Hey hey hey!
So this week has been awesome. We had a lot of great miracles!
Halloween was pretty fun. We had a lesson that went really well. That left us only like a half an hour before we had to be in our apartment because we had to go in early at 8. It was nice to get to relax and go to bed earlier, especially since this week was exhausting. For some reason we kept on having busy stuff happen and we had to cut some of our meals really short or just skip them all together and live off snacks. It's been adventurous!
I definitely realized even more the power of prayer this week. Elder Mumford and I were studying prayer during companion study. One of my favorite passages is the Bible Dictionary section on prayer which basically says that prayer just grants us the blessings that God is already willing to grant but are made conditional on us asking for them. And so Elder Mumford and I decided to take that promise extra seriously and we prayed that we could get a solid new investigator this week. And the Lord SUPER blessed us this week!
We prayed to get a new investigator. And this week we got a call from President Clements and he gave us a referral! it was great! The first thing he said as we started talking gospel is, "I just want to know the purpose of life." BOOM we whipped out the Plan of Salvation in a Millisecond and blew his mind. It was fantastic! The lesson actually went really well and you could tell he liked it a lot. And we have another appointment with him next week! We're excited!
Next miracle! We got a call from some other Elders in St. Paul who gave us a referral. She has family members that are Mormon in California. Her cousin told her to go to mormon.org and chat with the missionaries. And so that's what she did! She kept asking questions and stuff and eventually the Elders in Provo started teaching her lessons over Skype!! How crazy cool is that? By the time she got hooked up with us she already knew the Book of Mormon is true and wants to get baptized. What? Yes, true story! So all the hard work is done and they just passed her to us to get her going to a church, get used to the ward, and to baptize her. It's craziness and super sweet. So we met with her on Saturday and she is awesome. She came to church yesterday and then came to the CES Fireside last night too. She is so golden. The plan as of now is to have her baptism at the end of December because that is when her family that lives in Cali could come to watch. It would be so cool. Hopefully i'll be around by then. No one knows!
So those were two major miracles. _____________ is also doing really good. I forgot to tell you that we had to push his baptism back a week because his parents are going out of town.
____________ is doing okay. We've kinda layed back and stopped pushing the baptism and have put it more in his hands. Still teach him every week and he always comes to church and all the activities and stuff. He is just kinda stuck between a rock and a hard place. He loves his family SO much and that's a great thing. But he's affraid to disappoint them and wants their support before he moves on. He is such a respectable guy. I have learned many great lessons from him. I really think he'll be going on a mission someday. He would be killer diller missionary.
Holy smokes. Cool story! It was crazy! So we started talking to a girl on campus. We had a good conversation going and we taught pretty much the whole restoration as we walked with her. We ended up talking for about 15 minutes and walked her all the way to her house. She was grateful for the conversation but wasn't interested in learning more, which stunk for us because it was a good conversation. And then she told us that she lives with 9 other Christian girls and asked us if we would come in and let her and her roomates pray over us. Oh man... we went in the house and met everyone and then us and 10 girls stand in a circle and have a prayer. And you got to remember that most people don't pray like us. They pray to Jesus and and anyone can join in and say anything in the pray and if someone says something you really like you say, "yes Lord!" or "thank you Jesus!" Elder Mumford is used to prayers like that being from texas but I had no idea what was going on! And it doesn't help that all these girls were beautiful! Oh man it was an experience. Maybe one of them will read the Book of Mormon we left and convert the rest of them. 10 baptisms! And since they are all very pretty the singles ward may gain 10 members at first but would lose 20 in the end because all the fellas here would start dating like crazy! It would result in many souls saved :) Ha ha. Just kidding.
The final news of the week is that the stakes here in the Twin Cities got together and reorganized the Singles ward. They combined the Dinkytown, Uptown, and St. Croix singles wards all into one and made it the Twin Cities YSA ward. So we now officially cover a HUGE area. It is all of Minneapolis and St. Paul and their suburbs and goes over into Wisconsin even. We have a lot of work to do, but we're gonna see some miracles!
Well, I love you guys. I better get headed out. It was sad to hear that the suburban is gone. but those things happen. Things change so much in two years! i'm gonna get back and everything is going to be super different! Weird...
Love you!
Elder Ruesch
