To whom it may concern,
Welcome to the second installment of The Lord Wrecks
Missionaries So Miracles Can Happen™ but we'll get to that later. It's a bit of
a long one today, but hold on.
This
week was really fun. On Wednesday we took the ol' college aeroplane down to
Stockholm because Elder De Feo of the Seventy from the Europe Area Presidency
(translation: rather high-profile leader in the Church) visited our mission. It
was really cool to meet him and learn from his wisdom acquired by many years of
serving the Lord. Something that struck me is how he encouraged us to live
"more sacred lives" to meet the responsibilities that God has called
us to fill.
He also
talked about how in order to help people progress in the Gospel, we must as
missionaries show great love, but also have high expectations for them. The
following day, Elder Mathias and I were feeling rather loving and especially
high-expecting so we invited someone we had been teaching for a while to be
baptized in a couple months and she said yes! Honestly, that was a miracle and
a testimony to the truth of what Elder De Feo had taught the day before.
We
visited this lady and her family and talked to them about the church and everything.
It was more of a social visit honestly, but they had a lot of questions and it
was super fun. Among the funniest things she said were the following:
*Reads
name of church of my nametag* "Now I get the whole 'no alcohol' thing. The
name is too long to say when you're drunk!"
"When
I invited you in I thought you'd be like the Jehovah's Witnesses. I was
wrong!"
Now we
get to The Lord Wrecks Missionaries So Miracles Can Happen™. So Saturday was
crazy and literally nothing we had planned happened. It felt like we were just
running in circles because things kept getting in our way or plans just fell
through. But we saw these two cool miracles that only happened as a result of
everything else failing:
1. About
a week ago, we met a man outside a friend's apartment building waiting for his
other friend to pick him up. We talked to him a little and he gladly took a
Book of Mormon. As luck would have it, his friend pulled up in the middle of
the conversation (tangential rant: For real though, I think every time I've
talked to a person waiting for a friend, the friend always shows up in the
middle of the conversation and totally kills our vibe). The man told us his
address as he was getting into the car but we couldn't hear well enough to make
it out.
Fast forward
to Saturday when we had done a couple swing-bys in the morning--none of which
answered--and were driving around on a completely different part of town trying
to find a place to park to swing by another person. As we did so, I looked at
one of the street names and thought "Huh. That kinda sounds like what that
man said to us last week. Huh." Just as I thought that, we look to see the
exact same man getting out of his apartment building to once again get into his
friend's car. God had a way of getting us that address anyway
2. Later
that same day, we swung by man we had met who wanted a Book of Mormon and had
given us his address for us to come by. Unfortunately, he had forgotten that
the door was locked with a code and we couldn't get in and didn't have his
number. We said a prayer that someone would come out, tested a few codes while
we waited and left after a couple minutes. We started knocking doors and
talking to people on the street in the area until it was time for us to go
home. As we were walking back to the car, we see the man walking down the
street about a block from his apartment. We hurriedly crossed the street (we're
gonna skip over the part here when I step on the ice and my legs are taken out
from under me) and were able to talk to him, give him his copy of the Book of
Mormon, and witness to him that God answered our prayer and that He wanted him
to have that book.
Sometimes,
like the man born blind in John 9, we become the victims of what we think are
trials or opposition, when it turns out that the Lord just needed us to be
doing something that we couldn't have planned for on our own.
Love,
Äldste Cummings
1.. A member had this shirt on but had no idea what it was.
2. You might think this beautiful tapestry, woven in 1826, portrays a contingent of Revolutionary War era soldiers parading through a small Swedish village--but you'd be wrong. Upon closer inspection, one finds that this is in fact the Three Wise Men coming to worship the baby Jesus approximately year 0 AD at Bethlehem in Judea.
3. Elder Dumas holding us up 😤
som vanligt alltså
4. Grabbarna reunited.
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