Very Eventful Sunday! (Ch 5: G2 pt2, Week 4)

And it came to pass the fourth week of the fourth transfer Sunday was crazy!

I had almost nothing to write about until yesterday and now this email is long.

We are teaching a lady named Sincere and her 9 year old daughter Sinclair. Sincere is struggling with alcoholism and at one of our lessons gave us her last bottle of alcohol and let us dump it out and throw it away!!

I was on exchanges with Elder Openshaw here in Goldsboro. We decided to stop by someone we lost contact with a few weeks ago and Lashonda has read the Book of Mormon EVERY DAY since we last taught her because we set up a daily reminder to read it. She is so cool! If she can read every day y'all can too! It was also one of my favorite exchanges. It was a lot of fun!

Sunday was the craziest day. Random stuff came up for Sincere and Lashonda so neither of them were able to come to church but both of them really wanted to and we're confident we'll see them next week!

The power was out when we got there (45 minutes before sacrament started) and they said it would take a few hours to fix but it magically turned on within a minute before the meeting started! God is good!

Apparently we're at war? Us missionaries don't hear anything. It's pretty nice. Anyways, a good chunk of our priesthood holders are deployed. The last time this happened the ward had a bishop from the first ward because the bishop got deployed and there was almost no priesthood holders in the second ward. The time before that the ward got combined into the first ward for a few years. So we'll see what happens but being in a military ward is crazy! There's so much fluctuation in members because they get moved around and sometimes deployed. So far not too many have been deployed and there was a lot of people there still.

A guy named Eric showed up. I happened to randomly (and by randomly I mean the influence of the Holy Ghost is so subtle we don't know it's happening sometimes. See Elder Bednar's devotional titled "Quit Worrying About It") anyways I randomly talked to him. I was actually going to sit next to someone then changed my mind and walked back to decide who I would sit next to instead and ended up talking to him and we sat together as the meeting was starting. During the meeting I discovered that he was not a member (he seemed very unfamiliar with everything so it was easy to figure out) and he apparently found a Book of Mormon sitting on a bench in a park and decided to come to church. The Goldsboro first ward Elders happened to be there too and that's a crazy story too but one that I won't share here. Anywho they were there and Eric happens to be within their boundaries and I was able to introduce him to them!

Halfway through Sunday school we got a text from someone who was formerly taught but wasn't being actively taught and it said "I have been thinking about Joining your Church" and correctly assuming she had meant she was thinking about joining Jesus Christ's restored church, we left for a minute to call her and as Elder Howell described it, "it was like an MTC roleplay. She gave all the right answers."

The last crazy thing on Sunday was our meal calendar disappeared. We gave it to someone to pass around Sunday school, multiple said they saw it going around, but no one knows where it ended up. As of now we do not know where it is. Hopefully we find it because it is not good for ward relations when you don't show up to dinner when they signed up to feed you. Also southern cooking is the best and I don't want to miss any opportunities to have it!

I love all y'all lots!

And thus ended the fourth week of the third transfer.

We dumped our alcohol!