Thank you so much for all of the birthday stuff that y'all sent me! It brightened up my day a whole lot and I really enjoyed it. Those letters from everyone really touched my heart. That was probably the best gift out of all of them besides the temple socks! It's just nice to know no one has forgotten me and they are all watching me as I'm out here. It's easy to feel forgotten in Ridgeway haha!My birthday turned out to be a good day.
This week was pretty good. We were able to get a lot of stuff done and also find some new people to teach. We met 3 people who gave us return appointments on Wednesday and so we are excited for that this week. One of them is named Diane. She was a pretty interesting lady to meet. We had knocked on her neighbor's house across the street and her neighbor said that she would benefit from our message and so we went over there to meet her. She was nice, but she definitely wanted to argue points of doctrine with us. I hadn't had an exciting
conversation like this with someone and so I let her say what she wanted to bring up and we went inside and had a good talk with her. She kind of gave us the classic discussion on how there are no more prophets and all we should have is the bible and stuff like that. What was interesting is that she was legitimately saying these things to us because she wanted to help us and thought that certain misconceptions about our church were real and also wrong. I was able to teach her the restoration throughout our discussion and Diane made the agreement with me that if I could show her a prophecy by Joseph Smith that came to pass she would read the Book of Mormon. So we will show her D&C 87 and that should settle that concern. Usually I ignore people who are like Diane and just want to argue or point out things to us, but I felt like there is a chance that Diane will want to actually investigate the church and so I wanted to give her another chance. So hopefully the people we met last week will turn into solid investigators!
We also had ZTM on Friday. It turned out to be a really good meeting. We hit our goal of 16 baptisms for the months of July and August and so we all were happy about that. We set the goal of having 7 baptisms a month for the rest of the year in order to meet the Zone's standard of excellence every month until next year. Our zone leaders told everyone how impressed they are with how Ridgeway has changed and so that made me feel better about myself. There have been a lot of times where I feel like I haven't done much here. But I know that things are changing and this area is being prepared for other missionaries in the future to have success. I know that the work I've done so far has been a good contribution and I hope it continues to contribute here.
We also got the area book planner app for our iPads now! No more pocket planners! Or paper area books! Thank goodness haha. I am way excited for this because I can't even count how many minutes I've put into writing in area books. It takes forever but it's necessary. The app will make it 100 times easier.
I hope that everyone had a good week!
Love you!
Elder Sean Bills