 tomorrow.  I hope you are still enjoying it.  Love you all lots.

Elder Bodily

Gott sei euch bis aufs Wiedersehen