Hey everybody! We decided to drive up to the chapel today to do e-mails to avoid having to pay at the library. Took some of our kilometers, but worth the drive... especially since there's a ping-pong table here! I'm excited but a little nervous since we've got Elder Yan who is Chinese and says when he was young he had some training in ping-pong haha. We'll see how good he is.
This week was refreshing because we were finally able to see some of the people who had been unable to meet with us during past weeks. Gabriel was the first one. He's from Rwanda and has a Michael Strahan type gap in his teeth. It's pretty classy. We had a good lesson with him but we were at a cafe with music playing so it was kind of hard to really concentrate and get the spirit there.
Freddy and Claudia are a couple from Columbia who we found about a month ago and we had only taught them once. Freddy had been out of town for a while so we hadn't been able to teach them both until this week. We were over there on Friday and as we were starting the lesson, their friend (a lady whose name we couldn't remember) came up and sat at the table with us. Turns out she had been reading the Book of Mormon which we had left a few weeks earlier. She spoke very little French and no English so I practiced the little Spanish that I know. After the lesson she asked us if we could teach her English so we asked them if we could come by twice a week: once to teach English and once to have a lesson. They agreed :)
So I had a couple cool learning experiences this week:
The first one came from doing home teaching with Brother Jordan (recent convert). We are his companions to teach all the people who know English here since he doesn't speak any french. We were visiting a Sister and at the end of the visit he asked her how she was doing meeting her needs and stuff. She mentioned that she was pretty tight with food and wasn't sure how she'd get through the holidays. When we got back to Brother Jordan's to drop him off, he invited us to stay for dinner. He told Sister Jordan about the Sister we had visited and without a second's thought or hesitation they both started getting bags and food from their freezer. I was worrying because the Jordans have had some tight times with money as well and they aren't super well off themselves. They didn't think about themselves at all and they were just willing to give. It was a great example of selflessness.
The second lesson that I learned this week was to follow the Spirit more. I told you about my interview with Nic last week who was scheduled to be baptized. The interview had gone super well and afterwards I had a bit of an impression to warn him that the week before his baptism would be a crucial one because of the added temptations that ALWAYS come when people start making positive changes in their life. I took the prompting lightly and didn't say what came to my mind. Everything was going well until Thursday when I got a call from the Sisters telling me that they had received a text from Nic that he wasn't sure about getting baptized anymore. Turns out he had come across some anti materials. When I realized that I had received a prompting to warn him and didn't do it I was kicking myself. We did a lot of praying for him that day. That night the Sisters were finally able to see him and talked to him about it and just reminded him of the spiritual experiences he had already had and the answers he had already received. He realized he already knew what he needed to do and the baptism went through on Saturday. Phew. Moral of the story: do what the Spirit tells you to do without doubting that it's the Spirit!
Anyway love you all!
Love, Elder Oxborrow
P.S. One picture is from the service project of raking leaves a while ago and the other when is when we went Cois (as in Quebecois) Bowling!
On Friday we had a really cool opportunity. There's a recent RM in the branch who got home just the week before Christmas, and he's the only member of the church in his family. Before he left on his mission, his parents had met missionaries but never really had any visit with them. On Friday we had dinner at their house! They were an awesome family and really enjoyed talking about our mission experiences since we are doing the same thing their son had been doing for the past two years. His mom even asked us if we have a lot of investigators haha. They were super cool. Hopefully they will start opening up to learning about the gospel soon.
