Counterfeit Money

 

The first highlight of the week happened on Tuesday. Since this was the first Tuesday of the transfer, we had Zone Council and then District Council. Elder Dalton and I were asked to conduct a training on how the term Myopic (from President Nelson's talk "Let God Prevail") relates to missionary work. It was no sweat until we found out the night before that President Dunn and Sister Dunn were going to drop in and listen. I was actually sort of nervous because this was like the 3rd time I had been in the same room as President Dunn. It ended up being really cool having him there. I'm pretty sure it's because they're planning on making Elder Dalton assistant to the president next transfer--that's just my theory. Or me, who knows. Haha! Right, the re-assigned missionary who just got here a transfer and a half ago becomes AP...yeah I would just leave lol. What was really cool though is that after Zone Council we split up into districts for District Council. We assumed that President and Sister Dunn would both go to other districts but they actually BOTH stayed with us which was crazy. And we had one of our Zone Leaders there too. That meeting would have been super awesome too because I had to lead another training session on "taking good notes in the area book" but one sister missionary decided to take a whopping 25 mins for her "5 min obedience training"! So that was a real hoot. We were already overtime anyway and so we had to really hoof it in our training. That was certainly an experience. It's not every day that one of the busiest couples in the world takes time to visit with the very small and insignificant Hunterlake/Peavine District. 

One of the brand new additions to pandemic regulations in our mission is called proselyting walks. It is basically just street contacting BUTTT because that is "not allowed" because of Covid, you have to be "found" while walking around. However, you are still encouraged to talk to everybody. So yeah, definitely not just street contacting. However, our proselyting walks have been nothing short of invigorating these past few days. 

On our first proselyting walk we ran into a lady with a dog. I simply asked if I could pet her dog. She said no. But then she showed us what she had been "working on." Her clipboard was filled with crinkled pieces of paper that had nonsense and numbers  scribbled all over it. She said that the Gods were planets and planetary cycles determine the Earth's weather, diseases, economy, love, death, everything. It just looked like a bunch of nonsense to me but we talked to her for about an hour. Well more like she talked to us. 

We thought that was going to be as weird as it gets, boy were we wrong. We met a Canadian guy, and he started asking us a bunch of really deep doctrine questions that I just didn't know. Again it was an experience that took about an hour, but he was super open to meeting with us again. Probably so he can just try and prove us wrong, I don't know. I'm not really into arguing about the Gospel. There is no way you can prove to someone that the Book of Mormon is indeed another Testament of Jesus Christ or that the gospel has been restored. If you could logically prove it, it would be too easy. It's not supposed to be easy. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of convincing evidence but you cannot 100% prove it. It requires faith to choose to study it and ask God about it. On the other hand, the Gospel is simple--Faith, repentance, baptism, receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost and enduring to the end. 

Anyway the next crazy guy we met was at a little gratitude project we had at a local park. We had a big board and asked people to write what they were thankful for and we gave out free hot chocolate. Most of the homeless people were only into the free hot chocolate, but the board got pretty full by the end of the day. A contractor guy came up to us and started pulling coins out of his pocket and was like "do you know why 7 is a perfect number?" We didn't really know where this was going and so we just sort of let him do his thing. He put one penny in the middle and what do you know--you can perfectly fit 6 pennies around that middle penny making a perfect 7. What this had to do with his claim that the 4th Commandment was actually love thy neighbor I'm not really sure, BUT he was very charismatic. We actually left before he finished because we had already been at the park for a full two hours and our "shift" was up so I'm not sure how that ended. I think he kept on rambling which was a real turn off for the other people walking around the park. The board did get filled up though and it actually looked pretty nice. But yeah, missionary work. 

Interestingly our strange encounters all had one thing in common. They all brought up the idea of something being counterfeit. Like, how can the CIA tell real money from fake money--that was one question. Obviously we didn't know but one guy said it was because the CIA only studied what real money looked like. Their eyes become so accustomed to real money that they can tell the fake from the real thing just by sensing it. This guy then said the Book of Mormon is a fake because it didn't feel like the word of God and we should just study the Bible. I just couldn't help but think back to Jacob 7 where Sherem basically says the same thing and Jacob just roasts him:

10 And I said unto him: Believest thou the scriptures? And he said, Yea.

11 And I said unto him: Then ye do not understand them; for they truly testify of Christ. Behold, I say unto you that none of the prophets have written, nor prophesied, save they have spoken concerning this Christ.

If you have really studied the Bible, you know it testifies of Christ. And the prophets in the Bible testify of Christ. And if you really study the Book of Mormon you will know that it testifies of Christ. All true prophets testify of Christ. The Bible and the Book of Mormon support each other and believing the Bible should actually help you know that the Book of Mormon is not fake.

The final highlight of our week was inviting our lady (who had all of the cool dreams) to be baptized. She started laughing saying it was "crazy how far she has come". She said she would do it but really wanted it to be in a river somewhere. As awesome as it sounds it's like 28 degrees right now and it just snowed and her baptismal date is December 5th. So either she's going in the font or my baptismal clothing is gonna be covered with ice crystals. The important thing is it's happening. She was a little taken aback by tithing but she said, "well if I take all the money I used to spend on alcohol and put it towards tithing, I'm almost there." Now that's a smart lady if you ask me.