Hello everyone!
Wow careful what you pray for. At the beginning of the transfer I was praying for more humility and apparently Sister Johnson was praying for more patience. Boy did the Lord give us plenty to be patient and humble about! (But hey I would still recommend praying for those things... just be ready for an answer.)
So what happened? Basically everyone we are teaching fell off the face of the earth and stopped replying to us - even Mark who's date for baptism! Holy it stressed me out a lot. They might as well of all taken a spontanious vacation together in the Oregon wilderness with no cell service.
Thankfully, (and quite slowly) one by one we got back in contact with people over those two weeks. Literally as I am typing this we just had someone message us who ghosted us a week ago. After of the trial of your faith come the blessings my friends!
The best one was our friend on date for baptism, Mark - he's the one who called and had a dream that he needed to be baptized again. Yesterday between conference sessions, we decided sporadically to just go see if we could find Mark home (we had someone from the ward go over three times to no avail... and Mark hadn't been answering calls, nor did he come to our usual lesson spot/time).
We drove past the area Mark lives at and WE SAW HIM. I literaly whooped that car around and we blocked him just as he was backing up. He was so happy to see us though - turns out the man had literally gone to church that morning to find us (he'd smashed his phone) but of course no one was there because of general conference. So now we got his new number and it's all sorted out.
Alright now to my clickbait "Jesus is a Wizard". Basically we street contacted this guy who works at a random church here. We had a lesson and when we asked him what his beliefs are, he legitimately said "I think Jesus is a wizard." There have been few times I've been grateful to wear masks but that was one of them because I was trying VERY hard to keep it together.
Anyways the man actually turned out being awesome, he listened intently to the restoration and promised us he would read the Book of Mormon!
But then - he didn't show up to our return appointment and didn't answer his phone. As you can imagine, Sister Johnson and I have PTSD from people falling off the planet. So MIRACLE - on Sunday we called him. No answer. After conference we are driving around and remembered all the talks about prayer. So what did we do? I pulled the car over and we said a prayer that the Jesus wizard man would answer his phone. We called. No answer. Then we waited three minutes and called. Literally RIGHT before it goes to voicemail he answers!! We rescheduled our lesson and all is well.
Alright this is getting a little long but I'll share two more things...
- Some members invited us to an old people ukelele jam session. Hah. Literally we were the youngest people there in this small circle and we all played and sang a ton of classic tunes for an hour. Best thing of my life. We went to become acquainted with a non-member who always goes who is a professional banjo player! Afterward we devised a plan with someone in the ward of how we can encounter the guy more and we are calling it "operation banjo".
-We watched some of conference with Leonard!! Sister Risenmay and I found him the first day she got here over three months ago. Leonard is getting baptized in less then two weeks. Anyways, during Utchdorf's talk - the part about about missionaries adjusting how to do missionary work with covid - Leonard looks at us with the biggest smile and goes, "that didn't stop you!! You still shared the Gospel with me!!" And it was basically the sweetest thing of my life.
Hope you all had a wonderful conference weekend!
Sister Carlson
-Sister Fillmore is my STL and this was our happy reunion
-there's a shop in Lincoln City that looks like Christmas threw up there so this is me recreating the Santa statue haha
-shinanigans
