September 12

This is us at a BBQ last P-Day with the Harmon group

 

Dear Family!

Wow well this week has been full of many ups and many downs. The good news however is that we did have transfers so I'll be staying here in Brooklyn Park for another with Elder Mellen.

Tuesday was full of goodbyes, we had the opportunity to spend a little extra time with Elder Brown and Tausaga before they left on Wednesday. It's not that we were slacking on the work to do it, but it was the fact that our car had a bad battery so we dropped it off at the pep boys to have it looked at. We were within walking distance of their apartment, but far out of are area. We talked with them as they packed and Brother Cruz took us to get Sundaes at Costco. He dropped us off at the car shop and we got our car back and we got back to work.

Wednesday we had transfers and got two new Elders in the Branch. Elder Davidson and Elder Criddle. It's really cool,because Elder Davidson was trained by Elder Mellen and elder Davidson is training right now! We had an appointment fall through and as we went to get back into our car, it was dead once again. After placing a few calls we had it into the shop and got Elder Davidson and Elder Criddle to shopping after we got it back. 

Thursday was a frustrating day. The assistants I guess switched up our area boundaries and gave some of our area to the other elders and some of theirs to us. But we were not informed at all about anything and found it all out through elder Davidson. We also found out with the area change we would be giving up 7 of our investigators that we had been working with for the last 6 weeks. It really hit me hard because it started to feel like the work we had been doing with them was all a waste because we wouldn't ever be teaching them. It took some time for me to get through that, but by Friday night I was pretty settled with it.

On the Up side however, we had a great visit with Andrew the Atheist Friday morning. He invited us in and asked what we had prepared to talk with him about. I went over the Candle of the Lord talk with him by President Packer it went pretty good and he committed to read and pray about the Book of Mormon. 

Saturday was a great recovery day for us. We had contacted a bible referral that had come in Thursday. Her name was Nichelle. We called and asked when we could drop it off and she said Saturday at noon. When we got to her home, there she was sitting on her porch waiting for her free bible. After talking with her for a few minutes we introduced the Book of Mormon and she wanted to learn about it. We had a great first discussion there on her porch with her. A random lady walked up during it and listened to half of it and asked for our contact info to learn more as well. We found out she wanted to be baptized so we will work with that.

That night we had a pass off lesson with Cornbread (Sean) at the Harmon home. We talked about the last half of the Plan of Salvation and visited with them about smoking. Elder Davidson had a plan to commit them to stop smoking by having them promise a picture of Christ. It was awesome because they even said "Well that's unfair, I can't lie to Jesus." After much talking, testimony bearing, and Alma 34 33-40 reading, we had Sister Harmon on tears, Cornbread said he'd stop smoking by the 25th of September and accepted a baptismal date of October 30th. It was a great lesson and had us all pumped for the transfer.

Faith really does help us pay off. We learned in Stake conference this last week that we need to " learn by faith." If you want to learn how to swim, you get into the pool, if you want to grow your faith, you act on the promptings of the Holy Ghost. Faith really is a muscle, if we aren't using it, it is deteriorating. Why would we let such a precious thing fall out of our hands because of our laziness? The more we act on our faith, the more it grows. If we want to learn about faith, you learn by exercising your faith.  

Love,

Elder Bentley