February 20, 2012

Guten Morgan! Really, Elder Davies and I got up early to do our laundry and it'll be 6:30 when you receive this.

Anyways, this week has been another good one. Elder Davies and I have two role play investigators named Michael and Patrik. We've made a lot of progress with them. Michael is a really energetic guy with an East-German accent. He didn't know anything about religion at first. He had heard of Jesus Christ and that he was an important religious figure, but knew nothing else. We had to start from the basics and explain all the necessaries of Jesus Christ and his gospel, teach him how to pray, and then explain the significance of our church. Since then we've been able to get him to come to church, read the Book of Mormon (he still doesn't feel comfortable enough with his prayers to pray about its truth yet, but we keep encouraging him to do so), and has accepted the principles we've taught him. We're hoping to commit him to baptism here soon. More importantly though we hope he can trust in his ability to pray and find out the truth of the BoM and then gain a testimony. Patrik's development has been coming a little more slowly. His background is he had a lot of Mormon friends and wanted to learn more about our church, he is Catholic, and he doesn't really like to be a part of lesson more just listen to what we say. We have gotten him to read the Book of Mormon, and he believes that the Bible is true and that the Book of Mormon could be true, but doesn't believe either is a reality of today so he can't really believe the idea that we have modern revelation given to prophets from God, nor that we can receive personal revelation. We've testified of the truth of the Book, how it works together with the Bible to bring forth the fullness of God's work, and we shared Moroni's promise in Moroni 10:4-5 (future missionaries you are going to be using this scripture a lot) and shared our testimonies of how we have received answers from God through the Holy Ghost through prayer that the Book of Mormon is true. The only problem is he only likes to give the memorized prayer found in Matthew that a lot of Christian faiths say and doesn't feel comfortable yet with the idea that prayer is a conversation with God rather than a recited praise. We'll to continue to work with him though. This last week though, Elder Davies and I and Elder Gubler and Elder Niedens did teaching exchanges. Elder Gubler and I got to teach Michael and one of his investigators, Ingo, for three lessons each. We got Ingo to pray to know the Book of Mormon is true and we committed him and his family to get baptized. We made so much progress with him in just a few short trips because Elder Gubler worked so hard to really prepare for him. All of these investigators are based off of real people that our teachers taught while they were in Germany.

 

One quick thing before I go: They are building another MTC in Rexburg, Idaho which is going to be for the Spanish-Speaking Missionaries. This is to relieve the pressures on housing in the Provo MTC because of how many Missionaries are coming in. English-Speaking and all other languages will stay here in Provo unless of course they go to another MTC like Brazil, England, Philippines, etc. Also, they going to work it out here soon so that a number of Missionaries will be able to use I pads for teaching. This is so we can use resources for teaching such as LDS.org, use visuals, etc.

 

Well I have to go for now, love you all so much.

 

Gott sei mit euch bis auf wiedersehen

 

Elder Bodily