General Conference Weekend! | October 2, 2017
Hi family! It's so great to hear from you all and to hear how wonderful you are all doing. And I was especially happy to hear that you enjoyed conference! I loved it too! We watched it live here, but it was being translated into Spanish, so they had headphones for anyone that wanted the original English version. So I was able to listen to it in English which was nice. I loved it all and one of the themes that I think stood out to me the most was that we have to be doing the "little things" (reading scriptures, praying, attending church weekly, etc.) if we want to stay strong in the Gospel and not be tempted off the strait and narrow path by the Adversary. One of my favorite talks was from Elder Arden in the Sunday afternoon session. He spoke about being spiritually vigilant and built upon Christ, and how things like Sabbath Day observance, temple and family history work, and daily prayer and scripture study can fortify us spiritually.
It was really sad and a shock to hear about Elder Hales, but I was really glad to hear that his wife and President Nelson were there when he passed away. I thought it was great that Elder Anderson was able to include a little of what Elder Hales had written for his conference talk (When we choose to have faith, we are prepared to stand in the presence of God), that was neat to hear what he wanted to say to us.
I'm going to copy/paste a little bit from my letter to President Egbert again. This is just how our teaching is going and how our area is doing in general, and then a spiritual experience we had this week:
Our area here is doing well! We had a quite a few appointments fall through this week, which is always difficult, but it gave us time to do some contacting, and we were able to meet and talk to a lot of great people! We were even able to exceed our weekly goal for contacts. We have been meeting consistently with Sister Nuris and are still hoping for her baptism on the 7th. She was able to get a Priesthood blessing, which was great, and after much prayer and fasting, she told us on Friday that the man who is living at her house said he is going to leave! That was so exciting to hear. I know the Lord has blessed her because of her faithfulness. Now we just have to keep our faith firm and keep praying that the man will move in the next couple of days. Other than Sister Nuris, we have been having difficulty meeting with our other investigators on a regular basis. But we are going to try to keep meeting with them and bringing members with us to the lessons so they can meet people from the branch and start fellowshipping.
A wonderful spiritual experience that we all shared this week happened during one of the breaks in between sessions of General Conference. We were contacting in our contact area, but weren't having much success. We really wanted to find someone to teach, so we prayed to Heavenly Father that we would be able to find someone that we could contact and then turn that contact into a lesson. After the prayer, we continued with our contacting and were met with rejection at two houses before contacting the third house and meeting a man that was really open and friendly to us. After we introduced ourselves, he invited us onto his porch and we were able to have the first key lesson with him! It was amazing. This was a true testament to me that God hears our prayers and answers them. It's not always immediately (we had to experience some rejection before we found someone who was willing to listen and invite us in), but He will always answer our prayers. I can feel that God is with us when we are contacting or teaching, because we have met so many wonderful people who are interested in the message that we come to share. I know they have been prepared by the Lord to receive us and hear the message of the Restored Gospel of Jesus Christ.
I love you all so much and hope you have a great week!
Love,
Sister Davidson
P.S. I saw a TV screen in the grocery store today that said there was a mass shooting in Las Vegas, the largest in US history. That was super sad to see, I hope everything is okay! Those people will be in my prayers.
P.P.S. I don't have time to send pictures today, I'm so sorry! I'll send more next week
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