Elder Mason Moon: Saints

So this last week, our church has came out with a 46 chapter book all about the history of the church of Jesus Christ in the latter days and it's a really interesting book. There are a lot of stories of ordinary people who made huge sacrifices to follow Jesus Christ and to be a part of His church. I love when it mentions the missionary experiences of some of the first missionaries from the Church. They taught so simply (as they were all brand new converts to the church), but they had so much success. Apparently this book has been 6 years in the making and it really is inspired, so I invite everyone to read it!

As for our week, we found a couple new people to teach. We are still trying to get more people at church, so we are bringing more members to lessons to be their friends. Our ward is focusing a lot more on missionary work now, so hopefully that'll inspire more people to help us out as we try to find friends for the people we are teaching.

One of my favorite things about being in each different area is finding out who the members are that have stopped going to church. There are always different reasons for why people stop going to church, and the best thing I have found to do, is to listen. No one wants to be called out in a rude way by some 20 year old kid they don't know, so instead, we just "re-spark" their fire. We taught 2 different families this week that have stopped going to church, but we were able to invite them to come back with 2 different messages.

With the first family, we read through the introduction of the Book of Mormon and then we read 3 Nephi 11. The dad of the family was really impressed with how much he felt his mind being opened to the doctrine taught, so we committed him to read the Book of Mormon every day, and we have a dinner with his fam tomorrow.

With the second family, it was a couple from Guatemala. They were baptized in a different part of California about 20 years ago, but haven't been to church for the last 4 years since they have moved to Riverside. No one knew them or tried to reach out, so we stopped by last week, set up a time for dinner and a message, and they were excited to have us over. We shared with them a few parts of the Restoration of the Church, including the first vision, which helped them remember a lot of stuff that they have forgotten. It was just a simple message and then they treated us with some Pollo Loco. When we were talking at Pollo Loco, the hermano told me that he has the Melchizedek priesthood, but forgot a lot about what that means, so now we already know what we are teaching this Thursday when we bring one of the member's of the Elders Quorum.

Pray for miracles!

Elder Moon