January 3, 2012

Exerpts from our emailing back and forth today.  Weekly letter follows.

Mark:: hey there, you on yet today?

Skyler: Hey I couldn't e-mail till today sorry. I'm on now though!

Mark: Thats what we thought.  Mom is here and says hi, hope your doing great!!

Skyler: Oh you know, I'm just livin my life on the edge. I got my head shaved this week. 

Mark: You silly boy.  Make sure you send pics.  How come you did that?

Skyler: I asked for the real barbershop expirience and I got it. the guy was drunk as a skunk and I didn't realize it untill half way through my hair cut. What can I say? He was a good drunk. He then told my my hair cut was going to be 40 dollars. I gave him ten just so he wouldn't be mad and I told him my companion wanted a hair cut too. HAHAHAHA Elder Richardson refused and that made Elder Case feel like he had to say yes so he got his head shaved too. SO FUNNY

and a happy new year it has been,

 

HOly CATS!!!!

 

        I have already heard so much good news today. It makes biking to the library in the bitter cold after a dropped appointment seem very distant.

        This week has taught me a lot, as they all do. I think the lack of people making REAL growth has made me evaluate my teaching and finding efforts more than anything. This week has made me realize some important things.

        We could get 15 baptisms a week, if we wanted to just open the font and let people come. People say yes to being baptised left and right out here. What they don't do is keep their commitments to read and pray, to come to church, and to repent. By extending the invitation to change their ways and to start following Christ, we invite people to repent every day. A lot of them accept, they just won't put forth the effort. We as missionaries tend to take this upon ourselves and to say "if only I had testified more or taught it better maybe they would have actually done it" but I am learning more and more that it is the agency of others, not the missionary's weakness, that causes investigators to fall short. Since being in Virginia, I have set a total of 7 people for baptism. In the last two weeks We have set 2. None have taken the challenge yet to find out for themselves if this is true. We teach and testify with power and with the spirit to lay out the eternaly important decision they are to make right before their eyes, and for whatever reason, they chose not to do it. I don't know what more can be done. I feel like my brothers and sisters in Newport News are just rejecting Christ and that hurts.

       Angel is a lady who we were teaching the day we got into Newport News. She sees the importance, she just doesn't want to change. But she did come to church and that was great. She asked me in a lesson, "why do ya'all think I need the Book of Mormon so bad?" I blew up. Not in a bad way, but I heard myself start at Adam and tell her about the priesthood and gospel that has been on the earth with every prophet since then. The spirit testified through my companions and I that the Book of Mormon is not just a good book, It has eternal importance and a purpose that goes way deeper than the simple doctrine it restored. Finding out that the book of Mormon is True is so simple, but it caries with it an assurance that Joseph Smith was a prophet and that This church is true. It means personally that God is reaching out to each one of us through modern revelation. It means our Heavenly Father has not forgotten about the world. She read this week. :) YESSS!

      Angel is the only real investigator that we have, when you look at an investigator as someone trying to find out everything they can about this gospel. I only have 15 min left but I want to type a quote. Perhaps the quote that converted me.

"The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of the slums. Christ takes the slums out of people, and then they take themselves out of the slums. The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature...

"May we be convinced that Jesus is the Christ, choose to follow Him, be changed for Him, Captained by him, consumed in Him, and born again" President Ezra Taft Benson

 

Christ will change you if you simply let him. Do all you can to let go who you are and find out who Christ is, so that you can be like him. You will not lose your soul, you'll lose the natural man tagging along.

I love this work, I love the gospel, I know that the Holy Ghost is ever so real and will tell you the truthfulness of this divine work and of the Book of Mormon if you will just ask.

I choose Christ,

Elder Andreasen