What?! You've never head of the Book of Mormon?!

It is sad to hear things like families fighting and deaths occuring. A lot of the time the best thing you can do is listen. Being on my mission many many people have told me the problems of their lives. Deaths/physical fights/family disowning new member/ losing jobs as a result of being a member/finance issues/etc. As you said, it's the Atonement that brings spiritual (and physical) healing to these things. One of the reasons we become a member of the church is so that we can be part of this world-wide and heavenly family that all cares for each other and as Mosiah 18 says, mourn with those that mourn, comfort those that stand in need of comfort.


I am learning more and more every day how to be more bold. I have recently recognized in part how effective it is to express enthusiasm with the people I meet about the gospel... Our mission president has started a program with our missionaries called, "The Big Lift." There are a select number of missionaries that travel thoughout the mission to visit all of the missionaries eventually and go on 24 hour trios with them. These missionaries are to be super enthusiastic and very bold and are to extend commitments and promises all of the time. Well, Elder Martin went with Elder Peterson and I last Tuesday/Wednesday and there were several things that he did that I saw the after effects of that were awesome but I only wanted to mention 1 or 2 of them right now:

So this one guy we talked to named "Dasman" we knocked on his door and we had a bad first impression of him (didn't look interested at all).
Elder Martin asked him is he had ever heard of the Book of Mormon before.
He said no.
Elder Martin's reaction was done with great body language too: "What?!? You've never heard of the Book of Mormon before?!? THIS BOOK HAS CHANGED MY LIFE! [then he talked about it a little bit]. Dasman, have you ever been Baptized before?"
Dasman: "Yep".
Elder Martin: "Now, have you ever been baptized with the Priesthood authority of God?"
Dasman: [Thinking for a minute]"No". (I didn't expect people to know that they were baptized without authority... surprised me: everybody he asked said, "no". It's the way he said it though. Not the question itself.)

You get the idea... but this guy we did not think had much potential to progress right now in his life. but we made a follow up appointment with him last Saturday, this is how it went:

We get to his apartment and some other guy answers the door (didn't live there probably), "What you want?"
Us: "We're looking for Dasman may we speak to him?"
I'm sure the thought crossed his mind to lie to us, we could see it on his face...:"you just wait here a minute."
He walked into the other room then you hear Dasman tell him to let us in, "I told them they can come and talk to me. Tell them to come in."
We came in and Dasman was giving one of his black friends a hair cut. There was profane music being played around the house, they were throwing in swear words to each other every other sentence in their conversation, and his humongous tv was on and nobody was watching anything. (Second impression of him: really bad).
After he finished with his buddy's haircut we sat down on the couch and I invited the other two to join in our discusion after removing (turning [cutting] off) the distractions.
One of them (Richard) asked, "What are you talking about?"
I explained: "We're talking about the Book of Mormon, have you ever heard of it before?"
Richard said, "No."
I said "What?!? you've never heard of the Book of Mormon?"
Dasman said to Richard: "I know! can you believe we've never heard of this book before?"

Now the way Dasman said it was in knowledge that this was a very important book to read. Very important. You could hear it in his voice. Now he would not have had this great impression of how great the Book of Mormon is if we didn't show our enthusiasm for it from the beginning. Too many times we take this stuff for granted and, as missionaries, do not express the great message in such an important and urgent manner.
We had a marvelous restoration of the gospel lesson with them and they know that the Book of Mormon is true even though they haven't read it yet. They committed to read it. and would have come with us to church yesterday if their own didn't confilct (but will this upcoming Sunday probably).

(This is why I don't write in my journal very much. These things happen all of the time. You know how long it'd take to write this down? more time than I have)