I was looking on lds.org to look for a talk. And lo and behold! I found out that they are releasing a new edition of the scriptures! Woah! So, Mum, Dad, that's your gift to me, since I'm just a poor missionary. ;-) Lol... I wonder how that will effect the mission. All of the copies of the Book of Mormon might have to be changed. So that means, I don't know! I wonder how much this will change things? :-) Pretty nifty.
Apparently the new editions will be coming out in August or so. Sweet as. :-) It's already available for the iPad and everything else electronic.
So, I don't remember if I wrote at all about Vernon and Kelly. Kelly is a less active referral that came from a member in the ward, and her records were not on the ward list, so we have requested them. Anywho, she has a partner that is not a member, and we are teaching them both, and Vernon, the partner, is set for baptism on the 23rd, along with Jenelle and Keisha. (I'll talk about that a little bit more.) They are so keen. It is really awesome. At first, Vernon said no to being baptized, because he was baptized as a member of the Brethren Church, which I know nothing about. So, that was interesting. We committed him a few times, but he always said no. So we kept trying.
Well, we took Kelly and Vernon to the Visitor Center at the temple, which was a really awesome experience. (Btw, if you want any of your non-member friends to reaaaally feel the spirit, take them to a visitor's center. There is a really significant spirit that can only be found at the temple visitor center. So, it will be one of their most amazing experiences. I highly recommend it. All you need to do is invite them, and the missionaries will do all of the rest. :-)) So, we took them, and watched a video about families being eternal. It was really good. Marriage is the next step that they need to take before being baptized. So that's really cool. But they really felt the Spirit there. It was great. We should have set them at the temple, but we didn't and then we set them the next morning. So that was really good. :-) Kelly, Vernon, and Kelly's Mum and Brother-in-law; all of them came to church on Sunday. They all enjoyed church, and the brother-in-law said he will come the following week. That is really great. :-)
We had an Elder's Quorum activity that we invited investigators to. It was a Hangi. A hangi is a Maori-style meal. It is really nice. It is made with a hole dug in the ground, irons and stones heated to searing in a fire, then placed in the hole. Then, you place metal baskets of meat and veggies in the hole, then cover it with sheets and sacks, then cover it back up with the dirt. Then you leave it for hours and come back, uncover, and eat. It is steam cooked from all of the hot irons and rocks. So that's really cool. :-) It's a huge ordeal.
Since E. Lee has come, out lessons have seen an almost double in the amount. It has been really great. We have more lessons every day to teach, and the Spirit is present more often, and we teach in better unity. E. Lee is by far the best companion I have had so far. We are going to really see some miracles take place in this wonderful area.
So, let me tell you about an experience that E. Lee and I had a few days ago. Well, we decided to walk so that we could talk with some more people on the streets. Well, we saw this one young man at the end of the street standing there, and we decided to go and speak with him. So we did. He was what is called a pioneer. Equivalent to being a missionary. Kinda. Well, he gave us some religious material and talked about his religion, the Jehovah Witness church. He looked deeply terrified to be talking with two Latter-day Saint missionaries. He wasn't confident at all. Then two of his buddies came along to help him out. He was visibly relieved by this. Well, we found out from retrospect that his mum and dad told him to wait at the corner while they went and preached to some others. When his friends came, it changed from being a nice informative chat to being hostile. One of the JW's, Carl--I remember his name because he was so hostile-- was so hostile. He thought he was the baddest badd guy to ever grace the presence of Ngaruawahia. Lol.. he was a Kiwi. The first was a Kiwi. But their other friend was from Maine. Well, we tried to have an intellectual discussion with them, but their most common resort was to go to the scriptures to prove how we were wrong and how they were right. Lol... All they wanted to do was bible bash with us. So all we did was testify to them, not bible bash, because the Spirit doesn't like to stick around when contention is near. Well, eventually, there were seven JW's, and we decided that nothing good was going to come from it, so we left. It was interesting, and I found out how appalling their tactics were. They pointed out all of the cliche "contradictions" in the Book of Mormon and between the bible. Well, they were all things I have heard a million times, and it was annoying to think that these people wouldn't even try to find out any other new "dirt" on us. Well, as E. Holland so boldly and clearly states in Safety for the Soul,
For 179 years this book has been examined and attacked, denied and deconstructed, targeted and torn apart like perhaps no other book in modern religious history—perhaps like no other book in any religious history. And still it stands. Failed theories about its origins have been born and parroted and have died—from Ethan Smith to Solomon Spaulding to deranged paranoid to cunning genius. None of these frankly pathetic answers for this book has ever withstood examination because there is no other answer than the one Joseph gave as its young unlearned translator.
But they couldn't be dissuaded, so we left. I wrote this in my journal: "They didn't listen to us at all... There was a perceptible change between my companion, E. Lee, and themselves. A change in the spirit."
So, This church is true, and no one can prove it wrong. So many evidences have come up and tried (and failed) to prove something wrong. When you think about it, all that you need to find out is whether or not the BoM is true. If it's true, and it is, then everything else that the church teaches is true.
Love,
E. Staheli
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