Easter Week!!

Hey!

It was an awesome Easter week for us.

We had a great experience Friday night. We went to the temple with Janice and a couple from the ward. We did a grounds tour and then did a mini-lesson in the waiting room. It was awesome. The Spirit was there for sure and Janice was loving it. Her 4 year old, Olivia, was actually very reverent and whispered the whole time!

Julian is doing great, still wanting to take things slow. We brought over one of the ward missionaries, Trenton. He has long hair like Julian, so Julian related with him and enjoyed that haha. Funny that one small similarity can bring people together! He tells everyone he knows that he is meeting with us, such a solid missionary and his brother said he would sit in on a lesson one of these times.

We did a lot of teaching and contacting this week, and were able to testify of the Savior many times. Especially this week of Easter it seemed to open up people a little bit more to our message about Jesus Christ!

There were many instances this week where we felt prompted to do something and it turned out great! Many unforeseen opportunities to serve and share this gospel with others. The Lord truly is directing His work and He has GREAT love for all of us. 

Love y'all!

Elder Bean

Conversions Etc.

So many wonderful things are happening!

Elder Payne and I have a fun way of contacting people by taking them cookies and it has been awesome! We have been able to soften some hearts and meet some great people! Occasionally we even have a "cookie swap" where they offer us cookies in return :)

 Janice's baptism on Saturday was amazing! The Spirit was so strong. Elder Payne did the baptism and I confirmed her in church yesterday. Elder Allen (Area Authority), President Curtis (mission president), and President Atkins (Stake President) were all at the 10th ward yesterday! Just a little nervous doing the confirmation :)  I am actually pretty close with them and they are great men!

The whole ward is excited about Janice and it has really helped the members do missionary work! We are excited to help her progress even more in the gospel now :) I realize how baptism truly is just a gate, that allows us so many more opportunities on our path to return to our Father in Heaven. SO many promised blessings that Heavenly Father has in store for all of us. Will we receive them by living our life by His will and His way?

On Saturday there were two instances where someone said "You came right at the perfect time" and it just reassured us that we must be doing something right, and that the Lord really is leading us even if we don't always know it!

I love y'all and have a Happy Easter!

Elder Bean

Janice's baptism!

#Hallelujah

We had a pretty exciting week! Lots of good things happening.

Our investigator, Janice, is still doing phenomenal! Her baptism will be this Saturday hopefully! Possible complications, but we are working through those. She is so prepared for this, and has found such a love for the gospel of Jesus Christ! She wants to read the whole Book of Mormon before Saturday too.

Friday we had our Mission President come out with us for the day and it was great! We had some neat experiences and lessons. He is great man and fun to be around! I have great love for him and his dedication to the Lord.

We started the #Hallelujah initiative this week! Everyone go check out  FollowHim.mormon.org and watch the video! It is so powerful and only about 2 minutes long. It helped me to realize that nobody is too far from changing, and that at any moment we can decide to follow the Savior and bring that eternal joy and happiness into our lives! I know it is true and I love being out here helping others come to know that same truth.

We have a very busy week ahead of us! :)

Love y'all!!

Elder Bean

Following the Lord's Promptings

It was a great week! Super busy though.

Janice is still doing great, she is set to be baptized on March 19th! :) It is going to be great. Also on March 20th, the Area Authority Elder Allen is coming to speak in the 10th ward! That will be a cool combo with her confirmation on that day! 

Awesome experience: Wednesday, March 2nd, 8:21 pm. We pray where we should go. We feel prompted to see this one guy, but I knew he wouldn't be home and we had every excuse why not to go. We decided to go anyways, turns out he was not home like we had thought. However we see someone sitting outside near his house. We walk near this lady and try to talk to her but she waves us on. We circled the block, but we both felt like we need to talk to her. As we turn the corner to go back to that street, she is walking our direction. And that is when we met Emily! She is awesome. We walked and talked for a good hour with her. Shared a whole lesson, gave her a Book of Mormon and everything. She had a rough life of bad decisions and she told us how she needed us that night. She knew God had sent us to her. It was so powerful.

Elder Payne and I were so humbled from that experience. I look back at my initial doubt of the prompting we received. Little did we know at the time, we were just being led to someone else. Sometimes the Lord prompts us in ways that we may think don't make sense! But I realized that the only way we would of been led to that lady is if he prompted us to see the other person, fully knowing they weren't home!

We are starting to take birthday cards to all the members on their birthday! It has already been really awesome and they love it! We even were able to give someone a blessing and be of service because of that. It also feels really good to just do something really nice :)

Anyways I am doing great!! Loving it out here.

Love y'all

Elder Bean

Another Transfer!

I am staying another transfer with Elder Payne, but we will only be covering the 10th ward again. We will miss the 24th ward, there are some great people there. Also this transfer will be a 7 week transfer instead of a 6 week transfer, so that will be different!

Janice is doing amazing still!! She faced some opposition last week but she recognized it was the adversary and recognized she needed to read her scriptures better to be able to get through it. Without us even having to tell her! Also right after sacrament she started telling us about some of her friends that came to mind during church, she is going to talk to them about the gospel this week. She is so prepared and so converted. Her baptism will be this month! (March) 

Things are going well and I am loving every day out here. So many things that I don't want to give up when I go home. I enjoy serving the Lord and being away from so many distractions. It gets hard to focus sometimes but I always try to stay 100% in the mission and not have one foot at home and one foot in the mission! 

Love y'all!

Elder Bean