Same Area, Seen Through New Eyes
Well Hello!
Wow, has this week been great! I have been able to do so much! For the past few weeks, between the people we normally visit getting sick, and the snow storms, he have not been able to teach that many lessons! But this week has been great and we even got 5 Member presents in this week! But before I go into the many miracles that happened I need to introduce my new Companion, Elder Stallings! He is from Tooele, Utah, and has been out a little over a year! He has got this Senior companion thing down pretty well so its been a weird switch from Elder Dally, because I came when it was his first time being Senior companion so because my brain was a little more organized, I did a lot of things that I am now finding out is really what the Senior Companion is supposed to do. So Elder Stallings is pretty satisfied with that fact though. haha He says, "you just make my job a crap lot easier!" He is really funny, and he have laughed our eyes out a couple times already. But as well he is very smart and spiritual so we have had some great intelligent conversations and some deep spiritual conversations already just in the last 5 days! Its been pretty great! I wonder how he has these great attributes....oh yeah! He WAS HOMESCHOOLED! Yep! That's right! haha So our background is very similar, he only had one more semester before he would have had his associates degree and did the whole graduating early and what not! So yeah its pretty cool, but we joke about our "homeschool" moments because we both don't spell well. So we joke around saying, "Why did he put 2 homeschoolers together?!" ;p haha Its pretty funny. Anyway! Its great to have him see this area with a fresh set of eyes! He has seen where we can improve things, when I have just kind of gotten used to it. So yeah, thats been really great!
We have taught really well together too! I love how he teaches! Its super great! The best way to describe how we teach is that we have each others backs as we teach! Its pretty cool! I fasted for multiple things yesterday but one of them was that this continues to go well with us two! I have a lot of struggles with my companions and the last few days have seemed too good to be true, so yeah I really hope we continue to get along so well!
So onto the miracles!
#1 So on Wednesday, we had an appointment to meet with this lady that came to our Family History workshop a few months ago, and to help her with a couple questions she had. So we met her at this place where are emailing and got her signed up with Familysearch and helped her add the 4 generations of people she had into family search, and she is like 92 so 4 generations put us back quite a ways. So her information started to match up with family search's information, and she was able to find new information (like death places, birth places) that she didn't before have! She got SOOO excited to see that! We will be meeting with her again this Thursday, and said she would try to make it to our church soon too! So yeah, New investigator! All from family history! And we just had a cool miracle with another lady that came up to us just a little bit ago, and happened as I was emailing to President Stocker. To save time, I will paste in what I shared with him:
As well, I wanted to tell you about one thing I was pondering this morning. I was studying in Preach My Gospel about finding through family history and was thinking about how great a tool it has been here in this area! We have had the chance to do a workshop for the community on Family History that included other genealogists from the community and many who wanted to learn more. That allowed us to tell why its so important and then how to do it with Familysearch.org. This past week we met up with one of those who came to our workshop and became one of our new investigators and we are helping her some more this week! ............And you won't believe what just happened! haha I just had to pause because this lady came up to us where we are doing our emails right now and asked us about our other family history workshop that we are about to do in this next 2 weeks and started asking us questions about our church, and we invited her and another one of her friends that was interested to our Book of Mormon Class and got to briefly explain what the Book of Mormon was and that because she has American Indian heritage that this record was their dealing with God. She replied that she would be signing up for our workshop and that she would probably see us at the Book of Mormon Class! Yeah! That JUST happened as I was typing this to you!
So yeah, that was super cool! And we are hoping we continue to have such success with family history! The people here love it!
#2 Mark! He is the man we met that is friends with Norm. He was at his house again on Friday so that he could meet with us again! This time we had Bro. Duffy with us too! We talked about faith and how it can change our actions and used the "Lord, I Believe" talk by Elder Holland and it was really great! He has been reading the Book of Mormon and he described his experience with it like Troy first did. He said, he brings it with him everywhere, and that he had read the first part and also was looking in the index at words like repentance and what not! I extended a soft baptismal comment to him and he accepted and said he would. Next time we will be able to set a date with him! I am so excited, especially when he walked in with Norm on Sunday! Yeah and he stayed for Gospel Principles! It was so great, and we have such high hopes for him!
#3 We got to teach Terry our 10 year old investigator and we didn't really have a whole lot planned. But we knew we wanted to teach him about the Gospel of Jesus Christ lesson so we started into talking of faith and went from there! We found out he is definitely a visual learner! Elder Stallings got our his picture book, and made some on the spot visual aids! And then I came up with an on the spot object lesson to teach the principle of repentance and also Baptism! It was really cool! And afterwards we just told each other there was definitely some inspiration going on to do that so well! haha
So yeah, thats what I've got for you today! I know a lot of great things are going to be happening here soon! I can't wait to share more miracles with yall about this work, next week!
Love yall!
-Elder Swalberg
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