Week 35
I had a Zone Conference on Thursday last week. This transfer meeting was my 3rd one and has been the most spiritual meeting, out of every meeting I’ve attended on the mission so far, that I have had the opportunity of experiencing. The entire meeting lasted for 8 hours in total with a 1 hour lunch break in the middle. My Mission President shared some of his experiences from when he was growing up and raising his own family to relate them to the Missionary work and he also shared some other things that heavily invited the spirit. It was a powerful meeting. But one of the most amazing things about all of it was what happened when it ended. Just like any other meeting in the church, we ended with a song, and a closing prayer, but even though the meeting ended, no one got up and started moving around or talking to each other. There was a good long moment of silence because of the things that had been shared with all of us and the spirit was still so strong in the room that no one wanted to say anything because we were all too busy trying to listen to the spirit so that we could continue letting it teach us. After about a minute of silence, some people started standing up and moving around, but there was still hardly any noise. It was so quite and so peaceful in the room even though there were about 80 missionaries including many of the senior couples from throughout the mission. I am sure many other missionaries noticed it as well because normally when a meeting is finished, especially an 8 hour long meeting with only 1 break, everyone stands up and begins stretching, making small talk, and basically the room becomes noisy. But after this meeting, everyone just remained so reverent and quite. I’ve never seen that before at the end of a meeting, I thought it was cool.
I had some more really spiritual lessons this week and they were both on exchanges as well. I went on 2 separate exchanges this week, both with the same person and in his area. I had the opportunity of teaching a soon to be part member family since the man is a member and his soon to be wife in the next couples weeks is investigating. They are a biracial couple, he being white and her black, which did have some effect on the lesson we had. It was very easy for me to relate to this woman since that is how my parents are with the black one also being the convert too. It was a good strong lesson and I am pretty confident that this woman is going to be getting baptized within the next couple of months, if not weeks. When people actually keep their commitments of Reading in the scriptures, attending church, and praying about what we teach them and what we read, all of course sincerely, it is impossible for them not to develop a testimony, or at least feel the Spirit which leads to developing a testimony when acted upon.
The other lesson on exchanges was to a man named Philippe. It was a handoff lesson since he is white and only speaks English. I met him while street contacting a couple weeks ago and was finally able to set up an appointment with him since he has such a busy schedule. He is an artist and his art is very cool. He does a lot of work with Adobe software which allowed for me and him to make an instant connection since I do that kind of stuff as well along with 3D Modeling. The lesson we had with this man was by far the most grueling and doctrinally difficult lesson I have had on the mission so far. He is a Christian Catholic and he knows the Bible way better than I currently do. He asked many many questions but also made it very difficult to answer the questions since he would have his primary question and hit all of the tangent questions around it at the same time and expect us to be able to give him an all encompassing answer, which was not very possible since he would only give us about 2-4 phrases worth of time to speak before he would move onto another subject based on what we were able to get out. He also spoke in an intellectual manner that made it nearly impossible to cut him off because he did not pause or leave room for that. All of these attributes together about I m just made teaching him extremely difficult. And the biggest problem. Was his response to a question that I asked him. I asked him if he would be willing to except a spiritual confirmation or witness from the spirit regarding whether or not the things that we were going to teach him were true or not. And he paused for a moment to that and thought about it and told us that he just couldn’t do that because he needs tangible evidence to prove it to him not spiritual evidence. So although this investigator may sound like a waste of time after that statement, we decided to give him another chance because he does sincerely want to learn more about our church and he does listen, even though it is hard to say much. He may come around if we can just get him to really feel the spirit in lesson which will first require him to listen for longer than 1-2 minutes of us actually talking. That lesson drove me to increase my studies from the level that they were at. I have been studying harder than I have on the mission these past few days so that I can be far beyond ready for our next visit with him, because he listens to us more, the more that we are able to answer his questions, therefore I need to prepare myself even better to be ready for when those questions come. The lesson humbled me a little in regards to my scriptural knowledge, at least of the New Testament since that is the one book that I know the least out of all the Standard Works. I am looking forward to my next visit with this man because that lesson we had with him was intense on so many levels.
I hope everyone has a good safe week.
Sincerely,
Elder Adam R. F. Scoville
Elder Adam R. F. Scoville 