This week has been great, Carlingford is awesome, so many people here. We are teaching people from Lithuania, Persia, Pakistan, China, Tawain, Korea.... it's crazy how many different cultures there are. Like the other night we went to a barbecue with an investigator from Lithuania, one from the Netherlands, and one from Brazil. It feels like I am traveling the world haha.
A cool experience this week was a follow up from last week's email. We met with that girl twice since last monday. She is so awesome. We set a baptism day with her for april 30th and when she put it in her phone she wrote "best day of my life" as the note! We were teaching her at a park yesterday and read alma 32 with her and just mega applied it to her life. She realized she wants her tree to grow, and she said she will water it everyday. She is really starting to find how awesome her life can and will be with Jesus Christ back in it. I love teaching people about this message. Without fail it brings happiness. It is a full proof plan.
One night, I think Friday, we were traveling back at 9 to get home and as we were sitting at the train station waiting for the bus I was watching this woman. She had her head in her hands and looked like she had a rough day. I went and sat by her and said hello. We began to talk and she told me she was from Persia and had come here for work and couldn't get a job. She had only been here 1 month. She just got divorced and all these other things just weighing down on her. I asked if she had a religion she said no. She had never been to church before. We talked about how Christ could help her. She said she would come to church. And she came! She loved it and we are seeing her later this week.
The man from Pakistan named AK I talked about a week or 2 ago is on date for april 23rd. He is loving the Book of Mormon. We read alma 36 with him and he felt like it was God giving him the advice for his life. It's amazing how the Book of Mormon changes lives. People can deny it all they want, but it will always stand as a tetimony of this work.
Our mission president sent us this:
Occasionally some say "I could believe your Mormon Doctrine if I just didn’t have to swallow the story about Joseph Smith being a man of God and that he translated the Book of Mormon from some golden plates which he claimed he found on a hillside." It is even possible that you yourself have doubted his story. Well let us consider some facts or conditions that must be complied with in order for you or someone else to produce a similar record under comparable conditions.
1. You must be between 23 and 24 years of age.
2. You cannot be a college graduate. In fact, you can only have three years of formal schooling.
3. Whatever you write must be on the basis of what you know.
4. You must write a book with 239 chapters; 54 of them about wars, 21 about history, 55 about prophecy, 71 about doctrines, 17 about missionaries, and 21 about the mission of Christ.
5. You must include in your writings the history of two distinct and separate nations, along with histories of different contemporary nations or groups of people.
6. Your writings must describe the religious, economic, social and political cultures and institutions of these two nations.
7. You must weave into your history the religion of Jesus Christ and the pattern of Christian living.
8. When you start to produce this record, covering a period over 1,000 years, you must finish it in approximately 80 days.
9. When you have finished, you must not make any changes in the text. The first edition must stand forever.
10. After pauses for sleep and food, if you are dictating to a stenographer, you must never ask to have the last paragraph or last sentence read back to you.
11. Your history or record must be long, approximately 522 pages with over 150 words per page.
12. You must announce that your “smooth narrative” is not fiction, but true, yes, sacred history.
13. In fact, it must fulfil the Bible prophecies; even in the exact manner in which it shall come forth, to whom given, and its purpose and accomplishments.
14. You must publish it to every nation, kindred, tongue and people, declaring it to be the word of God.
15. You must include with the record itself this marvellous promise: “And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask of God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Jesus Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, He will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.”
I thought it was pretty awesome. But even without all that I would know it is true. I have studied it for hours every single day for almost a year and a half now. I have studied it side by side with the bible and have come to know it is good. It is true.
love you all!
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