Member Missionary Magic

Elder Matthews and Elder King at Multonomah Falls - May 16, 2016

It's been a fantastic week in Vancouver WA.  Elder Matthews & I shared the gospel with many and drank diet Mtn dew and Coke Zero w/diet cherry add in (Sonic special). We taught active members of our ward the majority of our week.  You would be surprised to see what strengthening the roots of the church does for the branches.  When the roots grow, the branches can increase.  Elder Matthews loves trees and farming stuff, so he has been teaching me about tree growth as related to the gospel.   Okay ,here is a cool story from the week.  After learning from one of our members how to work better with members, we started taking him up on the counsel he gave.  One important step he taught us is to have the members actually set up the lessons for our investigators.  Have the “fellowshipper”  for any given investigator call or stop by to set up the lessons.  We texted our favorite member of the ward, whom is fellowshipping our top investigator family (on date for baptism the 28th of May), and invited him to set up the next lesson.  For the past three weeks we have struggled to teach the youngest daughter of this family and we assume it is because we are scary 20 year olds that look like FBI agents or something.  But, our savvy member invited them over for a lesson & root beer floats after.  Guess who showed up?  The youngest daughter! He also invited the youngest daughter to take the lessons from him for an easier environment to learn in.  She accepted and now wants to be baptized on the 28^th with her family :).  During our last lesson with the family we taught of fasting for strength.  The whole family fasted (a father age 40, two daughters ages 14 & 10) for 24 hours!  I don't even remember doing that until I was a missionary.  They fasted to be baptized and to have strength.  Guess who invited them to do so?  OUR WARD MEMBER.  Work with the members and missionary work is a lot easier.  This week we took out two priests from the ward and invited them to compile a list of inhabitants perishing in unbelief (people without the gospel - hopefully that doesn't sound mean). Both times we were lead to families & people that we would never have found on our own.  It was really cool to see a couple younglings reaching out to their friends at such a young age.  Missionary work is kind of like the fellowship of the ring.  Everyone plays a significant role.  Just the other day, we had a cool miracle as well.  All day long we worked our butts off visiting everyone we could and talking to as many people as we could.  No luck for most of the day until about 8:45 PM.  We saw a girl walking her dog with headphones on across the street.  We felt inclined to preach some gospel  to her and darted across the street.  With a hand wave she removed her headphones to see why we were so happy to see her.  She asked at least 5 sincere questions about the Book of Mormon and said she would like to take the lessons.  She went from saying she was Catholic and happy where she was, to wanting to take the lessons at the end of the conversation.  Most of the success in missionary work does not come from our own plans.  We just hiked Multonomah Falls, and I only spent 5 dollars at the gift shop so it was a successful day.  This is the coolest place to serve a mission I hope you all know.