dear anyone that has used the chinese zodiac at some previous point,
you know you think that after being on amission for so long i would have figured out at some point how to write an adequite letter to describe the acti/fun/fantas;tivities that you get up to in the life of a full time missionary. buuuuuuuut i still can't :) sorry about that. so instead i will spend some time talking about the various people we've seen this last week. we've started teaching loads of new investigators (again) this last week. the first is named wendy. she has always had a strong beleif in god but has often been confused about different veiws and has ended up with some incorrect understandings that have realy troubled her because of it. so teaching her is an amazingly different experience. she ahs a strong trust in us as servents of the lord and beleives everything that we teach her but we feel what she realy needs is to just truly feel that the gospel is true by the witness of the Holy Ghost. i've noticed a lot about that witness in my study over the last week. one of the main focuses of our teaching and our commitments as missionaries is to help others receive that witness for themselves that the book of mormon is true and that therefore the gospel of Jesus Christ has been restored in it's fullness. it makes sense that this would be the focus of our teaching because our focus as missionaries is to invite others to come unto Christ. and every person, no matter who they are, needs to receive that witness from the Spirit at some point or other in the course of their eternal progression. for myself this witness came gradually, ever so slightly. bit by bit by bit until one day (i still remember the day) i looked back on my life and realized that i knew for myslef that the Church was true. that is why i love sharing the book of mormon and it's message with investigators because it was so instrumental in this process of my own conversion.
As well we also had a realy cool experiance in the first teach with a new investigator named paul. he had never realy had too much religous backround and as such didn't realy know too much about god. When we asked him why he let us into his house he thought about it for a moment and then told us that he realy didn't know but that he felt that he should. after teaching him for a while we commited him to say the closing prayer. he was realy hesitant because he hadn't realy had too much experiance with prayer so far in his life. most of his experiance was with scripted prayer. but after some counsel and after we said a prayer as well to help him get a feel for it he said an amazing kneeling prayer before we left. the spirit enveloped the room touching our hearts as well as his. when the prayer was finnished he looked up, was silent for a while, and then commented on how different he felt. we were more than happy to help him understand what he was experiancing. something i noticed specifically, that i later recorded in my journal, is that when we all felt the spirit we all felt a natural and powerfull increase of love for eachother. this isn't the first time i've experianced this either. when i feel the spirit i feel love for those that i am with. i beleive this is at least one way in which the love of god can "sheddeth itself abroad in the hearts of the children of men"
as always i have loads of more experiaces that i could share but i'm kinda running out of time. and if i took the time to type out all the things that happened this week it would take about a week. which would make next weeks letter a little boring. . .
so i'll stop here :)
with love
Elder Jarman
ps. the leaves are changing!!!!!!!!!!!
pps.i've decided that i'm basically realy realy blessed to hav Elder Gill as a companion.
ppps. i've also decided that i'm basically just realy realy blessed. full stop. : D
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