Elder Larson Serving it up in Maryland: SO MUCH TEACHING!!!

Howdy!

This week was solid but it was crazy! We started off the week good with a money lesson with Eunice and Carol! Eunice is from Nigeria and Carol is from Africa somewhere as well. You know what that means, they are super solid and open to listening to the Spirit! We initially contacted both of them on the street and next time we are going to go back and teach the rest of their family as well. They both accepted baptism if they come to know that it is true and are new investigators! Solid! Tuesday morning we exchanged with the Ellicott City zone leaders, Elder Dyer and Elder Ewald, and Elder Ewald came here to our area with me. We had another solid day and were able to pick up 3 new investigators then too! One of them is Jim, he is an interesting guy for sure! He is older, probably in his 70s, and has met with missionaries in the past. We taught him the Restoration and he already knows that all of it is true! And I'm not talking about how he has faith in God so he says that he believes it's true or anything like that, he literally knows that it is true by the power of the Holy Ghost! He testified to us many times in that lesson that Joseph Smith was a prophet and that the Book of Mormon is the word of God and that the world needs to read the Book of Mormon. He read the entire Book of Mormon and prayed and got a very strong answer that it is true! But, buzz kill, he has some weird concern where he is fine with just "living the New Testament" and drinking coffee and alcohol and stuff because the Book of Mormon is only for the newer generation. What the?? He doesn't want to get baptized, yet, but the Spirit has worked with him before and it will work with him again and he will be baptized one of these days! He even wants us to come teach his kids and grand kids because he knows it's true. He's gonna get there though! Later we taught Reggie and Liz and it was at the perfect timing, they were going through some crazy stuff and are going to be evicted soon.... But the message that we shared brought a ton of peace and joy to them.

On Friday we had a meeting with President and then we drove out to Winchester, Virginia for exchanges with the elders there. It was a long haul out there! I went with Elder Shouse, he's a stud! While I was there we were able to have several lessons and we picked up 2 new investigators there! I feel like I'm in Brazil out here with how much we teach! Then we drove back to Columbia and found out that we needed to move an elder that was being intermediately transferred to his new area. So we spent the rest of the day/night driving missionaries to where they need to be. I am tired of driving! We didn't get back until late Saturday night so we didn't get a ton of sleep that night.

Sunday morning we had an awesome lesson with our investigator Dameon! He is hard core Catholic but he has super real intent in meeting with us and read the pamphlet like crazy that we left with him! He said he would be baptized if he finds that the Book of Mormon is true (which it is) so he is gonna get baptized!! Sick!!!:)

Have a good week!!

-Elder Larson