I am once
again humbled as I am reminded of what an amazing week it has been. So many
amazing things happened this week and I have been reminded daily of just how
blessed I am to be serving a mission and be serving in Grand Rapids!
Tuesday,
I was on a trade-off with Elder Boswell and got to be back in the Lowell/Ada
area where I was serving with Elder Brown! It was a great day working with him
and it was weird to be back in my old apartment and old area for the day.
Wednesday, I taught my first district meeting on the doctrine of Christ and on
how to effectively extend baptismal invitations. I thought it went really well
and me and Elder Dunn got to put it to work immediately as we extended a
baptismal invitation to one of our investigators right after district meeting
and she accepted! We stopped by a few members of the ward that are unable to
come to church due to health reasons and got to share a spiritual message with
them before we went to dinner and missionary correlation at the church.
Thursday, I got to travel to Lansing with the other District Leaders and Zone
Leaders to go to missionary leadership training. It was an amazing day as I was
able to learn so much from President Jacobsen and from 2 guys from SLC that work
for the mission department. One was the director of proselyting and the other
was the director of technology. It was an amazing day that I was able to learn
so much about how to more effectively find people and teach better! I am also
now able to use Facebook as a district leader! I am able to use my same account
that I have. I just have to use it for missionary purposes and not just social.
So all of my friends and family are able to see my post, like, comment, and
share them but I am just not allowed to communicate back and forth with people
back home. I have to just use it to communicate with people here in Michigan
and to share messages with all of those people that are friends with me on
Facebook. So if you comment or message me directly and I don't directly respond
don't take it personally I am just trying to keep my work on Facebook on my
purpose as a missionary! I am excited to see how the Lord is able to do amazing
things through another tool that I am going to be able to use for missionary
work!
Now here
is where the miracles began to happen... Friday we taught several great lessons
with several people that we are working with. We got to the apartment around
9pm and we got a call from a bishop in a surrounding area telling us that the
nonmember mother of a lady in his ward had a stroke and was in the hospital and
the daughter has requested a blessing and that he was unable to find anyone to
go. Since we were the closest missionaries to that hospital he asked if we
could go. Since it was a little later and we aren't suppose to be out of our
apartment after 9:30 we had to call our mission president and get his
permission to go give the blessing. We went to the hospital and we met the lady
and she was the sweetest and funniest lady I have met in a long time. Even
though she was not able to speak clearly because of the stroke she still was
happy and was giving her grandson a hard time and was really keeping a positive
attitude. We gave her a blessing and told her that she would be healed.
Afterwards we talked to her son and his girlfriend about the priesthood and
explained blessing to them. The grandson is familiar with our church and
invited us to come visit his grandma again and to visit him and his girlfriend
in a few weeks to share more about the gospel with them! So we picked up 2 new
investigators. Then on Saturday, we hadn't had much time to door knock this
week (and I was really missing just getting to talk to people on the street)
since we have been teaching so much so we set aside 2 hours to door knock and
made sure that we didn't schedule any lessons during that time. We door knocked
with just a copy of the Book of Mormon and a plain bible that didn't have any cross-references
or anything just the Scriptures. At the third
door we knocked, we met the youth pastor for the biggest church in Grand Rapids
and he invited us in to see what we shared with people. I honestly thought in
my head that this was going to be a terrible lesson because we didn’t have our
normal scriptures with our verses highlighted and all of that. The Spirit took
over the lesson and me and Elder Dunn taught great. The Spirit was so strong
there and he agreed with almost everything that we taught him. He and his wife both listened to us and
discussed the things that we shared and both invited us to come back. It was an
awesome lesson and we picked up another 2 investigators!!
Yesterday
was a great day at church. After church we talked with Ethan (who is the one
who is getting baptized on the 7th of February.) He was nervous about telling
his parents of his decision to be baptized because they told him that they
would cut him off. We talked to him and gave him a blessing of comfort. Last
night he called us and said that the phone call went better than he expected
but that his parents were really upset and were probably still going to cut him
off. They said that they will be talking to him a lot in the coming weeks and
did not support him in his decision at all. He has a great amount of faith and
it is inspiring to me to see a guy his age that is willing to do whatever it
takes to do what God wants him to do. He is an amazing guy and he is going to
do great things for this gospel!! I am excited to see all of the things that he
does!!
Well I
have another busy week planned and I am excited to see all of the things that
Heavenly Father has in store for us! Thanks for all of the love and
support!!
-Elder
Bloskas
"...God
has not ceased to be a God of miracles." -Mormon 9:15
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