Investigators

Hey family and everyone else who has survived the last 2 years of reading my emails without deciding to quit,  how’s life?

Things down here are going pretty well, we have been having a great time going around and trying to spread the word to the people here in Westbank, which sometimes is not as easy as it sounds. This week has been full of tracting (the funny thing about tracting here is you don’t get any doors "slammed in your face," it is more of a slow door closing while you are trying to talk to them and they try to make themselves as small and unnoticeable as possible) , and arguing with Elder Hansen about visiting the ghetto (he is not a big fan of the ghetto).

Haha as you can probably already tell we have been doing a whole lot of tracting in an attempt to get more investigators. It was a little hard at times, but we were able to find some cool people and were able to hit our goal for new investigators this week. One of the new guys we met is named F. He is the father of N (the one from Honduras that had missionaries teaching him down there that we found last week). It was pretty awesome because we were sitting with N on the front porch getting ready to start talking about the Book of Mormon, when all of a sudden F walked up, pulled up a chair, and listened to what we were teaching. He even started asking us a few questions about our church. So it was super awesome cuz I feel like that was a blessing for trying to find investigators with no success the few days earlier.  God pretty much just dropped him right in our laps as a way of showing that he knew we were trying hard to teach people.

We also had a cool experience while teaching our investigator M, we pretty much had the same kind of thing that happened with F. We were going to teach him about the Book of Mormon, and one of his friends from inside the house decided to come out and start talking to us too. This guy’s name was G, so we took the chance to run through the restoration as a review and talk about the Book of Mormon, and by the end G told us that he thought that the message we shared was pretty cool, and he would like one of the copies of the Book of Mormon as well. And to make it even better he had told us at the beginning that he doesn’t really believe in religion, but by the end he was very willing to invite us back to teach him more.

Something that is really cool that happened this week is that one of my old investigators, J M, just got baptized up in Jennings; so that was some super exciting news!

For all of y’all that don’t know what My Plan is for missionaries, it is a little program that helps missionaries make plans for continuing to progress as members of the church when they come home. Doing that program has made me reflect a lot on what has happened during my mission. It has made me realize how much God's hand really is in his work. Looking back, I can see God strengthening me in hard times, I can see his power softening the hearts of people I have met, and one that was surprising is I could see him blessing all of my past investigators through his gospel, even if they did not eventually make the decision to be baptized. It really has made me realize God does love all of us with a love that is incomprehensible. No matter what, he tries to bless us, as much as we let him bless us through our obedience. If I have learned one thing on my mission it is this fact that God is always with us, and he always wants us to find joy in sharing our testimonies and in our personal journey to conversion. 

Well I love you all and hope you have an awesome week! 

-Elder Porter

West Bank, Tracting, Gators/Crabbing

Hey everyone how’s life?

Things are going well over here in the West Bank. It is for sure the blessed bank, just looking at our meal calendar alone proves that. I am starting to see how missionaries in Utah feel, since here we cover more than one branch. We cover both Spanish and English work, so we have to go to both branch’s meetings and we get to get fed by both of them. I mean I guess it isn’t as intense as the Utah missions where they cover like 10 wards, but still. I’m loving it over here, the people are awesome, the district it awesome, and doing Spanish and English work is keeping us pretty busy, which I love! Haha one of the anti-perks of covering two wards is the fact that this Sunday when we came in, they had had one of their speakers cancel on them in both the Spanish and English ward; so that meant I had to come up with two talks on the spot to share since they thought choosing the new guy was a good idea.

This week has been the start of the building phase for this area. It had been closed down for around 3 weeks last transfer from missionaries going home a little early for school. But we are back at it, and we are tracting a ton. For the first few days here we didn’t have much success tracting. We would talk to people and they would either not be interested, or they would tell us to come back later. But eventually we found a super awesome trailer park full of Hispanics that let us in and teach a few of them. One was named N and he is pretty new from Honduras.  Apparently he had the missionaries visiting him down there, so it was pretty lucky for us to run into him again up here. We are planning on teaching him more and trying to bring him to church. We also met a man named I, he was pretty cool and we talked to him about the restoration and how it can help solve some of the problems in this world, and some of the questions people have. We had an awesome lesson with him, and by the end he was asking where the church was and told us he wanted to come and worship with us there.  That was super awesome! 

We also ran into a few Cajuns that were fun to talk to.  It was the first time Elder Hansen has met a true blooded Cajun, so it was a fun and new experience for him. 

This morning we had a fun time going and crabbing. For those of you who don’t know - you catch crabs by tying a chicken thigh to a rope, and dropping it into one of the bayous down here. You wait until you feel the crabs tugging on it and you pull them up. So we did that for 2.5 hours hours this morning and had a lot of success with it. We probably caught like 6 or 7 crabs each.  We even had a Cajun man come and give us some that he had caught, since he could obviously tell it was our first time crabbing. But one side effect of throwing chicken into the water is that it attracts other animals as well. Just like shark to chum, we had a few gators that started swimming  pretty close to the dock while we were crabbing. Some of us would distract them and try to scare them away, while the others were crabbing. And then at the end of the whole fiasco we had a guy come talk to us that had friends that are in the business of giving swamp tours down here; those guys will just play with gators during the tours and they will touch them and all that jazz. He grabbed one of the chickens and lured a gator in right to the dock and started feeding it. We were all so close to it we could have touched it (and I might have actually touched it...... don’t tell my mom! ) it was crazy!

But yeah that is what has been going on down here. I hope y’all have an awesome week!

June 12, 2018 --6 weeks to go

Hey everyone! This week has been a little bit crazy

First of all we are at the end of Elder Johnson’s mission and he is going to be flying home on Thursday, and I will be entering my last 6 weeks until I go home! It is crazy how fast that is coming! And to top it all off I am getting moved to a new area for my last transfer, so we will be turning over all of our investigators to the Metairie Spanish guys. I’ll be heading over to the West Bank with Elder Hansen to finish off the mission. But I am excited because I will still be in a Spanish ward, so that will be awesome! 

Another fun update this week is that K and her family are continuing to read the Book of Mormon and I think things are going to go really well with them in this transfer. I just hope she can find a way to make it to church, because that is all she needs to get her and her family ready to be baptized, so everyone pray for K that she will be able to get work off to come to church, or that she will be able to find a new job that gives her Sunday’s off. It’s sad every time we go over because she really wants to come to church, but it is hard to get anything to go your way as a Hispanic working in the states. Again keep her and her family in your prayers

I had a good experience this last Saturday on exchanges with Elder Cannon. I was able to spend part of the day down in Kenner with him. It was an interesting one. We knocked a bunch of doors and got bashed a few , but we also met a lot of good people. One of my favorites was one lady we talked to who when we did our little spill at the door, she kind of sighed, rolled her eyes and then said we could give her a short message. So we jumped right into it and for some reason we started with Joseph Smith’s story right away, instead of talking about prophets and all of that before. We told her about how Joseph realized there should only be one true church on the earth since Christ only established one true church, and then we went through his whole search for truth and first vision. It was awesome to watch how she changed right before our eyes as we talked. She went from being annoyed and uninterested, to listening attentively  and drinking in the story. By the end, after we testified, she told us she for sure wants us to come back and talk to her more about our church and everything. It is amazing to see how the spirit can change someone in the blink of an eye when they hear about what God has for them.

Haha and then this morning we had some fun times exploring an abandoned factory that is a stones throw away from our apartment. It was way fun and a little sketchy. We walked around in some of the old dark rooms that had no windows, and the only light was from our phones. It was an awesome time, and it was really cool to explore it even if sometimes we thought we might die in the dark haha.