Royal Trumbull

Malo Soifua!!!

Today on the Elder Hill Show:

• Hit my 1 year mark! (Wack...)
• Don't teach a lesson for three hours. I tried it and it doesn't work 😑
• Knocking doors is kinda fun, it just takes soooo long
• Eating at members' houses is always the way to go (especially when they have non-member friends there too)

This week was honestly a rather uneventful week. We did get a lot of rain from hurricane Ida, but we weren't hurt too bad by it. We had to drop a lot of people we had been teaching, and our area book looks a little thin, so we've been on the find grind to find more people to teach.  Also I officially passed my year mark, so that's just wack. It's weird to think that I still have so much time left, but also so little (and the list of "last"s begins...).

We had a lesson with our friend Matt, and it lasted for THREE HOURS. It was a really good discussion, and we covered a lot of ground, but honestly it wasn't very effective. It was a little frustrating because he told us that he saw us and our faith as "missing parts of the gospel of Christ." I've got nothing against his religion, and he's a super good guy; it's just really hard to teach someone about a gospel that they believe is inferior to theirs (and they don't really want to change that line of thinking). He is reading the BoM though, so that's good. Hopefully he'll understand someday that there's more offered here than just a life to come.

Because of our incredibly low amount of lessons per day and per week, we've been working super hard on finding, especially knocking. I've heard all of the missionary stories about tracting, so I had mixed feelings about it at first, but honestly it's kind of fun haha. Wandering around and just knocking dozen of doors isn't all that exciting, but waiting to see who will answer and what kind of conversation we'll have is always fun stuff. We've been able to give out a couple BoMs as well as countless pass-along cards, so hopefully we start seeing dividends/profit from our investment.

Last night we had a dinner appointment with a member of the ward. She's less active, but she LOVES the missionaries, and she and her son are looking to start coming back to church. They currently live in the same home as another family (mom & dad & four kids), and we were able to meet the whole family and talk over the dinner table as well as share a brief message with them. The whole family is super nice, and a couple of them seem genuinely interested, so we might start teaching them soon, so that's very exciting stuff.

Mafaufauga faaleagaga: I studied grace this week as part of our long discussion with Matt, and I listened once again to the BYU devotional by Brad Wilcox called "His Grace is Sufficient". It's a super super good talk, and he explains it so well. One part that I particularly like is the fact that nothing we do in this life can repay the laws of justice, or repay Christ for satisfying the laws of justice. The reason we have commandments and covenants is to USE the grace that Christ gave us to change and become better. We are all saved by grace, but the choice is yours if you want to be changed by grace. (Kinda strange topic, but it's important). I encourage you all too listen to that talk as soon as you can. It really is amazing and I know you'll benefit from it.

Alofa tele lava atu ia outou uma,

Elder Hill

Ata:

• Raccoon roadkill
• Good meme 😂
• Nice sign we saw by someone's house