October 17, 2011

We saw some few miracles this week,

1. secretly I have had this nasty cold that has been staying for weeks. it made me sort of really tired all the time. Anyway, the miracle came just recently, I got a blessing from our district leader about 3 weeks ago, and in the blessing it said according to my faith I would be healed. Well, i guess i needed more faith because I didn't get healed! but you know what, God has his plan for each and everything.

the miracle came finally. as a district we weren't really that unified, so we made a unanimous decision to change that. we decided that each companionship, would take turns every Sunday cooking lunch and then serving our fellow district members. About the same time we made that decision, I got sick. at first it was ok, but then it got somehow worse. our unity as a district began to improve more and more, and i finally got a blessing from the district leader (like i said before). then members of the district began checking up on me to see how i was doing. yesterday, we came to know that they had began praying for me, almost instantly, I got better, and now i am 100% again. I decided that God is funny. that was a good joke on his part. I do know that all things are for our experience, i think all of us needed that lesson. I know God lives, he loves us, and he teaches us what we need to learn. but once the lesson is learned, he moves on to something else. just pray that the next lesson won't include my health.

2. On Monday last week we had a zone activity with this man named Elder Hartman, he came and spoke to us about the color code (you know red, yellow, blue, white personality types? if you don't you should go check out http://www.colorcode.com/ Sister Chirchir and I have both decided that it has revolutionized the way we teach. I think we have finally figured out teaching people and not lessons. Who knew the key would be learning about the color code? We have one investigator in particular that we have been struggling with for the last 3 months. He is a member referral whose family is so anxious to see him be baptized, however, despite our best efforts, he has budged very little. After learning about the color code, we came to the decision that he is a red, thus when we went to teach him this past week, we were able to totally teach to how he wanted us to teach him.

 It was a complete miracle to see the change in him as we taught to his needs. The lesson itself was inspired beyond belief, we talked about goals and about what he wanted to achieve in life, then we helped him realize that there are many things that he is doing that are preventing him from achieving them, he has begun to make steps towards dropping the bad behaviors and picking up good ones.

From our visit with him this last week to now, he is a different person. He came to church on his own after an absence of 3 weeks, and he was actually smiling, he was excited to greet us (which doesn't happen), and the list just goes on! We were able to identify his concern with the help of his member brother, and together they are working it out. The brother is a returned missionary and after that lesson he explained to us that we were totally inspired, he said that "I wish I would have known when I was on a mission that the people who are not progressing are not actually rejecting the message, they just have a concern that won't allow them to progress." I have gained a stronger testimony of Teaching people not lessons.

3. On a sad note, we met a less active return missionary, both Sister ChirChir and myself are not exactly sure what to think. He came home and slowly by slowly, broke some commandments and then tried to justify them, then he got caught up in trying to find "more truth" as he put it by searching for anti-mormon literature, then it began to escalate, now he is totally less-active and wants nothing to do with God. He doesn't believe that Jesus Christ is the Savior, and he doesn't believe that God is our Father, he thinks of God more as a Grandfather (as he put it... not really sure what he meant by that). He still reads the Book of Mormon every blue moon, and when he reads it he feels so good, but he denies that those feelings are the Spirit. He doesn't believe there is the Holy Spirit at all. We are afraid he has been blinded by the craftiness of men. We are not really sure what to do with him. We will be seeing him again this week and we are going to try to rekindle his testimony (which he claims he still has, because he feels good when he reads the Book of Mormon, but he doesn't believe in God, Christ, the Spirit, the church, the prophet, or anything...).