Elder Jantsen Thorpe August 2017-2019: We are now an online proselyting mission!

Hey gang!

This week on #whatsmysnack we have some Oberweis chocolate milk! Nick and Brooks, you two would absolutely love this stuff!! It is some very rich, very creamy and very delicious chocolate milk! Elder Kish couldn't stop talking about it ever since he got here so he bought some for us last week and it definitely didn't disappoint. The only way I can describe it is, it tastes like melted chocolate ice cream! It's pretty great.

Well, this week really flew by! This week we officially became an online proselyting mission! So I get to use my Facebook to get in contact with investigators and we can now do Skype calls to investigators for lessons if they aren't available for us to physically come to their house! Weekly planning also got totally changed which is really nice. It used to be we had to go through all 13 steps in preach my gospel but now it's much more personalized to our investigators. It's supposed to make weekly planning a lot shorter, which It does depending on how many investigators you have. So for Elder Kish and I we have roughly 19 investigators we have to talk about haha so it's still pretty long! It rained pretty much all week and we got caught out riding our bikes in a couple storms which was crazy!
We had a lesson with our investigator Rose and her two sons John and Rico. Rose is a single mom with an 18 yr old, 9 yr old, 7 yr old, 6 yr old, 4 yr old, and a 2 month old baby! Yeah that house is insane. It's impossible to teach her when all her kids are home so we go over twice in one day to teach her in the morning without the kids and once later to teach John and Rico. Rose, John and Rico all have baptismal dates for January 6!
We also taught Stanley again. Stanley has a cousin that he lives with who can get on Stanley's nerves haha. He likes to come in and make jokes during our lessons and Stanley tells him to leave because he is learning, it's awesome. After we left Elder Kish asked who that guy that kept coming in was, and I felt like Jack Black from School of Rock (haha) I wanted to say, "that's yo yo ma's cousin, lil nepotiz!"

This week I really realized that Heavenly Father truly has a plan for all of us. Last Monday evening we had a couple lessons planned that we were really excited about. We went to the first one and they weren't home which was a bummer, then on our way to the next one they texted us and cancelled. We were pretty bummed and didn't know what to do. As we were sitting there I had a very strong prompting from the spirit to go and visit Louie who is the guy who we met last week who asked us some difficult, deep questions. So we went to his house and right as I knocked on his door he opened it! He was just walking outside to sit and he was so excited to see us! We sat and talked with him for a while and he said he was sorry he wasn't able to make it to conference. We set up a meeting with him and the bishop that he was wanting and answered more of his questions. The next day he met with the bishop and us and it went super well, he got a lot of his questions answered. We then had a lesson with him on Friday and taught the restoration and it went super well. He then came to church yesterday and enjoyed it. He told us he wants to continue to learn and come to church because he really wants to find out the truth. I'm so pumped for him! Anyways I now realize that those lessons Monday evening fell through because Heavenly Father had a different plan and that we needed to be with Louie! God works in mysterious ways, but as we put our faith in him, he will direct our paths!

Elder Thorpe