We had a couple of throw down lessons this week with some less actives as well as investigators who haven't been progressing. One less active in particular, knows all the things she needs to do but always makes excuses as to why she can't do it. We've seen a lot of progress in her Book of Mormon reading these last couple weeks because we've texted her a lot of reminders. But she is still having trouble with the law of chastity, the word of wisdom, and keeping the sabbath day holy. While we were with her this week, we read Heleman 4:24-25 and then we talked about how we need to keep the commandments in order to have Heavenly Father with us. Then we said something like, "Hermana, we really don't know what to talk about when we visit you anymore. We've talked about the law of chastity and nothing has changes here. We've talked about the Word of Wisdom and you still drink coffee. And we've talked about keeping the sabbath day holy and you still have trouble coming to church a lot of the time. We've seen you progress in your daily scripture study, but we want to see the same progress in these other commandments too. How can we help you?" Boom. Throw down. We then had her pick one commandment to work on and she picked keeping the sabbath day holy. She almost came to church yesterday, but unfortunately she texted us a half hour before it started and asked for a ride. We didn't see the text until about a half hour after the conference started. But I know that's progress for her and I'm really hoping that we'll be able to help her come to church every Sunday from now on.
We finally were able to see Yoli this week. She has been working a ton this past month. We were able to talk more about where she is at with the gospel and what she wants to get out of the visits. She said she liked it all and wants to get baptized. But we also talked about how she can't get married to her boyfriend because she and her family are working on their papers and when they started she was not married. It's a pretty difficult situation because she and her boyfriend have 3 kids together and she lives with him and his family. He and his family are all members. But as we were talking, I knew it would be better if we dropped her for now so that we could find the people who are ready to be baptized right now. We told her that we want to help her prepare for baptism, but it's hard because she can't take that step right now. So we encouraged her to keep reading and praying and coming to church every week so that they could progress on their own. Then we told her that in a few months, we would come back and try to teach her again to help her get ready for baptism. It was sad and hard to do because I don't want to stop visiting her, but I know it'll be better, especially because she's so busy with her new job all the time.
This week, I studied the Baptism and Confirmation section in Chapter 1 of Preach My Gospel. I really like the quote by Dallin H Oaks that says, "We do not preach and teach in order to 'bring people into the Church' or to increase the membership of the Church. We do not preach and teach just to persuade people to live better lives. ... We invite all to come unto Christ by repentance and baptism and confirmation in order to open the doors of the celestial kingdom to the sons and daughters of God. No one else can do this." I love that our purpose is to help people make the covenant of baptism with God so that they can receive eternal life. Without that goal of baptism in mind, we're just sharing a nice message about Jesus Christ. But because we have that goal in mind for everyone around us, we share a message of hope and change and we can help others be able to truly draw closer to our Heavenly Father.
We took lots of pictures on Wednesday because we had to change our profile pictures on Facebook.
Wish us luck because our miles got cut again. We're supposed to be a "half bike area" which is basically where we bike all the time except when we really can't. *praying I don't get hit by some of these crazy Memphis drivers😂😂
We listened to the Sunday morning session of general conference in Spanish with all the members and our investigators. As the the Mormon messages and homefronts started playing, the tv started doing this: jaja
<spanish video>
Hermana Keller
