Elder Dailen Brown's Mission Blog: Lots of Success!

Cool scenery around here

Elder fisher and I aren't sure who the senior companion is! Nobody told us, so we just kinda work together, and it all works out. I had assumed that he would be, because he has been in the area longer, but not much was happening when I first came in and he didn't know much about the area or the members, because his last companion didn't really pass on a lot of information. So I kinda just suggested things to do and we started doing them and we finally had success this week! We had a wonderful week! We had a lot of success, and saw some really cool miracles! We found a new investigator who committed to read and pray, and had really good questions. Because we can't answer all of his questions at once, he has a desire to meet with us more, so we can meet with him multiple times, and he will hopefully progress. We will be teaching him for the second time today. We met a man in the street, and we were unable to share much with him, but we mentioned modern prophets briefly, and he invited us to his home for 5:30 that same day. About a half hour after we met him, he called us back and asked if we could come to his place in 5 minutes instead of at 5:30. We said sure, and came to his place to teach him, his wife, and two of his friends. They all committed to read and pray, we gave each of them a Book of Mormon, and we set another appointment for the same week, on Saturday. When we taught them on Saturday, all of them had started to read, and one of them had already read 16 pages! We had to keep the lesson very brief, but we taught a bit of the plan of salvation, and the word of wisdom. They committed to live the word of wisdom, and to come to church on Sunday. Unfortunately they didn't show up to church, but we have set up to teach them twice in this week! Two of them had accepted the soft commitment to baptism, but we didn't extend a date yet. We also stopped by a less active member who invited us in, told us he hasn't been to church in 14 years, but he wants to be fully active by a year from now, and his partner has a Book of Mormon, and they both want the discussions! He told us that our visit will probably provide him the push he needs to come back. So that was really cool as well!

I am doing really good. I have a lot of hopes for the work here, and we are striving to work with the members more, and get to know them. We had a really good fast and testimony meeting. Many of the members thanked us for our testimonies, and said they would like to have us for dinner soon! That is a true miracle for us as we haven't gotten many appointments with members at all yet.

We do like..... a lot of walking, I would say at least two hours a day total, maybe more. It depends on where we go. Apparently they used to have bikes here, but the mission stopped it for some reason or another. It's not bad though, because as we walk we often meet people along the way, we just have to make sure we leave early so that we don't have to rush so much.

I met Elder Gugyelka at zone training about a week after I got here, so I have seen him a few times now. He was like oh, Elder Brown, my grandparents are in your home ward, and I was like oh yeah! That's crazy!

Remember President Utchdworf's talk on gratitude? I was thinking about it on that Saturday right after conference, and ironically our train home didn't stop at the station it was supposed to so we got off at the next one it stopped at which was two stations away from the one we wanted. We had no cell service, so we had to walk about 2 hours back to the flat and got back at 10:20 pm instead of 9 pm! The whole time though, it just didn't bother me, because of his talk which was really cool! Normally I would have been super irritated, because nearly everything that could go wrong, went wrong. But I just remembered his talk and realized that the experience would be a tiny blip in about a week, so in the long run, it is nothing. His talk really helped!

Some more cool scenery around here.

Here are pictures of the Broadmore hospital, Which is a hospital for the Criminally Insane! It is so guarded, and security is so important that they test the alarms every Monday morning at 10 am! it is about a 45 min walk from our flat, and the alarms are so loud!