#BecauseOfHim

Missions are interesting things.

A member in our ward gave a very interesting talk the other week. He was talking about General a Conference talks. His main focus was on being courteous when defending/sharing our faith. He talked about Health Insurance. Basically he had to get a new health insurance to support his family. He is self employed (seems to do well). He was in contact with a Christian Health Insurance provider. During the application process over the phone everything was going great. He was qualifying. Then he asked "Well as a Christian organization I'm sure there's a religious part to this?" They confirmed that and started asking him religious stuff. Things such as "Do you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?" He said he was all "Amen to that Brotha!" (He is a really goofy funny guy). So he qualified. Then they asked him what church he went to. "I go to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints." The guy then goes gets his supervisor. Supervisor
talks to him. He is denied health insurance because he doesn't qualify as a Christian.  Wow! I know. I guess at times I start to get comfortable thinking that we are starting to get generally accepted by people. Nope.

This week has been a bit challenging for us. We have been fixing up the area a lot. It's now organized and mapped out well. We've visited everyone on the directory and all the former investigators since I've gotten here. Just about everyone has been covered. Sadly, the recently past missionaries had spent a lot of time just hanging around with people. They built really strong relationships and the people here love them. But... No real effective missionary work was done. Because of that we are basically starting from scratch as there are no new people added in our pool of people within the last year. We could fill our time easily but it would not be with things that are fulfilling our purpose as missionaries or are just very ineffective with our time. So it's been trying to find people and get someone progressing. On the bright side, Sister Tran & Flores have like 3 baptisms coming up! Which is great!

So it's my goal to teach at least 1 person via Skype on the iPad. (Totally allowed to). It dawned on me while Brindley and I were talking about how we want to teach people with Skype that I can totally teach any of my friends/people I know from back home if they want to take the lessons from the missionaries. Pretty cool stuff, eh? So hopefully I'll utilize the resources I have to take the opportunity to widen my range of influence.

Brother Thornton is my favorite. He took us to Applebee's for dinner the other day. It's just always a great time and great conversation. I think I might adopt him.

We had dinner with brother and sister Pitts the other night. They were the former mission president of Provo, Utah mission. It was interesting talking to them. Sister Pitts misses Coney's and the flavor of the days.

The Christensen priesthood chain of authority lives on through Adam.  Got the cool opportunity to ordain him to an Elder. He is excited about that and is continuing to be very focused on being a missionary. He's a character!

Sister Tran and Sister Flores are having two baptisms this Saturday!  It's pretty exciting. I am supposed to interview the one this week. So I'm a little nervous for that. Not too worried though.

As any of you who are social media aware, #BecauseofHim was the big marketing push by the church this week. It was pretty cool! If you haven't watched the video yet, go watch it. Now. Seriously. Mormon.org/BecauseofHim. Anyway, I'm excited to see the final results at that. It was trending on Facebook as well as other social medias, I'm assuming. It was all over YouTube on Easter Day. It was a very cool message. It was a great reminder of how everything we are is because of him.

Thanks for the Easter package! It's nice having a camera that works again. Starting to try and snag some photos.