Wow. Suddenly everything that happened in my week is completely dwarfed by the gigantic spiritual experiences that occurred at the Calgary Temple celebration this weekend. I'm guessing that that celebration dwarfed all of your escapades throughout the rest of the week too, because you only mentioned what happened this weekend. So yeah, Hurricane Sandy is passing over Pennsylvania and colliding with a cold front from the north. And we got 8 new investigators this week. Not a big deal.
You asked how the storm was and it kind of seems to me like everyone's blowing it out of proportion, at least for now. Yes it's been pretty cold, and yes it's been incessantly raining for 2 days, but nothing of cataclysmic magnitude yet. We've been warned by President Topham to park the cars for a couple days and that the Erie Walk Elders specifically should stay with our zone leaders because of flood warnings, so I'm going to guess it's gonna get pretty bad. We'll see though.
I think I can hold my own if someone were to intellectually question what I believe. If all else fails, a testimony of the truthfulness of this work vanquishes any sort of finger pointing. It's pretty hard for someone to argue with “I know the Book of Mormon is true,” what are they going to say? “No you don't!”? Something I cannot contend with however is the complacency that is plaguing the people all around me, a sense that they feel that they'll be OK no matter what they do. Sometimes I wish I could just take away their agency and force them to keep commitments and to agree with the truth, but then I remember that that's what Satan wanted and I donut want to be Satan.
This week we lost an investigator simply because we gave her a Book of Mormon. We had been introducing her to Jesus Christ previous to this and she was definitely feeling the Spirit. But when she asked her uncle about the Book, he promptly told her that we weren't Christians, that she shouldn't associate with us anymore and that if she were to die right now she would go to her Grandmother. All this sounded so appealing coming from a family member that she decided to trust him over us. All I could do was beg her to pray about it herself and persist in the feeling she had while we were talking about Jesus Christ. But alas, my pleadings nor my testimony was good enough for her. I'm getting pretty sick of flaky people; of people answering my calls by saying, “Oh, we didn't know you were MORMON”; of people thinking they “don't have to be a Mormon” to return to God. I wish I could just grab these people by the lapels and shake them while shouting “I'm not asking you to be a Mormon! I'm asking you to follow our Savior Jesus Christ!” And then I would stick out my tongue and shake like Benson would when he was little.
The main message that the Book of Mormon conveys is the convincing of the Jew, Gentile and Lamanite that Jesus is the Christ. That is the message with which the Book of Mormon begins and that is the final testimony of Moroni with which it ends. Moroni 10:4-5 is not a casual invitation to know the validity of the history of the Book of Mormon, but in verse 1, Moroni reveals that the invitation is to the Lamanites to know the truthfulness of the Savior of the World. If only people would hearken to this additional witness of Him and know that that truth will make them free.
Elder Low
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