Elder Jantsen Thorpe August 2017-2019: We ate Baloot!

Hey gang! This week on #whatsmysnack we have a real good one. Not good in taste, but good in experience haha. The Zone Leaders brought over some Phillipino food from a member and they gave us some Baloot. Baloot is a duck egg and the duck has grown for a month so it's formed and everything. So we ate it, it was a little crunchy with the beak and everything and boy, it was gross, but now we can say we ate Baloot!

Another solid week over here in Glockford! Chapter 14 of PMG was put into good use again this week! We have a new investigator named C. We had our first real lesson with her over Skype this week and the first thing she asked was, "how do you date in your church?" after I told her she says, "oh ok, so are you dating anyone right now?" Haha I had to really get the point across that we dedicate these 2 years 100% to the Lord and so we don't date. I was pretty sure she got the point, but at the end of the lesson she asked me for my Instagram haha so we will see. She is a solid investigator though, she said she really wants to come to church when she gets back in town and she wants to be baptized. After we taught the first vision she shared an awesome experience with us.

So she had just moved to Rockford from St. Louis and she said she wasn't the person she wanted to be, she had stopped being religious and she could really feel the absence of God in her life. She moved here and had no friends. So she prayed for the first time in a while and she asked God to help her get back into church and to have friends. She said that about 5 minutes after she finished her prayer we knocked on her door! It's even more amazing to know how we got to knocking on her door. One day as Elder Bagley and I were planning, we saw that we had a random task to stop by somebody we had never heard of, and neither of us put it in. We thought it was weird, but we figure it was there so we might as well stop by. The Lord definitely has his hand in this work!

We have been working with members a lot more so we have been stopping by some less actives that we've never met. This week we stopped by a less active and he pulled up as we were on his porch saying "how's the mormon church treating ya?" He let us in and we talked for like 40 minutes. He likes to talk and we got through all sorts of topics for example, UFO's, native Americans and how he's a member of the KKK. He told us he was offended by something that happened in his little branch in Wisconsin 20 years ago and he hasn't been back since. Since then he has stopped praying and reading his scriptures and gotten into a lot of anti and does not have a testimony of modern day prophets. Something President Griffin said in our last zone conference had stuck out to me. He said, "Don't take a chance on your testimony, strengthen and nourish it everyday!" Love y'all, have a great week!

I love elder Elton and Hollist

Elder Thorpe