Feb. 16, 2014

Feb. 16, 2014

Magandang Hapon sa inyong Lahat, This week was a good one.  Lots of stuff happened and we had some great success with teaching and Investigators progressing to Baptisimal Dates or IBD's.

First I went on exchanges 2 times this week, once with my District Leader and then again with one of my Zone leaders who lives in our house. With my District leader Elder Liston our very first appointment we were contacting a man who said we could come back. We sat down outside and then another man saw us and asked if he could join, we said OF COURSE you can join. So we hadn't even finished the opening prayer and this second random guy starts firing off questions and being all crazy, and then sadly commenced a bible bash. We answered every question proved every one of his accusations wrong, but there was no spirit.  Me and my companion were mad, the man was mad and then I said something I probably shouldn't have that reignited his fury and questions when I said, "Brother if you continue on the path you are on now you are not going to be saved." As you could have guessed he did not like that and that is when part 2 of the bash started! I learned a few lessons from that bash. That there can be no spirit when you are mad and are pretty much arguing.  At the end, you didn't prove anything.  They just don't like us now and some people have heads harder than.....I don't know something really hard. Even though we were right in everything we said, we were wrong in the way we handled the situation. We should have testified closed and left. And another bad thing was that the first man that we were supposed to teach who didn't say a word the whole time doesn't want missionaries to come back. So, I learned that Bible Bashing is bad and nothing good comes from it.

    MMM mmm mmm…pringles and coconut milk.   – Personal study snacks. J

On a good note we had a lot of progression with our IBD's and one of them will be baptized this week. Elder Moreno and I found him my 3rd week in the Philippines and he is finally being baptized!!! Another good thing is I can't say that I am fluent but I can speak consistently an understand everything people say other than deeper grammar that I don't know, so that is cool. It is kind of weird to think about that I can understand 2 languages that aren't even close. But It is really all because of the help from Heavenly father and because I am on his errand that I can. This week was a good one.  Lots of things learned and a lot of good things happening in the Urdaneta 1b area!!:)   

Have a fantastic week!

Elder Ball