A General Authority Visit, An Amazing Birthday Party & More!

Hey everyone!!!

I don’t have a lot of time to write, but I will try and write as much as I can in the next few minutes. 

This week has flown by, as usual! But it has been awesome.

So the highlight for the beginning of the week was obviously the General Authority coming to speak to our mission. He was super awesome! His name was Elder Foster. He took my middle name!! 

His wife gave a super cool talk that had to do a little with football. She told a story about how a team was down 41-0 at halftime and when they came out second half, the losing team started playing better and started scoring. The running back ran for a touchdown, and another player said to him, “Great job, but where were you during the first half?” The running back answered that he had forgot to lace up his shoes. She told us not to wait until the middle of our mission and be down 41-0 to lace up our shoes, but do it now and get to work. She was awesome and had some really cool stories.

Another big topic that they talked about was the power of exceedingly great faith and that with this faith many miracles have been wrought. Then Elder Foster went through Doctrine and Covenants 31 with us, verse by verse and we spent a lot of time talking about it. In verse 3, the one that I chose for my mission plaque, I made a comment about how sharing glad tidings of great joy reminded me of Christmas. I said that we are all so excited Christmas morning to wake up and open presents and there is a spirit in the air during the holiday season, and that we should wake up every morning with this spirit because we are sharing the good news with people. In another training, he talked about three columns with the headings: Missionaries, Members helping Missionaries, and Missionaries helping Members. He said that missionaries need skills and the Spirit and members need the same thing. Right now, he said, our mission is in the second column. The members help the missionaries in the work of the Lord. But how it should be is members calling missionaries and saying we have a family we are teaching could you help us. The members should be inviting the missionaries to do missionary work and if we did this the number of baptisms a month would be off the charts. That was a really cool exercise to think about. He also talked a lot about how family history and the temple can be used in our teaching. He also used an analogy that we can't start a fire with the big logs, but that we have to start with the small kindling and that involves bringing in less actives back into the fold.

A pretty cool story: My comp accidentally left his scriptures at an investigators home and he asked her to bring them to church for him. Well on Sunday the investigator texted us and said she couldn’t make it. Since he still needed his scriptures he asked her if she could just drop them off at the church. She did and then ended up staying for Sacrament Meeting and afterward was attacked by the Relief Society!! It was pretty awesome.

We also have another investigator that should be getting baptized in the next two weeks and he is doing super awesome! He brought his grandchildren to church on Sunday and they loved it!!

On Saturday we attended a birthday party for a girl in our branch. She just turned 7! It was the biggest birthday party I have ever been to, period! The entire branch came and she was seven! It was awesome. There was food for days and tons of people! At first they were blasting some pretty bad crazy music, but then they changed it to some nice Mexican songs. We had a huge feast for dinner and I just started talking to everyone. We were able to talk to a lot of nonmembers so it was really cool. And then they pulled out a giant piñata and the kids went at it, but they don’t blindfold them, they just sing a song and once the song is over their turn is over. Well it was so heavy (full of candy) that the head just popped off and all the kids started rushing for the body and tore it to shreds! It was pretty gruesome, but awesome. We then put the head on our heads as missionaries!! Mom, I better get a party like that when I get home! ha

So one last story real quick! We went to this person’s house and started talking to them and they were from Cuba so it was hard for me to understand, but they just went off!!! They talked about how the Sabbath day was Saturday and how an Emperor Constantino had changed it from Saturday to Sunday and so they hated my companion because that’s his name. Then they said he was pathetic and they wanted to talk to our leader!! The whole time I just wanted to leave; it was bad!

Well my times up!! Have a great week!!

Elder Clark

Photos from the Birthday Party...