Week 10

January 27, 2022

Week 10

Monday, April 12, 2021

WEEK 10: Vaccinations and Urination during the Restoration

Good Morning everybody! I have an invitation for you all. Later today, I am going to post an add on Facebook for free copies of the Book of Mormon. If you want to be a missionary from home (or if you are a missionary in the field) repost my ad!! It will help us reach out to people and invite them to get a copy of the Book of Mormon. It does not matter if you live in Michigan or not we can reach out to people in other states and connect them with missionaries close by! So please, feel free to add me on Facebook and repost my add. That would be a huge blessing :)

It was yet another blessed week in the great state of Michigan. Yes, you did read the title of the email correctly it was a pretty wild and exhilarating week! Let me tell ya' about it!

So I want to start off with the biggest miracle of the week! On Tuesday, we had transfers and Elder Corry and I went with our Zone Leaders to the transfer van to say goodbye to Elder Stone. He is a great guy and the Saginaw Zone will miss him dearly. Afterwards, we went to Buffalo Wild Wings with some of the new guys in our Zone and our new Zone Leader, Elder Harding. He is a great guy. I will add some pictures below of us at Buffalo Wild Wings, and my companion and I taking a goofy picture with him. BUT here comes the miracle:

So after everything was done with transfers, Elder Corry and I had two lessons set up that both seemed like long shots. But, amazingly they both went through We video called this woman named Heather who had self-referred herself in July and she answered. We told her what we do as missionaries and she was blown away by our purpose. She thought it was absolutely amazing that we sacrifice two years away from our families and she could feel the spirit really strongly. During our conversation, she haphazardly brought up baptism to us. I wish all of you could have seen the look on Elder Corry's and I's faces. Did she just invite herself to be baptized? We were blown away. We were truly at a loss for words we sounded kind of dumb for a few seconds there. But, the best part was that after she said she wanted to be baptized she said she had four kids that also wanted to be baptized. So, she went around the house with her phone and asked each kid "Do you want to be baptized?" and they would say "yes! I can't wait to learn more!" and then she would go to the next one and ask the same question. She did this for all four of her children and it was truly a miracle! SO, we put five people on baptismal date for April 24th, and found five new people to teach. It was amazing!

The next day we dropped by her house and gave her family five copies of the Book of Mormon. There is another cool miracle that happened with that. Elder Corry and I needed 6 copies, (because the other guy we met with that night wanted one as well). But, we only had five. So, we went to the Zone Leaders apartment to grab another one and realized they were gone! We didn't know what to do because we really needed to give them these Books. We were thinking of ideas when Elder Corry pointed to my door and said "What is that?" I looked and behold, there was a Book of Mormon waiting there for us. It was a miracle. Neither of us know how that got there because only a few days prior that was not there. There are miracles in this work ladies and gentleman and I have felt that very strongly this week.

Another cool thing that happened this week was that Elder Corry and I got our first dose of the vaccine! There is a big chain called Meijer here and they partnered with a college that is close by to distribute vaccines so we went and got ours! The lady giving us ours was laughing because Elder Corry and I were taking pictures of each other getting the vaccine. But hey! We were excited to get it sooooo...

I feel like my email is too long so I will end with this. This week was an incredible week! Like I have mentioned earlier, it is so important to seek out the good in everyday life. Heather, two days after we put her on date for baptism, has stopped contacting us. We do not know what is going on. But that is okay! I still have faith that she and her family will join the church eventually. Something I have learned is that you need to control the controllable. It is sometimes really hard being a missionary because I have such a deep love for all the people we teach. I have such a strong testimony of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and it brings me so much peace and joy and ALL that I want in my life is for these people to feel that same joy I feel! So, when people fall away it is hard. But I keep my good attitude. As long as I am doing all I can do, I will leave the rest up to the Lord.

Funny Moment:

Okay here comes that strange second part of the email header for this week. We had a lesson with this guy on Tuesday and we were teaching him about The Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I love technology because it is such a blessing, but sometimes it provides entertaining moments in lessons. In the middle of our lesson, this guy gets up and starts walking around in his house. I wasn't really paying attention to what he was doing because I was focused on teaching but then suddenly he looked right at us. I could tell something was different because he had been kind of not paying attention for most of the lesson. When Elder Corry started talking we could both hear him starting to use the restroom... I started laughing really hard so I had to duck my head out of the camera's range so he couldn't see me. This guy thought he was so slick and that we wouldn't notice. Maybe he thought his microphone was off and we couldn't hear him. Whatever the case, this guy had me rolling on the floor after the lesson was over. (And by the way, he actually came to church on Sunday and is progressing really well. Everytime we ask him about what we taught him he remembers so I guess he really was paying attention during the lesson!) Apparently, this has happened to my companion several times. People are very interesting...

Last week we were driving and saw a bunch of wood this guy was giving out for free so we took a few logs home to have some things in our apartment for missionaries to sign when they leave. A few days later, ants and bugs started appearing all over our apartment and we realized it was from the log we took. So, we found this bug-killing fog and sprayed a bunch of it all over the place to kill the bugs. We didn't read the label until afterwards and realized we weren't supposed to be in the same room as the fog after we sprayed it and that it was not supposed to touch our skin. Elder Corry and I decided to do the rest of our lessons that day at the church while the fogger went to work... lol. But hey! When we came back all the bugs were dead and we had an ant-free stump next to our couch. You gotta find furniture as a broke missionary!

Spiritual thought:

With the new transfer ahead of us, Elder Corry and I have made an increased effort to be more effective missionaries. We want this transfer to be even more miracle filled than the last. Here is a scripture I memorized this week that has been motivating me.

Alma 26:12

"12 Yea, I know that I am ^anothing; as to my strength I am weak; therefore I will ^bnot boast of myself, but I will ^cboast of my God, for in his ^dstrength I can do all ^ethings; yea, behold, many mighty miracles we have wrought in this land, for which we will praise his name forever."

I know that if I have faith in the Lord, I can quite literally do anything with His help. Great miracles are about in this amazing mission! And I can't wait to continue to be a tool in the Lord's hands to bring other people to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I love you all, have a great week!

-Elder Elliott