"God Has Not Ceased to be a God of Miracles"

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