The week that the Earth Shook

The earth didnt actually shake this week, but it seemed like a good enough title for the weekly letter.

This week was an adventure I think.

I was definately a great week to fight on the Lords side.  Whos on the Lords side who?  Lots of learning to get better on the Lords side this week.  Lots of things learned.

So we have been working with Leila and Reny forever.  Almost litterally.  During that time, the rest of Leilas family has been baptised, and stuff, and she wants to a ton as well, but Reny has some doubts about marrage and commitment because he never really grew up in a culture of... doing that.  But, slowly sloooowly he has been coming along.  They have been coming to church for a while now, and Reny is getting better at getting up in the mornings and stuff, and this week, we discovered the part in Preach My Gospel about creating a plan for investigators when you get them a baptisimal date marked, and then share that plan with them, so we marked them a baptisimal date, and created a long term plan for like the next 7 weeks to help them focus on the basics like family prayer and then individual prayer, and then family scripture study, and then etc...  And so now they are working for that, and we hope that slowly and surely we can win the race.

So this week has been great to listen to conference every day that I downloaded.  Conference is fantastic.  I love it sooo much.  I am super excited to read all the talks.  Preisthood session was my favorite.  If you havent heard it yet, get it and read or listen to it.  Sooooo good.  My favorite is Elder Eyrings talk.

So President Rodrigues, the branch president is fantastic.  He also had an accident a few years ago, and so is in a wheel chair.  This week we were walking by his house, and we stopped some of our investigators, and they said they had seen the branch president sitting by himself a few blocks away.  It turns out that his electric wheel chair had died in the middle of the street, which was great.  Haha.  He was stuck.  Luckily his tablet had internet, and so he used it to call one of the members.  We found them a few moments later, coming down the street, with the member, Alex, pushing the back of the electric wheel chair.  A fantastic sight with our branch president in grand spirits.  Haha.  I love our branch president.

So these days I have been learning courage and confidence.  I still have a loooooong way to go to be couragous, but I made some good steps this week.  Taking risks is good.  Usually.  There is a great talk I read about the difference between sin and weakness which was great. 

We also took charge of integrating night to get it back going this week because people have stopped coming.  We had a good turnout.  Maybe 30 people or so.  Lots of new faces.  We blew up baloons, and then everyone tied the baloon to their shoe, and then tried to pop others without theirs being popped.  Inside the baloons were scriptures and stuff.  If your baloon got popped, you could get back in the game with another baloon if you memorized the scripture and passed it off.

So.

The Lords work is great.  It cant be stopped.

Love you all!!!

Elder Sampson