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