TEACHING ANGELA

January 14, 2008

Two new companions! I’ve been serving with Elder Roseman for about 3 months and with Elder Johnson for my whole mission, about 5 months so far! We found out on Saturday that Elder Johnson will be transferred on Tuesday to another area.

We are excited to find out who our next companion will be! All we know is that he’s just finished his two and a half weeks in the MTC, so Elder Roseman and I have the responsibility to train him! I’m pretty nervous about teaching and being a good example to him. Elder Roseman has trained before, so hopefully we’ll do it right and help him establish good habits for the rest of his mission. I’ll write about Elder ____ next week!

We were also able to welcome a new service missionary to the Institute at Chapel Hill, Sister Gwyn! She is SO full of energy! She has 7 daughters, about sixteen grandchildren, has served multiple service missions and knows President and Sister Wallis from Ohio. She will be at the Institute Monday through Friday from 8am to 9pm helping out in a LOT of great ways.

She’s making a “cookie of the day” in the morning and making the meals for a lunch we do for Institute students every week at Duke and UNC and contacting students on the phone and coming to Institute classes and being there during the day to keep the building open. I am really excited to share the little CES service missionary office with her. Hopefully some of her excess energy will rub off on me!!!

We are having a great time teaching Angela. She comes from a Catholic family and her boyfriend, Aaron is a member. She has a lot of great questions for us when we come over. We began just sharing spiritual thoughts with them when we went over for dinner. About two weeks ago, she asked to hear the missionary discussions, and we’ve had a lot of really neat, spiritual experiences with her as we read and reread certain scriptures, like Ether 12 about faith and Alma 32 about gaining faith as you would grow a seed.

I planned for Angela’s lesson on Saturday morning but I missed the lesson that night because I had a fever. Elder Roseman and Elder Johnson taught a part of the lesson by using dominoes. As they sat at a table, they put a domino within Angela’s reach and labeled it ‘a testimony of the Book of Mormon.’ Other dominoes followed like ‘a testimony of Joseph Smith as a prophet’ and ‘knowing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is God’s Church on the earth today.’

As the dominoes stretched farther away from her reach, the questions became less crucial, like ‘are Mormons the only people that do baptisms for the dead’ or ‘what happens to kids born in the millennium’ or ‘what is Heavenly Mother’s role.’ The point was that no one could start at the end of the domino chain trying to work backwards and answer less important questions without first answering the simple questions like ‘is the Book of Mormon the word of God’ ‘is Christ our Savior’ ‘was Joseph Smith a true prophet’ ‘is the church true?’

Angela really opened up on Saturday night and shared some spiritual experiences she has had, some that we were even present for! She talked about how it feels when she reads the Book of Mormon, that it feels right, that certain parts stick out to her. She shared a particular verse in Alma 32:16: Therefore, blessed are they who humble themselves without being compelled to be humble; or rather, in other words, blessed is he that believeth in the word of God, and is baptized without stubbornness of heart, yea, without being brought to know the word, or even compelled to know, before they will believe.

And Alma 32: 21: And now as I said concerning faith—faith is not to have a perfect knowledge of things; therefore if ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen, which are true.

Angela realized Saturday night that many of the times she has felt the spirit in the past were really the beginning of her testimony. It is really amazing to see the Spirit work on people, when they really see God communicate to them through the Holy Ghost.

Thank you for all of your letters and support! Sorry if I don’t respond quickly!

Elder Walters