Elder Mason Moon: Temple Wednesday - Members have been great!

Our P day was changed to today, but it's all good. We will be going to the temple today in Redlands! We don't get to go as often on a mission, so I'm hyped up.

This last week has been pretty interesting. There were 2 big highlights of the week...
Juan received the Aaronic Priesthood!!
Pedro came to church after us not being able to teach him for almost 2 weeks, and now is back working towards a baptismal date which will be in the next few weeks! Juan and Pedro are also some of each other's best friends at church already, so maybe we will see Juan in the baptismal font baptizing Pedro???

Something I've enjoyed with the new changes is that instead of 7 elders at dinner, it is only 4 of us now. It's definitely a lot easier for the members to feed 4 elders at a time, and I feel like I've just been able to talk to the members the whole time and develop good friendships with them. In every area I've been in, the members have been awesome. The members in this ward have been involved in missionary work for a good while, so I feel like a part of me being in this area is learning how to use members to further the work. For this reason, we have been doing a lot more home visits and then of course every dinner, we can be in their house and share a quick little thought. A few examples from this week...

We ate at our Ward Secretary's house, Hermano Fenn. We had a great dinner and I just took the opportunity to talk about Family History and temple work with the Fenn's, so they could help us make a plan to help Juan seek out his ancestors and be able to do their work in the temple.

Another example is just a young family in our ward, the Cardenas family. They gave us an awesome referral (some of their neighbors) a few weeks ago, we had one lesson with the family they referred us to, and weren't able to get back in with them after setting some return appointments. Eventually we find out that they have pretty much been on vacation since then, but we still want to do pretty frequent Family Home Evenings with the Cardenas fam, so we did one this week. During the FHE, they came up with the idea to do some sort of missionary activity at the park right next to their apartment complex some day and they were more than willing to keep on looking for people to refer to us/come out to lessons with us.

All in all, I've really enjoyed getting to make new friends on my mission with these members. The main key for everyone in this Church or not in this Church, is to read the Book of Mormon and to develop a testimony of its truthfulness. From there, our foundation will be solid in the Gospel of Jesus Christ and our search will be over for Christ's true church.

One last story...

We were waiting for someone to open a gate for us at an apartment complex, when we saw a guy outside with his son on the other side of the street. He had just started drinking a bottle of beer and he started to talk to us about how hard life is. I first got him pumped up enough to dump out the rest of the beer in his bottle, so he could be a good example for his son, and so that he could start making changes in his life that moment. Then we read a little bit from the Book of Mormon and gave him the last English copy we had left. He had told us that earlier that day, he was thinking about taking his own life that night, but by God's divine design we were sent there to save him from physical and spiritual danger.

That's how God loves and takes care of His children.

Elder Moon