Another week in Indiana

Hello from Indiana!

 

This has been a good week, and it's been perfect weather! So everything's been going great! We started up waking up a little bit earlier and going running too, because Elder Ernest wants to get in shape these last 6 months, so that's made me pretty happy too.

 

We had a busy week, full of lots of meetings. On Wednesday, we had a conference with the whole mission. They said general authorities would be there, and we knew Elder Holland was visiting the Indy North Stake on Sunday (I'm in Indy West), so we were hoping he would be there, but it was are area seventy who came and visited. Which was still super cool, he taught us a lot, and it was cool to see my MTC buddies there. I also ran into an Elder from West Point that's serving out here! His name is Elder Lowe, and he lives in that neighborhood just across the street where the Garvers and Johnstons live. It was pretty crazy. I don't really know him, but I recognized him from high school, so that was pretty nuts.

 

On Thursday, we had interviews with President Cleveland. He's a super cool guy. We were supposed to have our interviews at 330, and we ended up having them at 630....just shows how super friendly he is. The whole interview he asked about me and my family, what I liked to do, and all that stuff. It just really showed me how good of a guy he is.

 

This week we came in contact with four of our investigators: Lee, Barbara, Spencer, and Ben. All of our other investigators were hard to reach this week (we have 13 total now, all of our tracting and finding efforts are starting to pay off.). We invited all 4 of them church, but only Ben showed up. That was kind of disappointing, but at least he did. One of them, Lee, straight up told us that he wouldn't come, but the rest said they would. Spencer, is the guy I talked about in my first email that's been investigating for a long time. He's a super nice guy, in fact he's going to give me a water bottle holder and tail light for my bike, but he's still not sure he wants to make that next step of being baptized. We had two really spiritual lessons with him, and we thought he'd come for sure to church, but he couldn't make it. We haven't talked to him yet since then, but hopefully we'll figure out why he couldn't come and have him come next week.

 

We had an awesome lesson with Ben last night. The Spirit was really strong. We taught him about some of the commandments, and he got emotional when we talked about them. Then we highlighted how by repenting and being baptized we can be washed clean from anything that's happened in our past, through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. It really meant a lot to him. He basically said that he's been looking for direction like that his whole life, and he could really see why we have those commandments and the blessings we receive from them. He hasn't decided on a date to be baptized yet, but he's still praying about it. He is excited to be baptized, and it will probably be August 31st or the week after. I'm pretty excited about it too.

 

 

-Elder Tom Hill