Hey Everyone!
Well this week was a kinda slow week for investigators, but we had some good appointments with members, some good....some not so good.
First off, the best appointment out of all of them, was with the T. family. We set up an appointment to go over for a lesson, but as we were walking home from church, they stopped and gave us a ride. When they dropped us off, Brother T. informed his wife that we would be coming over. She then invited us over for dinner! That was the first member meal I have had in this area (at a member's home)! It was awesome! I mean every Wednesday a few of the members take turns to make a wonderful dinner for the all the Elders around here and serve it at the church. That's about the only "member meal" that we get during the week. So we were pretty excited to go over to the T. Family's for dinner. When we got there we had pleasant conversation about who is from where and what we did before missions and what they majored in in college. The whole point of the meal there was that their neighbors would be coming over to join us as well. Unfortunately the neighbors were unable to make it that night. They did, however, let us know that another one of the neighbors said that he would be interested in hearing the missionary lessons. We are super excited about that because our teaching pool, as of late, has been going down. It will be nice to start picking up a few new investigators. All in all, we had a great time with them and getting to know them was a great experience! I will keep you posted on the progress of their neighbors.
We also were able to meet with the Phantumhives this week. They are an awesome family! In my last email, I wrote about them, however, I wanted to share a little bit more about Sister Phantumhive's story which is actually quite an amazing one too. At first, they were just friends and Sister P was leading a life similar to what Brother P was doing. She been running away from religion because she wanted nothing to do with it. Then I guess one day she decided that she wanted to settle down and find a church. I can't remember how, but she came in contact with the missionaries and was baptized a few months later. Brother P said he started noticing changes in her, and then after a while he didn't even know her anymore. They were good enough friends that Sister P would call him out on things that he shouldn't have been doing. So when she joined the church, he started meeting with the missionaries after little while. At first he didn't want anything to do with them, but then he softened up and met with missionaries. He was baptized soon after.
Then we had a lesson this week with Sister U. For this lesson we chose to review the earthly ministry of Jesus Christ, the apostasy, and the restoration of the church. I think this was a good lesson for her because she actually had some really good questions. For example, we brought up the fact that when Christ set up his church, he called not only 12 Apostles but "another 70". I shared the scripture (I think it's in Luke), where it talks about how Christ called the 70. Right then and there she asked, "If Christ did that in his church then, why don't other churches have that today if they're supposed to be Christ's true church? I love when questions like that come up! That shows not only that they understand that things are missing from churches today, but it also leads well right into the discussion on the Great Apostasy, which was the next thing we were going to talk about.
We continued on with the lesson and explained about the Great Apostasy. We answered her question about the 70s, and then we went into the next subject which was the Restoration. In that section, we shared the confusion that Joseph Smith had, what prompted him to search the Bible, trying to figure out which church was true, and the First Vision. The spirit was very powerful in the room and it was an absolutely wonderful lesson! The other thing that I love about going to Sister U.house is, besides the fact she has great questions, a great spirit, and a desire to learn, she also usually feeds us (which I guess is a member meal that I forgot about from earlier in my email.) She's from Africa and she cooks really good African food! I think my favorite thing that she's cooked so far is peanut butter soup! I had never had peanut butter soup before. The one that she made didn't taste anything like peanut butter, but there's peanut butter in it. It's so fantastically good! And you eat it on rice.
Finally, we had a lesson with Sister J. and Sister D. That lesson went well and we had pumpkin pie afterwards! Normally I don't like pumpkin pie with out whip cream, but this pumpkin pie was actually really sweet! The crust was also perfect! I don't like the crust so flaky and dry. I like the crust a little moist, and that's how this pie's crust was! It was super good!
However, that's not even the eventful part! After the lesson with those two sisters, we were walking out of their apartment and we saw a guy standing in the doorway of the stairwell, down the hall. When we got closer to him I said "Hey! How are you?" and he replied, with an accent that I didn't recognize, "Good". I wished him a good night and he replied the same way. Then Elder Humphrey said to have a good night as well, and he replied with the same answer but seemed to be agitated this time. This is all we had said at this point, nothing more, nothing less. So we kept walking. When we were a little further down the hall he calls out and says "Hey you guys! Stop!" At that point I knew we were in for a treat.
The man caught up to us and asked if we were from a church. We told him that yes, we were, and he just started going off on us. He went off on how we need to show him respect and something about calling him crazy and that God will destroy us and so on. It was difficult to understand what he was saying and he was getting more and more angry by the second, so I said "Have a nice day, sir" and started walking away. Well he didn't like that. He started cussing us out and telling us to get out of "his" building and that it was an apartment building, not a church. We told him we understood that, and that we were visiting a member of our church that lived here. I don't think he understood that because he started yelling at us that he was going to call the cops. Now keep in mind this was all said while screaming (and a a lot of cuss words thrown in there). Well we got out of the building as quickly as we could because it looked like he was ready to get physical, and we went home. That was probably the most I have ever been cussed out during my mission.
We got home and later that night Sister J. called to make sure we were all right and told us that she had apologized to the man. We were...shocked. She had nothing to apologize for because he "attacked" us. She told us that he said the reason he had gotten so upset was because "we called him crazy." We were speechless! The whole thing started because he THOUGHT we called him crazy. We said nothing after we passed him and he went (as Meg from Hercules says), "berserk"on us. Neither my companion or were very happy afterwards. Then to add insult to injury, some punk kids made fun of us on our ride home. I tell you what, I have never felt Satan work so hard on me while I have been on my mission. I had to do a lot of praying and scripture reading to get over the anger and frustration. I felt like I just wanted to give up on the people here in D.C.. Through it all though, I was able to feel Gods loving arms around me, just letting me know everything was going to be alright and to just keep working hard to LOVE THE PEOPLE. It reminded me of the mistakes I have made in my life. The little ones and the REALLY big ones and through them all my Heavenly Father and Savior never gave up on me. Yeah, I'm going to run into people who hate my guts and Satan is going to try and use that to drag me down, but I won't let it :).
Well this has been our eventful week. Ha! I hope you had a better one than we did. I also hope you have a great week to come! Love you all!
Love,
Elder Gold
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