Blessed

First off, I'll tell you transfer doctrine we got this week. Elder Farmer is getting transferred to Amarillo and I'm getting Elder Woodland as my new companion. He was in Amarillo when I was in Borger so I'm pretty excited to serve with him! There's also five other missionaries getting transferred out of the zone.

At church this week, we had two less active families, the A's and the D's! There was also this lady who works at Salvation Army, where we do a lot of service, who came! Plus K came . He's a young man who we've been helping work toward going on his mission because his home life is rough.  His mom is super anti-Mormon and his dad is less active because of that.

There was one day this week when we were trying by people and not having any luck contacting anyone so we started doing some knocking. It was the same every house where somebody answered. They'd open the door and either right then or after we talked to them for a minute or two,tell us they weren't interested and to go away. We were talking about how frustrating people are on the way back to the truck, but then the last door we knocked on this guy, W, answered. We start talking to him about Christ but then (somewhat off topic) I asked him something about prayer. He said, "It's funny you bring that up. I don't know if y'all came here planning on talking to me about praying, but recently I've been praying for God to guide me and I've been trying to simplify my life a lot." It's meeting people like that, who you know Heavenly Father has prepared to hear the gospel, that makes missionary work so great. Amid all the rejection and hate, we are blessed; even though many times those blessings don't come until "after the trial of [our] faith".

I know that this is the Lord's work. The priesthood of God has been restored to the earth. Without it, men could not preach the gospel of Christ or administer the ordinances thereof and we would be continually lost and in the dark. And even though dark times still come, we just need to focus on the specks of light ahead of us or that we know we've seen in the past in order to get through.

Love,

Elder Carlson