Diversity Day
Hello everyone!
This week was great! I've had so much fun here in Morristown that it's hard to believe that I've been here for almost six months. I'm entering what will likely be my last week here and I honestly wish I could have more time here.
Elder Rasband and I have been on a roll this week, and I'm pretty exhausted. I've seen so much divine help. We visited Jenny like three times and she's still the nicest person ever. We came to teach her English, but she keeps asking us Gospel questions which we're more than happy to answer.
We talked with Felipe again this week and he's still fighting to get his schedule open but he's been reading a ton of the Book of Mormon.
We talked to Gerald who is awesome and showed us some of his antique firearms and a silver dollar from the 1700s. I talked to his son about computers for a good while.
The crowning event of the week was our event yesterday in Morristown's Central Park. We had a Diversity Day where a ton of different religions and community organizations had stands in the park for the day. We spent a lot of the week (mostly Saturday since we had to do normal proselyting) preparing for that event. Saturday was an amazing day with so many miracles. We were trying to prepare the stand and get posters and volunteers and it came together perfectly. We were going to try to go by our friend Romaine, who we haven't had contact with. As we were driving, we saw him walking down the street past our apartment so we pulled over and were able to finally talk to him. We probably won't teach him, but we managed to get some things back from him that he borrowed from members which they were grateful for. President Hess called us with an idea for a poster for the stand and asked if we could make it. Our run-in with Romaine saved us enough time to head over to the mission office and start designing some posters. At this point it wasn't possible to get a poster printed same-day, so we were going to order one and have them leave it for us for the next day (the day of the event). We hustled to make the poster and then sent it in to Staples, but didn't know what we were going to put it on. As we were leaving the office, we saw two A-frames that were being worked on for another project. When we asked about them, they weren't going to be used for a little while and upon measuring them they were the exact size of the posters we had just sent to be printed. We grabbed them and a pavillion that just happened to be the perfect size for our tables. When we got to Staples, the employee (who had been nice enough to even start the project for us) said that if we waited 20 minutes we could walk out with the posters. We took them home, and instead of eating dinner (we hadn't had lunch) decided to get them prepped on the A-frames before we visited Jenny. We were starving, but we knew that the work came first, so we finished those and went over to teach her. When we showed up, she brought over a giant bag of Chick-fil-A that she had gotten on the way home from work with meals for all three of us to eat while we taught. It's amazing how if we're prioritizing how we need to be, Heavenly Father will make everything else fall in place. We just need to have faith to make it the priority.
I don't remember if I talked about faith and obedience last week, so I'll skip that and come back to it next week if I didn't. This week we talked a lot about the Gift of the Holy Ghost. Fun fact: Joseph Smith was once asked by the then-President of the United States (Van Beuren) what distinguished our church from other churches. His answer was the Gift of the Holy Ghost. Because of the authority that we have, this is something that only we can offer. Our Spiritual gifts are manifest through the Gift of the Holy Ghost based on our faith and obedience. We started a challenge as a mission last week to cut things that are impeding us from feeling the spirit more for 40 days to see the difference and change our habits. I encourage you all to do the same to have that Spirit with you more strongly. We're going to need it more and more. I testify that this is true in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.
I love you all,
Elder Reyes