terita mita orro!
how is everyone doing? what’s that? your all doing great all the time! that’s good news! so am i!. in other news the gospel is true and the book is blue.
we had a really interesting week filled with talking and walking and teaching and testifying with just a smidgeon of death defying (do not worry death was, in all cases, defied) i think i will share a few different cool (slang word for awesome) experiences that i've had this week because that is what i usually do when i e-mail on mondays.
so first off we visited a recently reactivated member named alan this week. i don't think i've told you about him before. he had been coming around for the last three months to church and as far as i could tell has been really enjoying it. he wasn't there last week though so we dropped by his place to see if anything had happened. when we got there he excitedly let us in and told us that he had only not come to church this week because he had been at his parents home up north for the weekend. what's more he told us that he had been really sorry that he had missed church all week and was really looking forward to being able to go this week. he told us that since he had been coming around to church he had noticed that everything in his life had improved. his relationship with his wife was better he was having a better time at work and he had begun to read the scriptures in his own time and actually had begun to understand them. it was really cool to see just how much just attending church has influenced his life. when he first started coming back it was just because his wife was making him and he didn't really participate much but as he kept on coming around the spirit started working on him and he has made a complete turnaround in just a few months. it really just cemented for me just how important church attendance is and just how much of an influence it has on every aspect of our lives.
we also had a pretty cool experience this week as we were following up on a potential investigator named valeria. her husband answered the door and after a little talk on the doorstep he let us in. he told us that he is deeply religious and is actually a preacher for a local pentacostal church. he currently has over 5,000 "disciples" that he meets with each week! he invited us in so that he could share with us as "fellow men of god” some things he had recently learned from the bible. he had come up with a lot of different theories from reading genesis about why god created adam and what purpose the fall served. after he explained his theories we were quite happy to show him second nephi chapter two which agreed with most of the theories that he had come up with. he was very interested and invited us to come back sometime this next week to talk more about the book of mormon. and (being brazilian) he would not let us leave his house without feeding us something. (side note missionaries in brazil probably don't have to set aside time for meals during the day, they probably just go knocking and then get fed by everyone they meet).
for my third and final experience that i feel like sharing this week i will talk about a story that i will explain after i finish this quite long and mostly pointless introductory sentence that serves no purpose whatsoever at all. when we went contacting yesterday it was raining (it does that sometimes in engalnd) and we weren't having a lot of success so i said a prayer where i basically said that i would do anything to find a contact where we were. immediately after i finished i noticed a group of teenagers at the edge of a park. we don't usually talk to teenagers in groups just because well. . . they're teenagers. . . in groups. . . and as such they usually act how you would expect a bunch of teenagers to act (side note sometimes i forget i'm still a teenager). so i was a little bit hesitant about acting on the prompting. but after some deliberate deliberation i resolved to try it out because you really never know. we walked up to them and explained that we were missionaries talking about god. first off they all just sort of laughed and told us that they were all atheists and such and didn't really care but as we continued to talk to them i noticed something interesting. first off that teenagers in england really aren’t' that different from the ones that i'm used to from back home, and secondly they all had some questions. some trivial but also some very serious. we talked to all of them for nearly twenty minutes about god and about the purpose of our lives and by the end of it we had gotten to know nearly all of them and had answered some serious questions of the soul. we were able to hand out some different church materials and many of them said they would continue looking into it. as long as we are sincerely seeking revelation with the real intent to act on the promptings we receive so that we can do heavenly father's will and bring about good he will guide us. it may not be in the way that we expect and it most definitely won’t be the path of least resistance, but he will guide us nonetheless. i've learned this on my mission more times and in more ways than i could possibly try to explain by e-mail. i know this church is true and i know that god loves every one of us because he is our father and we our his children. and that is pretty cool! (understatement alert!)
i love you guys and i'm incredibly grateful for your advice and your continued support.
with love
Elder Jarman
ps. i popped a balloon by throwing a pass along card! so everyone should be kinda proud of me
pps. i'm not sure if anyone has tried this but vinegar and salt on chips (large french fries) is ridiculously good!
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