Well Hey
There!
Thank you
Mom for you email today! It was awesome! It sounds perfect to me!
Thanks for all the help with getting me set up for school! You
rock!
It has been
an awesome week! We have had all sorts of little miracles all week long!
It has been great! Among the miracles, One was the presence of one
of our most awesome investigators in church yesterday! It was his first
time to come but he made himself at home as if he has been a member his whole
life! Everyone LOVED him! He is such a funny guy!
This man's
name is D. We have been visiting with him for about 3 weeks now.
We met him at the Internet cafe in our apartment complex while we were
trying to synchronize our iPads. He was just sitting there talking and
being friendly with the rest of everybody in the Internet cafe. Everyone
else in the Internet cafe seemed to be trying to kindly put up with him.
Not that they didn't like him, just that they were all there for other
purposes than to chat. I just knew we had to talk with him. So we
picked up our iPads and went to sit down next to him. D. LOVES to
talk so we really didn't get any words in. We realized pretty quickly
that he has several good jokes and stories (all of which teach an important
principle about life) that he shares with EVERYONE! He is retired but he
says, he doesn't believe in being retired and that now as someone who doesn't
have to work to bring in the money, he devotes himself to a different type of
work, the work of service to all his fellow beings. He loves to brighten
people's days. And he always references The Lord as he goes about doing it.
He studies the Bible quite a bit. Eventually we were finally able
to give him a Restoration pamphlet. It was the funniest thing when we
handed him the pamphlet and he made the realization, "Wow! I'm
honored to be in your guys' presence! You guys are so young and yet you
are already sharing the word with people!" He then began to explain
to everyone sitting around us how impressed he was with us and that how more
people should be like us. It was probably the warmest welcome I have ever
received as an English missionary and so I have to admit I began to wonder if
he was being sincere with us or not. I wondered for a min if he was being
"sweetly/comically sarcastic" or if he was for real. He was
saying stuff like, "Wow! That explains the light you have about you
guys! You young men just stole my heart away! Wow! So you
guys do this all the time? I am so impressed with you young men!"
I realized pretty
quickly though that he really and truly was just a super friendly and loving
old man. He is awesome. In our next visit with us he told us that
the last time he had driven by our church (before he knew that we were
affiliated with it) that he had felt the impression from The Lord to go to
church there. He said that he had never followed up on that impression
though and that because of that The Lord must be using us to remind him.
He told us that he just goes around wherever he thinks that The Lords
word is taught the way it is supposed to be without joining himself to any of
the churches because he hasn't found any pure doctrine. He believes that it is
all somewhere changed/compromised according to ones desires. For that
reason he claims to only bind himself to the truths that he finds and sees in
the bible.
One of my
favorite quotes from him is, "Young Men, I'm bound by the truth."
The first time he told us this, we misunderstood him and thought that it
was his nice way of telling us that he couldn't accept what we had shared with
him because he didn't believe we were telling the truth. My thoughts
were, "Great! I will just show him that I'm not the only one saying this
and that it truly does come straight from God's holy word brought to us by his
prophets!" I opened up the bible and handed it to him so he could see a
few scriptures about it. But before he even read the scripture he stated,
"Young men, you don't have to prove anything to me. I already know
you speak the truth. I can feel it from you. You young men speak
only the truth and I know that because that is what I have felt." He still
read the scripture I had handed to him (which he loved by the way) but I got to
see a perfect witness right in front of my face of the fact that the spirit,
which testifies of truth, is the perfect and best teacher. So now,
whenever we hear, "Young men, I am bound by the truth", I love it
because I know it means that he is ready and willing to do whatever it is that
he knows The Lord is asking of him.
Oh...here is
just one of his funny lesson jokes (he tells this one to everyone!),
"Young men, something I have learned in my life is that God gave man the
woman to be his best friend. So if you want one, get your own, and not
somebody else's"
Anyway,
through a series of events, we weren't able to see him all week long. The
two times we had appointments with him things came up which made it impossible
to see him. So that was a bummer. One time is was the mission
conference, and the other time, he had some family errands to do. So when
Saturday night rolled around and we still hadn't seen him, I called to remind
him about church. He didn't answer so I left him a message. When we
didn't hear back from him, I assumed that something must have been wrong with
his cell phone and that he would get it when he reconnected it again or
something like that.
About
mid-way through sacrament meeting, a member motioned us to the hallway.
Our member whispered with a big ole grin on his face, "Hey Elders,
D. is here." Sure enough, when we got out to the foyer to meet
him, there he was! He was just sitting there talking away with everyone!
He was in the middle of one what must be one of his favorite stories.
He was visiting with people from the other congregation who had finished
up with church. When he noticed us standing there he interrupted his own
story with, "These are those Young men I told you all about that invited
me here! These are the ones that inspired me to be here today!"
He then proceeded to tell them how grateful he is to them that they sent
us to him. It was so so fun! He was making us sound like the best
missionaries in the world. We ended up having to interrupt him to put a
stop to it all and bring him into the chapel.
He LOVED sacrament
meeting! (or at least what he got to experience of it) He only got to hear one
speaker. When we closed up with the song and prayer he said, "So
that’s it? We are done?" He was so relieved when we
told him we still had another couple classes.
Well, I
could probably go on forever about this guy, but I'm out of time.
So just one
more thing…when Bishop invited him to introduce himself in Priesthood opening exercises,
it was pretty much the funniest thing ever! He just got up there,
introduced himself, made sure everyone knew that we were the ones who had
invited him in his own charming way, and then started telling all his greatest
D. lesson jokes that we have grown to love as his missionaries.
Everyone was laughing so hard by the time he was done. It was
great!
Oh and last
thought, he did such a good job winning friends and influencing people at
church on Sunday that we actually had members come up to us after church and
tell us that we can use them WHENEVER we want for lessons. Now that’s a
fun thought eh? We have people who now are asking us to let them come out
to visit with our investigators! So that is gonna be great for weeks and
weeks to come! Woot Woot!
Ok...I just
realized I spent the whole letter talking about just one of our investigators.
We have some other awesome ones too. But hopefully I will remember
to tell you guys about them next week too. Things are going great over
here! Love you all!
Hasta Luego!
Elder Ostler
