Family!
Well,
it's been a great week in Burnaby. Marc had a wonderful baptismal
service yesterday. We had the chance to teach an 8 year old, Nico
Esquivel, with kind of less active parents the missionary lessons over
the past weeks, and so although he wasn't a convert baptism, they shared
a baptismal service. It was just fantastic. The Spirit was very strong.
We got to participate in both confirmations, and I had the chance to
confirm Marc a member of the church. He's going to serve a mission. Ha
ha. We're sure of it. Baptism days are just the best. We had been
fasting that day, but we still probably ate twice the number of calories
as a normal day because (the Esquivels are from Guatemala) both
families brought a ton of food. It was also great because the recently
assigned home teachers for Marc's family were there and setting up home
teaching appointments and everything. The work of salvation. It's the
best.
Other than that,
the work is going great! We're still working with a few different part
member families. We're teaching a few different people from Islamic
backgrounds, come to think of it. And a lot more with non-Christian
backgrounds. We're still teaching Shaikh, who is just kind of cemented
in his beliefs, although not really practicing. We're also teaching
Murat, a man from Turkey who is sincerely interested in what we believe.
It's been interesting teaching them, because they believe in God, but
they don't understand at first why we believe that we need a Savior. It
has given us a lot of special opportunities to teach very simply about
the necessity of an atonement. It has also given me a deeper
appreciation of the knowledge that we have of the Plan of Salvation. It
makes a lot of things that don't make sense otherwise make sense. We're
teaching a Chinese guy named Jason. He's a student on the last year of
an economics degree at some university around here. He was raised in
China as a Buddhist, and so he's very curious about God and about
prayer. He is always asking about how God has helped us and how God
helps us. We taught him how to pray and we'll continue to work with him.
We're also still
working with a part-member family, the Steiners. Sabrina, the mom, is
struggling to believe in God because she's read a lot of atheist
literature, and as a result, she's become one of the people who don't
have the truth "because they know not where to find it". She's really
spiritually unhealthy and you can see that it's been hard on her. She'll
start crying sometimes when she just starts talking about how she
feels. It's very easy to see how the adversary likes to work by
weaseling doubt into somebody. A little bit of doubt can undo years of
spiritual experiences. She struggles with the word of wisdom, and sin
weakens her faith, and it also lifts a burden of guilt that she isn't
doing what she is supposed to be doing. She's really honest with us
though, so we're going to keep working with her, and when her faith is
strong, we'll work with the family too.
There are a lot of
miracles though! We're managing to find a lot of new people teach.
Burnaby is a pretty big place, and there are people kind of sandwiched
all over the place. We feel very blessed to be here. I'm still blown
away by how multicultural it is here. French is on all the labels, but
if they printed labels by population, there would be Chinese and Arabic
and everything else.
Ha ha, and, if you
must know, one of my essays was indeed used for Russ Beck's English 2010
class. Last year one of my friends from high school took the class and
wrote to tell me that my essay on memes was required reading and he
called it a "joyful romp". I don't recall writing any poems about roses,
however... I think that there might be 2 Josh Blotters. I think I
googled myself one time or something and I had a doppelganger that went
to Woodscross high school or something. So that's my theory. :)
Well! Out of time! Love you all and we'll talk to you next week.
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| Elder Francis's first chance to baptize someone. |
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| Marc and his family with Elder Francis and Elder Blotter. |
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