Calling Down Miracles

My first Boba!

7-7-14  

Our zone is trying this new thing, where we pray and ask for Heavenly Father’s guidance on who he wants us to find. So Sister Long and I try it. We pray and ask for guidance, and then we come together to try to decide who we need to find. We sit there in awkward silence for a while and I just keep thinking that...we need to find a black guy. There are very few black people in West Virginia, so I kind of put that out of my head and keep trying to decide what we need to be looking for.

After a while Sister Long says. . . "I don't think he's going be white." SUPER cool when you have a companion and you can verify what you are each thinking and feeling. So then we get excited and we decide that we won't find him knocking doors...we'll just talk to him somewhere, and that he's going to be really searching and have a lot of questions. Well anyway, we make our little lesson plan for this man we've never met before and we go to work. A day or two passed, and we still hadn't found him, but we continued to pray for him. Then, one night, in the very last hour of the workday, we are walking down the street and see this black guy working on his car. We say hello and he is really friendly and says hello back and we start a conversation about his car. We get talking, and the conversation turns to us being missionaries. We give him our card and he's super interested and we offer him a Book of Mormon and then realize that we had given our last one out. Yeah, it sounds ridiculous right? But it's showing us that we really can call down miracles! And the thing is, we don't ask that we'll find this person, we ask what kind of person Heavenly Father already has for us to find, and try to align our will with his. I sort of thought it was a weird idea at first, until I really understood it. But anyway, we tell him we will bring him a Book of Mormon!

Two days later we bring him one while he's outside with his wife and his neighbor. So we give it to him and he talks about how he's from Kenya and I bring up that my mom lived in Kenya, and for some reason I had this weird urge to tell him about Wairimu, and so I mention her, and he says, "Yes! That is a Kenyan name!" in his sweet accent! He asked us tons of crazy questions that I've never been asked before but he was so cool and so interested! I'm so exited about him! We also found this great family who just moved here from New York, and this young couple who are going to WVU and the guy loves guns and the girl is agnostic. . .so we have gained a super diverse teaching pool here and it’s great!

On our way to meet the new mission president.  Yes, that's Sister Reed, my MTC companion!