The Power of Prayer

This week has been crazy. Elder Anderson and I have been getting along so well and we've been getting so much done. We have a ton of people to be meeting with and so we spent a couple of hours the other day and sort of cleaned out our list of investigators and we're doing our best to focus on the people who are willing to keep commitments and bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ into their lives. We have tons of inside jokes and we are singing pretty much all the time. We sing hymns for our members when we have dinners or other appointments and they all love it and it totally brings the spirit, and then the primary presidency asked us to come teach a lesson about how much Jesus loves us for a little activity they had this week and at first it was super chaotic cause they're all little kids but then we looked at each other and were like "song time" and we sang I am a Child of God for them and immediately they all quieted down and paid attention, it was pretty cool.

I got to go to my first zone conference, which was awesome. The whole conference was about planning and preparing for our investigators, and the church has come out with a new method for how we should be doing our planning and it is so inspired. We go through our list of investigators and as we get to each name we say a prayer, discuss their progression and plan for what we can do to help them come to Christ for about 5 to 7 minutes, pray again, and then go on to the next name and at first I thought it was going to be like super robotic and not very personal but it works out so well. Every time we do it we get such direct answers to our prayers and they're always super immediate and it's really amazing to see. It's even cooler teaching the lessons that we plan with the new method. We have an investigator named Lydia who has kind of an interesting story. She's in her 30's and she has struggled with smoking since she was a teenager. She met with the missionaries almost 4 years ago and actually got baptized but never got confirmed. We don't know exactly what happened but we have an idea. So then she met with some other missionaries afterwards and they pushed her super hard and kind of scared her off and we're meeting with her now. Elder Anderson and his old companion have had two lessons with her and he said they both went okay. So we met with her on Wednesday and we asked some questions that we felt prompted to ask when we planned for her and she just totally opened up about where she was and then we taught about repentance and the Atonement and about how perfectly Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ love her and it was a super spiritual lesson and her countenance changed so drastically over the course of those 45 minutes. She's so amazing, and it was way cool to see such a huge change in her as she understood more about forgiveness and love. Awesome stuff.

We've met lots of interesting people out on the streets, but we've been getting better and better at connecting with people and having meaningful conversations in a short amount of time and then being able to relate everything back to the Gospel and the Book of Mormon. We've given out tons of Book of Mormons.

The members of our wards are awesome. We've had tons of opportunities to meet with members and get them more excited about missionary work and we've been seeing lots of progress and awesome things happening as we're working through the members of our wards. There's this one kid named Isaac Farrer. He's only 9 years old but he's a legit genius. We went over and shared a brief message with them and then asked them if they had any friends who we could meet with or they would be willing to share a message with and Isaac mentioned that he had a friend Roberto and so we just challenged him to give Roberto a Book of Mormon in the next week. The next day Isaac called us and he was like "Hey I gave Roberto the Book of Mormon and then I taught him about prayer and invited his whole family to church". Our minds were blown haha the kid is only 9!! It's awesome.

The weather has been awesome here, it rained for about 30 minutes the other day and that's been it. The sun is out and the skies are clear today so we went outside and played spike ball and kickball as a zone for our p-day which was super fun. Everyone jokes that I've brought the Arizona sun with me but I'm not complaining haha.

Guys, I love being out here serving the Lord in Oregon. It's hard at times, and I miss my family and I miss you all like crazy but I know I'm where I need to be. I know that Jesus Christ lives and that His gospel is so true. The principles of the Gospel are meant to bless our families, and I love being able to teach others about their Savior and how perfectly he loves them. He loves us so much. He lived a perfect life, he spent his entire life teaching and ministering, and ultimately suffered and died for us so that we could overcome sins and afflictions and death and be with Him and our families forever. I love my savior, and I'm so grateful to have his name on the badge I wear 24/7 to help me to always remember Him. He lives.

I love you all. Have an awesome week and as always, keep it lit :)

Elder Bond