Images from the Lewiston and Moscow Zones.
Well this week flew by pretty fast and I had met a couple more interesting people and had a couple cool experiences.
Yesterday at church I gave a talk that I actually feel like i did a really good job on. Why? because I had it memorized! I didn't mean to have it memorized actually. I wrote the talk but then, knowing myself, I didn't want to be looking at my paper the whole time I spoke so I rewrote it using only bullet points that I could glance at the paper, see what to talk about next and elaborate on it. I ended up not even unfolding the paper when I got up to the podium. I was able to remember what scriptures to share and what to say about them along with other things I wanted to share. I was able to speak for 10 minutes without reading from my paper once! :D I felt pretty cool and I could tell the congregation enjoyed my talk. it was nice to be able to make eye contact with people as I spoke.
After church the bishop told us that there was a woman who wanted us to bring her a copy of the Bible... in the mental hospital. We got there and did all the paperwork to get in and went to go meet her. ..They had a room set aside for us to meet with her in. So we went with her into this room and one of the first things she said was
"I swear I didn't kill anybody! I would never hurt anybody in my right mind." She then proceeded to tell us about how she is a paranoid schizophrenic and how she was in there waiting for the court to decide what to do with her.
The whole situation was very uncomfortable, but we left her with the Bible she requested along with a Book of Mormon. and left with a little pile of papers that had her "prayer requests" on them she had pretty much written down all of her prayer so that she could give them to us. She wants us to come back and teach her. I have very mixed feelings about teaching someone in this situation but if it will help her find peace then I guess it's ok. I don't really consider her accountable for her actions
Last night we had kind of a cool teaching experience. We went to go talk to a woman who had been inactive for 6 years and who had recently gone back to church. Her husband had expressed over the phone that he has noticed a change in her since she came back to the church so he wanted to sit in on her visit.
We got there and began to talk to his wife and we began to just read a verse from the B.O.M and he seemed really intrigued by it. So we suggested that we read some more and I gave him a copy of the book for him to follow along in. He would follow along with the verses we read and while we discussed them with his wife he would flip through other pages and I noticed he was reading through the introduction along with the testimonies of the witnesses and Joseph Smith in the from of the book. So, realizing that even though his wife had been coming to church he might not actually know anything about the church or the Book of Mormon, I asked him what he knew about the book.
He told us that he knew we believed Joseph Smith found the gold plates and that we were nice people but that's all he knew.
We took the opportunity to teach him about the apostasy and the Joseph Smith story. He was really intrigued because he has never had anyone explain it to him before. He kept on interjecting with things like "Okay, yeah, that makes sense" and as we read scriptures about the importance of having The Book of Mormon he was able to describe to us what the scripture was teaching and how we could apply it to our lives. He was an avid Bible reader so he definitely knew how to read scripture.
When we talked about the fall of Adam and Eve and it's importance he said that he had never thought about it before as a good thing. And that he liked our view on it.
We didn't have to leave him with any kind of commitment because without us even asking he said that he believed the story about Joseph Smith and how he got the gold plates (which is probably one of the hardest things for people to believe) and that the verses we read had power in them so he knew the Book of Mormon was true. and that he would like to keep the copy we gave him so that he could study it. And then he told us we could come back in two weeks to teach him more. Hopefully I'll have more stories next week! oh! and my birthday is coming up on February 6th, I'll be 19!
I assume he's in here somewhere'