Spirit Tracting

July 21, 2009

Hola familia,

This last week has been very full of crazy stuff. First off, we moved. It's just temporary for the Boyle's Wedding. We moved out last night and we'll be there for two weeks. We're living with President Ross, the branch president. We already miss the Boyle's but the Ross's are great too.

We had a cool experience doing some "spirit tracting" as we call it. We get in the car and Elder Becerra tells me where to drive. Every time we've found several people to teach. One of the teaching experiences was really neat. We had just got finished teaching a man in English that we taught in his garage. He was a little bit drunk so it made it interesting. Then we got back in the car because he said there weren't any Hispanic people in the area. Elder Becerra told me where to turn whenever we got to an intersection. After driving for just a minute we saw a lady sitting down on the sidewalk in the shade. She looked like she had been crying. The spirit said to talk to her so we parked the car about a block down the street around the corner. When we were first walking up, we couldn't see her because of the trees. We were praying that she would still be there. We walked really fast until we got within sight of her. When we got up to her she was looking away kind of ashamed. We just started by asking her if she was okay and if there was anything we could do for her. She didn't say anything just shook her head. We talked to her a little bit more with the same kind of response and then I asked her if it would be alright if we shared a scripture with her. She gave the same response and shook her head. Then she said that we could say a prayer for her. It was the first thing she said and it was really quiet. So we sat down in the shade with her on the sidewalk. I asked her for her name. She said "Lana". Then I offered a prayer specifically asking Heavenly Father to help her. She was a lot more open to us after that. She told us why she was sad and that her ex-boyfriend had just yelled at her and told her to get off of his property. It just tore her up and the reason she stopped on the sidewalk was because she was so overcome with emotion that she couldn't keep walking. We read Alma 7:11-12 with her and talked about it. I could see that it meant a lot to her. Her countenance cheered up quite a bit. The subject then changed to talking about Spanish. Where she works she associates with a lot of Hispanic people and she has to use a translator, a real person. She bought rosetta stone and has been using that. I talked to her about how I learned Spanish and she was really impressed. She said she would give us a call so we could come over and give her a Book of Mormon in Spanish and English. It was such a cool lesson. I felt on such a spiritual high after all three of us got up and went different ways.

Your adventures with scuba-diving sound like a lot of fun. I'll be excited to join you later on. Try not to have too much fun without me. haha.

Off of Amy's comment about the song coming on the radio. I hear stuff like that every time we go into a fast food place. It's kind of hard hearing all that stuff. Most of it doesn't sound as good as it did before the mission though. You can feel the spirit leaving as you hear it. There was one time in a Chinese restaurant where I heard some motab come on. That was really cool.

On Sunday I did my first baptismal interview. It was in English with Tyler. He just got married to one of the members in the branch. They're both about 20. He's really cool. He's very ready to take part in this church. He was actually kind of bummed that he had missed the opportunity to serve a mission. Isn't that such an amazing attitude?

ATF stands for All Time Finding. When you say that you ATFed somebody it means you talked to them outside of tracting on doors. For example talking to somebody in the park or outside in their yard or garage or on the street.

Francisco got an emergency call to go into work. One of the other workers just up and quit and he's been working double shift this whole week. It's been really hard on him. He hasn't been able to meet with us and he wasn't able to come to church yesterday to receive the priesthood.

Our district improved again this week. We've all been talking to more people, teaching more lessons, and seeing more success.

Another update on Jacob from Jerusalem; Sister Tulva, who is awesome, got us a Book of Mormon in Arabic to take over to him. He wasn't there the first time we tried but we left the book there for him. Then we came over the next night and went in and talked to him for a long time. It was really interesting and fun. He wants to come see you guys when he moves down to Provo in about a week. He's going to take something to you from me. When do you get back home? That way I can tell him when to go over. I have his email address so I'll keep in touch with him. I'll give him all your information so he can get in contact with you.

Exciting week!

Love you, Elder Ben Arnold