19 March 2018

Elder Sterling Fillmore at the Chicago Temple during his mission in the Michigan Lansing mission. He was one of Eric's YM leaders.

fam,

This week was pretty interesting. On Thursday we had a really good member lesson with the Miranda family and had lunch right after. Well right before I left for my mission I got a note from a former young men's leader by the name of Sterling Filmore saying that he had also served in this same mission. I later forgot about that message but it all came back into focus when during our meal Hma Miranda starts joking and pulling out old photos of past Elders that served in the branch. She's just throwing us photos as she's talking about each on and I saw one with a face that looked familiar. Looking closer I recognized the Elder to be that same Youth Leader I had! It was pretty funny and we grabbed a photo. 

Wednesday we had a good zone leader trade off. We'll as good as a knock-a-thon can be. I think the last three transfers we've been moving away from the very well set and ingrained mission tradition of only using knocking as the mode of finding. It's been pretty successful as we are almost entirely working through members, though slow, we teach more solid people. The added blessing is not having had knocked a door in like two transfers. With Elder Clark we knocked for like 6 hours and just about everyone we talked with did not speak English. We even were in a nicer area but like two people spoke English. We got invited into this one home and just could not communicate with this guy who was about our age. We grabbed his information and asked if he wanted to learn English. For the fourth time we just could not understand his name and asked him to write his name in our planners. The plan seemed good up until he wrote his name in a non-English alphabet haha. Luckily it's not my area. 

Friday we had a miraculous lesson. Teodoro is an awesome guy who has been coming to our branch since I've been here. Finally he is getting baptized. He was being taught initially and once he was ready he for baptism his future wife got pregnant and didn't want to get married until after the baby came. Well the baby came and we had a dinner appointment with them with full intentions of setting wedding dates and baptism dates. We had no idea how but felt like it was the right thing. Half way through our dinner appointment the Relief Society president shows up and joins us. Apparently they called her and asked her to stop by to reserve buildings for their wedding, baptism a few weeks later for Teodoro, and the baptism of their oldest daughter a few weeks after that. So things went really well. I'd say my most productive dinner appointment yet. We set goals for him to get the priesthood in time for him to baptize his daughter and to go over the missionary lessons one more time. I think the wedding is planned for July if I remember right.