Hello everyone!
This week and a half was incredible! So lots of you at home probably figured it out, but our mission is now approved to use Facebook. When I first heard the news I was not excited at all. After trainings at MLC last week and zone conference yesterday I can now say that I am SO excited to be a Facebook mission. We have been using it for about a week and it's been enhancing our efforts like crazy. We still preach the same gospel. Just in more ways! We've already have a lot of experiences that show how great it is:
We had a miracle Saturday. We had a few potential people lined up to be able to go to the Elders investigator's baptism. But the night before or even that morning, they all fell through. We had Facebook messaged an investigator a little bit earlier that morning. We haven't been able to meet with her for a few weeks. She woke up and saw the message 15 minutes before she had to go. She is really bad at texting, but messenger seems to work great! We communicated quickly and she was able to pull herself together and made it to the church right on time! It was a miracle. She loved the baptism and we finally will be teaching her again next week.
Another was on Sunday. We met these friends who are super super busy but wanted to learn more about the Book of Mormon. We were able to get Facebook messenger set up and we'll be having a lesson over that soon.
One of the ones I'm most excited about has been in the works for a while. We have a favorite bus driver named. Last transfer I made the goal to become friends with all our bus drivers. I asked him what his name was and he seemed confused and said, um, Bobby? Then I said nice to meet you Bobby! Then we sat down and contacted until we got to campus. Then when we got off he was like "hey sorry I was confused, nobody has ever asked me what my name is! My given name is Bobby but my friends and family call me Simon. It's my Jewish name. You can call me Simon!" Instant friends. So fast forward a few weeks after just chatting. He asks if he can ask us a question about the Book of Mormon. We say of course! He said his Mormon friend told him it's about people who lived in Ancient America and asked us if that was true. We said yeah and he was surprised because he's very interested in those people and thought his friend was tricking him into reading it. So he got a copy and we followed up on his reading every time. Then last week he told us he had bad news. This was that the bus driver routes were changing and he likely would never see us again. This was right after we got signed in to Facebook and the prompting came to add him! So we asked if we could and he said yes. He started messaging us more questions about the church. His Jewish cousin is dating an LDS girl in Utah and she wants him to convert. Simon asked if conversion was necessary for them to get married. We got permission from President to teach him over messenger because he's not YSA age. So we sent a link about temples and taught him about it. He was asking more about the Book of Mormon so we sent him a pamphlet and set up a time to all be online to teach the first lesson.
SEE WHY BEING A FACEBOOK MISSION IS AWESOME?!
Also. Formers are gold mines. Last transfer I had a weird prompting to clean off some random shelves in the study room. So I did. And I found an incomplete baptismal record for a girl. We didn't have her records so we asked around. We were able to find them and give her a call. She wasn't baptized because she got too busy with school. She said she wanted to meet in a few weeks when she's back in Columbus. Now fast forward a few weeks and we called and have a time set up for this week! I am so excited!!! We also found this guy in our former list. He had also got too busy. We had called him and asked if he wanted to meet again. He said yes after the semester starts. Then the next day a member sent us a text and told us that her member boyfriend is best friends with this guy and wanted us to reach out. We told her we just did and she said that she got some more info on him. Apparently the biggest reason why he didn't get baptized was because he couldn't relate to the sisters because they were raised in the church. The member said she wanted to be there for his lessons. She's a convert of a few years! So we had a super awesome lesson where we just talked about how important the gospel is and how much he needs it. He agreed to make the sacrifice to meet again. Yay!
Friday I got to take Sister Ballard on an exchange! This is her first transfer but you wouldn't be able to tell if you didn't know. She's an incredible missionary. We had a lot of fun and learned a lot. I'll share a few of the coolest experiences. So there was lots of partying going on (typical Friday) and you could smell the alcohol in the air. Sister Ballard didn't know what alcohol smelt like and I had the weirdest prompting to take her by a place with lots of beer so she can know the smell. So we went. We walked past and she now knows what beer smells like. Shortly after, we figured out why I had the prompting. We usually don't go to that area on high street and so we wouldn't have been there for another reason. We walked back out to the Main Street and met a lady. We talked with her for a while and started walking with her. We found out that she's dating a less active member and has recently been searching for a church. She grew up pretty religious but fell away. Recently everything in her life has lined her up to turn to God. She decided to do it right before we met her. We walked with her to Kroger but we didn't want it to end there. We asked if we could walk around inside with her and she said yes! So we grocery shopped with her while we taught more about the gospel. She was out of town for the weekend but she wants to come to church and meet with us soon!
S. is doing great!! We only have one or two more lessons with him before his baptism. Because he's only made it to church once, we had to move is date to September 21st. That's transfer day and it will be at like 8 pm. We talked with President and he said we can do whatever we need to to make it happen before Sister Johnson goes home (this is her last night in the mission). I just love hearing his testimony and seeing him grow and progress in the gospel.
That's enough for this week. I'm going to the temple in a few hours! That's why my pday was today. I probably won't have a ton of time to email people today. Sorry! I'll share about my experience at the temple next week.
I love you all!
Sister Barnes
-I got to hang out with Sister Hall at MLC
-MLC
-So Elder Adsit assigned everyone an apostle who they teach/act like. We tried duplicating the picture. You can call us The Twelve Exchanges!
-Joanne, Sister Johnson, Corrin, me! Corrin is the Elders investigator who got baptized. I love her! She asked me to be up the stairs of the font for when she comes out. It was awesome :)
-We walked 3 miles to find a less active and the address was a giant apartment building with locked doors. We tried dialing in all the people to see if anyone would ring us in. Then someone did. Then wedidn't know which one was hers.. it was a mess
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