Elder Gold Goes To DC North: Snowed in again!! (3/3/2014)

Helloooooo Utah!

Things are going pretty good on the East Coast! We are mission lockdown again due to the weather. It started snowing this morning, and has been snowing pretty much all day! We got tired of being cooped up in our apartment, so we decided to walk to the church :-) it's been pretty fun. I love taking these "adventures" on snow days. There's nothing else to do so you might as well start walking haha. We stopped by Ross and got some clothes. I got new pants, a shirt, and new shoes. They're some pretty awesome looking shoes!

So this past week went really well actually. I am sure I already mentioned this investigator, but to recap...a few weeks ago before transfers, we got a text message referral from the church for a woman name Sandra Aragon. She has been less active for 13 years but wants to come back and wanted her husband to start taking the lessons. We had the awesome opportunity to go over and teach the first lesson to them. Her husband, Dominic, is a little hard to read. He's very quiet and doesn't really talk much unless you ask him a specific question. We felt though that the lesson went really well and that it was well received. It's really cool also because this past Sunday they came to church! Their kids absolutely loved primary! And from what I could see Sandra and Dominic loved sacrament meeting and Sunday school. The ended up leaving early though because their kids were getting restless. She said that they also weren't used to a three hour church meeting so she took them home and promised the next time they would stay for all of Sunday school. We also have a lesson with them tomorrow at about 5 o'clock. They're so nice and invited us to stay for dinner afterwards :-) I love that family they're super nice.

Then we also were able to meet with Lauren. For those of you who don't know, Lauren is actually our previous investigator, Erin. I won't going to too much detail but just through different circumstances we found out that Erin's actual name is Lauren. So we talked to Lauren about charity and what it means to be charitable. We also talked about how charity really does bring the true love of Christ into peoples lives, both to those being charitable and also to those receiving the charity.

We also have the opportunity to meet with the Swansey (pronounced swan-z) family. The wife is a member but has been less active since she was 18, and she is now in her late 30s to early 40s. Her husband is not a member, but they both absolutely love the missionaries and in fact they want us over for dinner sometime. This last time we came over, he asked us in a nonjudgmental way, (meaning he actually wanted to know) why we don't drink coffee or alcohol. It was nice because we were able to share the Word of Wisdom with them and in a brief summary explain the revelation given to Joseph Smith. We're going to call them sometime this week and set up a dinner appointment with them :-).

Well that was our week pretty much. The rest of the week was just checking up with the members to see how their family mission plan was doing. The family mission plan is pretty much self explanatory. We have a ward mission plan which consist of three different things.

1. Pray for missionaries and their investigators by name

2. Pray for missionary opportunities

3. Invite people in and out of your home for activities.

Based off of those three or whatever else your family circumstances may be, they create a family mission plan. So the Ward has the general mission plan to help member strategy with missionary work and top of that they create their own family plan so that their family will be actively engaged in missionary work also. Part of our daily tasks are to go around and check up on the family plans giving the families encouragement and helping them to create the plans themselves.

Well I hope you all are having a wonderful week! The pictures that are attached to this weeks blog entry are a few pictures from us walking to the church today so we could email! It was way fun. I love you all!

Love,

Elder Gold