Hey ya'll!

Man, this whole emailing on Wednesday is throwing off my groove - now I have a week and a half of experiences to draw from. 

Hmm. Well, the most exciting thing was that Alan got confirmed, and the ward has been welcoming him splendidly :) Yay! Alan's doing really well - when we went over on Monday he had read up until Mosiah, and he's looking for ways to get the people he knows to read the Book of Mormon.

A couple of weeks ago we were looking through our Area Book and we found a record of a former investigator that looked really interesting and we decided we should try and find him again. We'd tried by his house probably 6 or 7 times in the plan of a couple of weeks, and he was never there. But the other day we FINALLY found him. He came out and at first kind of tried to kindly tell us he wasn't interested, but he mentioned something like "when the other missionaries were teaching me, life was real good, but I just am more comfortable in my baptist beliefs." As as probed a little bit he just started crying. He's a big, African American man, and he just broke down and told us how horrible his life is and how he's at rock bottom and he's been praying and praying to have relief and to find something. Evidently he had been really close to getting baptized before, but his family and friends talked him out of it, and then his life went south pretty hard. He talked with us for 20 minutes or so, and cried the whole time. At one point he got really choked on his emotions, and then looked at us and said "you can see that I need help, right? I just need someone to be there for me." He said he's willing to learn again, and he prayed with us and said a beautiful prayer and I was so humbled to be a part of it. Miracles like that are what make everything worth it :)

We had Zone Conference yesterday and learned a lot. One thing President Maluenda said that I really liked was that the mission is a time to learn lessons, because we'll never have the spiritual support like we do now, so we should use this time to learn through trials the things that we'd have to learn otherwise after our missions and without all the spiritual support. 

Okay, well I love you all!

Have the best week of your lives.

Love,
m

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Hermana Reynolds