Thursday, November 21, 2013

11/21/2013 Thursday "I would not give it up for any material possessions in this world"




Hello again,

     Man I am starting to slack on sending out emails every week.  We have just been very busy lately helping the other missionaries get around.  Since I last emailed, we have found 5 new people that are interested in the message that we have for them.  I realize that it has been a long time and there is a lot of stuff that I haven't talked about.  I am going to try to help you catch up so forgive me if I write about something that I have already written about.

     To start off with, the Asian couple that we were teaching left and moved to Washington D.C., which is just a couple of hours out of our mission boundaries.  

     We have been teaching J... more though.  I would like to take a couple of lines and thank the member that we brought with us to teach J....  We were trying to find someone that would get along good with him to bring to the lessons and I felt impressed that we should bring Brother A.  

     When I told my companion, who is still Elder Graff, at first he hesitated at the thought, but in time it grew on him.  As for how the lesson went, it was a total success.  Brother A is not a very deep thinking man but he has a testimony of the Gospel and as he talked about what he knew to be true the spirit filled the room.  It was funny, because he then started to talk about some things that would be rather strange to a person that knew as little about the church as J... does, but it did not matter because the spirit was there so strongly that there was nothing that Brother A... could say that could have ruined the atmosphere.  

     We asked him then if he would be baptized if he came to know the things were true and he replied, "while Brother A... was talking I felt something warm inside me, and I believe the things he said."  Even a semi-seasoned missionary like myself had a hard time keeping his cool until after the lesson.
     From this experience I learned how important it is for the members to go out with the missionaries.  While I am on the topic of member missionary work, we have had something very strange happen to us that I never thought we would run into.  

     So you are probably thinking that those members that haven't come to church in a while probably would not be doing missionary work.  Well apparently this is not the case, because 2 of the 5 people I talked about at the beginning were found by such members.  I cannot relay to you the strange excitement that comes when you get a call from a member that has gone astray and they say, "I have a person that I want you to teach and I want you to help me come back to church so that I can help them."

     Which leads me to the next person I wanted to talk about, G....  So the member that found him is named Brother F., and Brother F. has not been to church in a long time.  But he made friends with G. after Brother F. fell out of a tree and was recovering in the hospital.  He called us up and told us that G. needs our help really bad and that he knows that he needs the Gospel in his life.  When we met G. we soon realized what the problem was.  

     So for anyone that does not know this, missionaries tend to have this strange spirit about them that makes anyone that is talking to them realize what the Lord wants of them and why they are falling short.  Now I am not going to explain everything that is wrong with our good friend G. but I will say this, he is like a man who has lost God in his life.  

     He spent his life searching after the things that he thought would bring him happiness, but he lost it all in a second and now we are trying to help him find out what will really bring him happiness.  Now G... is not and was not a bad guy, in fact he is a great guy who is wealthy, has a nice house, has a nice car, and yet all those things no longer bring him happiness.  Because there is no makeup of material possessions in this world that can bring someone lasting happiness, only the Gospel can do that.
     I am not going to try to fit anymore in this already giant email.  But I am grateful to be here helping these people and that I have the opportunity to be a tool of the Lord’s.  I can honestly say that I would not give it up for any material possessions in this world.

Elder Erb

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