27 August 2012

Hey Family,
So last week I said I was unhappy about being transferred. I'm not anymore! I now know that I was transferred here to Terre Haute to see a little bit of success before I go home. Brownsburg was a sweet area with the coolest ward ever, but the work was very, very slow. Here it seems like people are much more open to listen. I am in the Honey Creek ward in Terre Haute. The ward here is pretty cool too, the sacrament meeting yesterday was pretty sweet. The last speaker was hilarious. My new companion's name is Elder Ewell, he is from Murray, Utah. He has been out 6 months. So I am not training anymore which I am happy about because the missionary I was training wouldn't talk ever. So this is a nice change. This missionary is a clutz though. The day after transfers, he crashed on his bike and apparently he does that pretty often. It was really funny cause I was riding behind him and he just went down suddenly and while he was sliding he was like "dang it!" It was super funny.
Mom, you are going to love this, you too Hailey. There is a girl who just got baptized about a month ago. Her name is ***** Disney, and guess who her great, great uncle is. You guessed it, it's Walt Disney! She is super cool too. She texted us last night and told us that one of her essays got published in a book, so she is officially an author now. She is going to be fixing some clothes of mine cause she is a seamstress.
The work is going very well here. We are teaching a family that will be getting baptized in September. It looks like I will be giving a lot of baptism interviews in September because the two other areas in the district have a few people on baptism dates this upcoming month. So that is exciting. There are also a few young men in the ward that are preparing for missions right now. They like to help us out and they are super cool.
We had a super cool experience on Friday while we were tracting. So we start tracting this street and it turns out that it is not much of a street, all the houses were facing the next street over. So we keep walking down this "street" and then it just turns into this guy's backyard. We walk up just as he is walking over to his archery target to pull out his arrows. So we go up and I start talking to him about bow hunting. Turns out he is heading out of town to go to Tennessee to do some boar hunting with his bow. He has also been to Iraq and got back a few years ago. He also said that he met some mormons in the army and he has read the whole Book of Mormon. So we would have tried to teach him right there but he was about to head out. So we set up another time to go back and teach him. The he let us cut thru his yard to get to the other street so we could knock on some doors. So we knock a few houses and we got let into another house of a young couple who has been married for 2 years and the wife grew up mormon but her dad got excommunicated when she was 7 so her family quit going and she never got baptized. We got to set up a return appointment for Tuesday and they are going to get a pizza for us because she said that her mom would kill her if she didn't feed us. Then we continued tracting. We knocked on a few more doors and finally an old man came out on his front step to talk with us. We came to find out that his wife died not too long ago, he got all emotional while talking about it. We were able to testify that he would see her again and that they could be together forever. He had a total change of heart while we were there. It started off with him saying that missionaries had already come by and that he usually tells them he goes to the church down the road. By the end he said that we could come back. It was awesome. But that is not the end. So we start heading down the road because it is getting to be about the time that we leave. We came across a little dog in front of a house, it didn't have a collar on so we didn't know if it belonged to them or not. This guy from the house behind us came out and got his mail. He said that dog did belong to those people and that it was super annoying. So we were about to walk away because we were going to go to our next plan but the guy said "so what do you guys do?" We told him who we were and he said "well your gonna have a tough time with me!" So we get to talking with him and he has been in an accident at his job which left him unable to work anymore, his wife left him shortly thereafter, he is constantly in pain because of his condition now, and he said the only thing that has kept him from committing suicide is his kids. So we continued talking with him and he asked us why God would let those things happen to him. So we pulled out a copy of the Book of Mormon and showed him 2 scriptures, one out of the Isaiah chapters in first Nephi and then Ether 12:27. He loved those scriptures. We then offered him the copy of the Book of Mormon we were holding and he very gratefully received it. Then we exchanged goodbyes and he said as we were leaving "thanks guys, you just recharged my batteries!" This was the most spiritual experience I have had on my mission while tracting. God made everything happen during that time to allow us to be walking by that guys house when he came outside. He even said it himself, "there must have been some reason God put you here when I came outside." God definitely prepares his children!
This has definitely been one of the best weeks of my mission.
Love,
Elder Robertson