“Wake up and get ready, let’s go to church!”

Hi Everyone!

Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers, I'd like to start out being grateful for the blessing the Lord gives me from the faith of all of you! Like it talks about it Ether 12, faith always precedes the miracle and we don't receive any till after the trial of our faith! These past few weeks have had ups and downs, but we've been keeping a good attitude and keeping faith that God has a plan for these 2 little branches. We're starting to see the beginnings of change, more people are feeling the influence of the Holy Spirit in their lives and are coming back to church, being more faithful, and are more willing to work with us! One family is starting daily scripture study, and others are sharing the gospel with their friends!

One of our young women has a boyfriend that she's recently been letting us come over to teach, I think I mentioned him last week. He came to church this week, and stayed for the Sunday School period as well as Sacrament! In Sunday School he started asking some questions about why the church encourages people to marry other people in the church, which received mixed answers, some with more tact than others (one of the most stressful things as a missionary is having an investigator lead an open discussion with most of your adult members, and not be able to clarify their answers :). He received it well, and then started sharing with the class that he's been meeting with the missionaries and having a lot of his questions answered, and also he's been coming to church and studying, and he's feeling more and more that the church is true! His girlfriend said that he'd woken her up that morning (he's living with her family right now) and said "wake up and get ready, let's go to church!" We're really excited for him, he's a great guy and it sounds like he's really applying himself to find the truth, and the Spirit is touching his life and guiding him!

I'm discovering that Carbondale, the town we're living in, is kind of a hippy town, and strange things are often going on when we drive home at night. One day this week we were stopped in traffic for this massive bike-parade thing where a bunch of people (the normal adults from the city) had dressed up in all kinds of stuff, with everything from 60's styles to a guy in a clown outfit on a double decker bike, and everything in between. I wish I'd gotten pictures, it was so unreal to see all of these normal looking adults in weird outfits riding bikes in a huge group! I felt like Alma and his sons seeing the apostate Zoramites worshiping, they were "astonished beyond all measure!"

I hope you all have a great week, I'm loving my time here serving the Lord and doing His work! Although success in the mission field is rarely immediate, I'm gaining a testimony more and more that if we put our faith in the Lord and work as hard as we can, the Lord will perform the miracles and magnify our callings. I hope you all have a great week!

Love,
Elder Damon Janis