The goodness really began with district meeting on Tuesday. Elder Knickerbocker wanted to focus training this week on families. We learned how to best teach families and the importance of finding and teaching families, and the invitation we were given was to seek and pray for opportunities to find more families to teach.
We left district meeting and got to work. On Wednesday something great happened! We met a guy named Busa, a Romanian 19 year old, who had been taught by missionaries before and wanted us to teach him and his wife and kids. We were so excited! We were even more excited when, after we got to extend a baptismal date to him in our lesson, he asked us go to to his father's house the next day to teach his mother and 7 siblings.
His mother, Rada, and his siblings were ecstatic the next day when we came to their house. Rada, in her poor english, asked me what she could do to come back to church. Her and the kids had been before a couple years previous, and she loved the feeling she got there and has been longing to return. She told us she had been going to Catholic churches around the area recently and the feeling is not the same. She did not know if she was welcome back at church and has been praying for us to come find her!
We were so happy to teach them and to invite them all to be baptised. In 16 year old Diamant's prayer at the end of our lesson, he simply but meaningfully said "Dear God, please help me to be baptised. Amen."
This instance is one of many, many miracles we saw in every part of our work this week.
We were also blessed to meet a man named Hussein, who is a Muslim young adult from Mauritania in Northern Africa. He is very kind and eager to learn more, and has agreed to be baptised if he finds that this is true.
What I love about Hussein can't be better explained than by his own words when I asked him, "why do you want to know if the Book of Mormon is true?"...
"Because I am a seeker of truth. It does not matter if it helps me or hurts me, I will do whatever I can to find the truth and to embrace it."
For everyone who is reading this, I promise with every bit of confidence I possess that the message of the Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ through the prophet Joseph Smith is pure truth. It is and was truth from heaven that was brought to the earth for every one of God's children to find, and the beauty of it is that it makes people happy!
We encourage all to find this truth for themselves, by simply reading the Book of Mormon and asking God if it is true.
Much happiness and more miracles were brought to us this week as the weekend approached. The wonderful fact that it was General Conference was not enough! We were so happy to have 7 investigators at church to watch conference -- a jump from 0 last week. And there would have been 10 if Rada and Busa hadn't had an emergency where they had to go to the hospital.
The Lord's hand has not been stayed in the least this week. For the first time in a long time, we have 11 progressing investigators. In a week that was so critical in determining the conversion I will have a chance to see in my remaining time in Galway, miracles produced and the joy of the Gospel is flowing.
We got to watch all but the Sunday Afternoon session of General Conference, and it was awesome. It's funny to hear the different perspectives on the themes for conference that were deduced from you all, because to me it seemed to all be about missionary work! Haha, we're all biased.
Today we are facilitating a few different performances in Galway from the Southern Utah Heritage Choir, which we've been advertising for the past few weeks!
Also, beginning today, a man from a local radio show here will begin to follow Elder Massey and I around as we will be featured in a 30 minute radio documentary in the coming weeks. More info when I get it!
I love you all and I'll talk to you soon!
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