Thursday, December 10, 2015

Week #71-We Are an Answer to a Prayer and #72- Maria Bears Her Testimony

November 30, 2015
Howdy Family and Friends!!

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!

Our Thanksgiving was pretty good. It was a proselyting day. We tried to visit some less actives as well as a few investigators. We were invited to eat lunch with the Willet family, who have 8 kids.  Brother and Sister Willets grew up in Arizona. So I ate with Arizonians on Thanksgiving day! We were invited to eat dinner with the Starnes family. They served us fried turkey.  It was way better than regular turkey because it isn't dry at all. Mom and Dad, we will have to try frying a turkey next Thanksgiving

We found a couple new investigators this week. We went to visit a potential investigator that we met a few weeks ago. We knocked on her door and her husband answered. He called his wife in. When she came in she told us that she was just praying to God for knowledge when we knocked on her door. She is a hair stylist so while Elder Dickerson gets a hair cut on Wednesday, we will talk to her about the Book of Mormon. 

Araceli, Estela, and Maria are doing well. We taught them for the third time this week. However, they will all be out of town this week since they are helping their mom Estela move back to Mexico. One of our investigators named Ricardo is also going to be gone for the next week or so while he is visiting family in Florida. Everyone is just leaving this week!

We almost ran out of gas last night. We are supposed to fill up when the car is at half a tank.  We were going to buy gas on Saturday but we got super busy and Elder Dickerson and I totally forgot about it until the gas light went on while we were driving out to Grimesland for dinner Sunday night. We figured that we would have just barely enough gas to get to our apartment but not enough to go to some of our appointments later in the night. Luckily, the member we ate dinner with offered to give us some gas from a gas can that he had in his garage so we ended up making it back to our apartment that night just fine. 

I hope that everyone has a great week!
Love, Elder Cannon

December 7, 2015
Hey Family and Friends!

Well, my companion, Elder Dickerson has completed his mission.  He is leaving for Virginia in a few hours and then he is flying home tomorrow. I got transfer calls. President Baker wants me to train a new missionary again! I will be staying in the same area in Greenville.

We had a really good lesson with Maria, Araceli and Estela. We asked them if they had read the chapters in the Book of Mormon that we had asked them to read. Araceli and Estela hadn't read but Maria did. Maria explained exactly what happened in 1 Nephi 1-4. She asked us some pretty in depth questions like, "So Nephi and his 3 brothers who are Laman, Lemuel, and Sam went back to get the plates from Laban. What are the plates, are they like scripture?" Then, Maria bore her testimony to her sister and mother.  She told them that when they start reading the Book of Mormon, they won't be able to put it down. Then, the three of them started to compare churches.  Maria talked about how she saw in us, unlike people from other churches, a hope and happiness. It was the best lesson I have ever been a part of. Sadly, Araceli took her mom back to Mexico.  She will be gone for the next week or two.  The number that we had for Maria is not working and we have no other way to contact her, so I'm not sure what to do about that. Hopefully, we will be able to get in contact with her soon or we will just have to wait for Araceli to return from Mexico. 

 Elder Dickerson and I were also in an auto accident last night. We were driving on a highway to a dinner appointment in Ayden when some guy did a U-turn from the opposite side of the highway into our lane right as we were going to drive by.  I seriously thought we were going to T-bone his car because he was turning super slow. Miraculously, his car flipped around as we were trying to swerve out of the way and the side of our car hit his car.  After we got hit, the wrong way driver sped off.  Elder Dickerson and I took off after him but after a few seconds I think he realized that we weren't going to let him get away so he pulled over.  We called the police and he ended up getting a citation. In the process of all this Elder Dickerson got ten violations from Tiwi, the installed machine in our car that yells at us if we drive too fast, drive aggressively, or speed up too fast. Thankfully, no one got hurt and neither car was that damaged. The only thing that is a bummer is that my new Greenie and I will probably be on bikes for a few days while our car is getting fixed. Ha, ha.

Hope everyone has a great week!

Love, Elder Cannon