March 2, 2015
Area: Trinity River
Companions: Gamez and Reed (and splitting with Smith)
t sounds like you all had a great week! This week continued to go well for us, but we have been facing problems getting members to lessons. I personally feel like that is because most of our lessons haven't been very set up, we just end up having to stop by some of the people. Other than that, we have been seeing miracles happen as we get outside and contact. We were able to teach three people and give multiple referrals, including those three people, to the English Sisters and Elders. Both of their areas have been struggling recently, so it was a blessing for them to receive those referrals. We also saw multiple miracles because of specific prayers, I want to tell you about a couple of them.
The first one happened on Tuesday in the evening, while I was in my area
on exchanges with Elder Smith, one of my Zone Leaders. We had our
lessons at 7 and 8pm fall through, so I had no idea what to do, it was
8:30, so I decided to start heading on the 10 minute drive back to the
apartment because there was an investigator of ours that lives down the
road from us. She wasn't home. I thought that we could either head in
early or go contacting, I chose the latter. I drove to a trailer park
that was also close to home and we walked around there, we got to the
end of the park, and headed back. Nobody was outside, and I didn't want
to be that rude guy who knocks on someone's door at 8:45pm. We had
jokingly mentioned milkshakes earlier, so as I went to keep walking down
the road and said to Elder Smith, "Well, unless you want to go get
milkshakes, I have no idea what to do." Elder Smith said, "Well, there's
more of a chance that we can talk to someone at Dairy Queen than out
here," and I agreed and we were talking about how to make our Dairy
Queen visit purpose driven. We went to Dairy Queen and on the way we
said to each other, "8:50 contacting miracles!" While we were there, we
talked with the cashier and brought up church and it seemed like it was
going well, but we didn't get the chance to invite her to do anything.
We both felt like that wasn't quite enough, but we started on our way
out the door. While walking out we noticed a guy kinda staring at us and
he waved, but we walked out to the truck and didn't talk to him. Elder
Smith mentioned, "It kinda looked like that guy wanted to talk to us,"
so we decided to go back inside, even though it was 8:58, and talk to
him. He only spoke Spanish, so I took over, and he turned out to be
really interested. He mentioned that he was here in America from his
home country of Nicaragua because he was trying to send money home to
help build a temple for God and he had me translate for him to ask Elder
Smith a question. The question was, "What is it that moved you to come
back and talk to me?" Elder Smith said that he felt like he needed to,
or that the Spirit was telling him to, I felt the same. I explained that
as missionaries, we are messengers from God, sent to bring a message to
his children who he has prepared for the message. When Elder Smith and I
got back to the car, he asked me if we had just witnessed a miracle and
asked me to tell him what happened, when I told him, he told me he had
prayed to the Lord when we first went to contact that we would find
somebody for my area, then when we went to Dairy Queen he prayed that we
would find that person at Dairy Queen, and we found him because we
followed the prompting that the Spirit gave us. I commented that I
wasn't even hungry because I had eaten something that didn't agree with
my stomach, but I had brought up shakes as a joke, but we decided that
shakes came back into my mind probably as a prompting from the Spirit.
We were astounded by what God did through us that night, so we decided
to pray specifically as a companionship the next day for something to
happen. The next day, Wednesday, we went through our plans, and by 2pm
all of our plans from then until 5pm had fallen through. We decided to
pull the car over and pray before going anywhere because I was aimlessly
driving. We asked that the name of a person he wanted us to visit would
come to our minds, and right when we did that, the name, Sister
Bufford, came to mind. We called, no answer. Stopped by her work, nobody
was there. We even went to her house, nobody was there. We knew there
had to have been a reason to go there, so we went contacting, and found
some people, and decided to start heading off. We started driving away
and decided to pull over and offer a prayer of gratitude and also to
know if there was any other reason for us to be there. Right then
another name came to my mind, Hector, so I got his address and put it in
the GPS, and started on our way, which took us past the Bufford's home,
and there was a car. We went over and the Bufford's weren't home, but
their friend was there, and we got to teach him. He ended up being one
of the referrals given to the Dayton Sisters. When we finished all of
that, it was almost 5pm, we were back on schedule!
The power of specific prayers are real, there were other experiences with it this last week, but it always ended with miracles.
I love you guys,
Elder Stanley Scott Dye
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