On Tuesday, we had our first district meeting with me and Elder Rasmussen in the same district. So what did we do afterwards? If you guessed that Elder Rasmussen and I went to the town square and contacted together, you're right! One person we talked to was a young teenager with his friend. That's always the best. After the contact, I wrote the following words about it in my planner:
He was anxious to get away. Not sure if his # is real.
But otherwise, it was fun to be with Elder Rasmussen again. He's still going strong with his no-English streak.
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I'll have you know that my glasses broke. It's unfortunate, but you don't need to "see" to preach the gospel. That's actually not true. There have been a number of cases where I've tried to talk with someone, thinking he was young, but in the end she turned out to be an old lady uninterested in changing her ways. New glasses are in order.
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Have you ever felt like someone was following you? On one particular day this week, I didn't have any such feeling, but someone was indeed following us. We were walking and talking with a man for some time about the Book of Mormon, but in the end he didn't want to read it. So we let him walk on ahead and we stopped. All of the sudden, two teenage kids came up to us and one said, "Excuse me, I heard a little bit about what you were talking about, and it interests me. What do you believe?"
I must have been too stunned to talk, because my mouth was hanging open and no words were coming out, so my companion started to explain. We had a discussion in which the one kid was asking a series of little questions, but it soon became clear that he had a bigger question under them all: How do I repent of my sins? He asked if it was enough to go to Confession, which they have in many churches. As he asked that question, an old lady walking by overheard and was quick to pounce: "Yes, go to confession!"
"Thank you," we said, and she continued on her way. We explained that it wasn't enough to go to confession, that there are steps to repentance. First, you recognize that you did something wrong. Feel truly sorrowful that you did it. Ask God and any parties involved for forgiveness. Try to correct whatever you did to the extent that you can. We used an example of theft from a store: return the item or, if you've eaten it, go back and pay for it. This process seemed to make sense to him. We talked about many other things and have a meeting in order for this week. Then we found out that they were the same two kids that Elder Rasmussen and I contacted on the town square. Remember? The one who was anxious to get away? His number turned out to be real. He explained that he hadn't thought about these things before, but we said something to him on Tuesday that he had been thinking about until now. He tried to look us up on the internet but found the Jehovah's Witnesses instead. Awkward.
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I know you all want to see what my companion looks like, but I was bad at taking pictures this week. That'll have to wait.
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