Week 92, 7/4/17

Well happy Independence Day to all you Americans!!

Wish I could celebrate our great country with you all today, but the Lord needs me in Edmonton.  I have absolutely zero time today since we are picking up the new missionaries real soon and it is transfers tomorrow, so even if I did have the time, there's no way my brain could piece together a decent email anyway since I'm so tired and frazzled prepping for all of that. 

Pics enjoying CANADA DAY!

I will just share two stories.  On Friday we had an awesome lesson with Ray.  We really want him to work more aggressively towards baptism and quit smoking.  We had a good lesson planned lined up, and at one point I asked him what next step he could take to show God his faith.  He said he could be more diligent about reading the Book of Mormon every day.  Right after that the spirit was so powerful in the room and Elder Hunsaker felt prompted to promise him as the Saviors representative that he would be able to have the spiritual strength to quit smoking if he read the Book of Mormon every day.  Hopefully he does!  I have no doubt that he will be baptized soon enough.   

Saturday was 150th Canada Day!!! It was a super awesome day.  The highlight was going up to the legislature building grounds where there were a couple live music setups, a bunch of food tents, activities, free legislature building tours, etc.  TONS of people were there. There was no open proselyting allowed so we pretty much just walked around and tried to be seen being friendly to everyone and starting casual conversations where we could, bringing up gospel things and sharing cards, etc. We came to learn that standing in lines and talking to people in lines was the best strategy. The Lord helped us in doing that when I went up to two people eating ice cream and started talking to them about their ice cream.  I genuinely wanted to get ice cream (it was super hot), so I was asking them about it and then the lady just says, "ya know what, you can have free ice cream on me!" And pulled a 20 out and demanded that I take it.  What?! Super awesome.  Then she wanted a picture with us.  Very grateful for how awesome she was because it allowed us to actually have money to pay for food so we could stand in more lines and talk to people!  

We had some great conversations! A bunch of people wanted to get pictures with the Mormons too, it was fun.  I got on the Vietnamese news waving a Canadian flag:) We were there for about 5 hours, most of the rest of the day was spent either eating food or on the LRT finding people.  It was honestly one of the most physically and socially exhausting days of my mission.  

At the end of the evening we were getting off the last train and it was almost time to go in (we still go in at 9, but our mission president approved us to stay out till 9:30 in the summer if we are finding), and we were getting off our last train a bit before 9 to go back, but something just felt a little off about heading back. Yes we had talked to SO many people and had so many awesome convos and gotten a few potentials, but we hadn't found someone super solid yet. We decided to do one more quick LRT run. Again, good conversations but no fruit.  Walking back to our apartment, out of the station, I saw two women sitting on a bench a decent ways away and I told myself "ah, we are done, its almost 9:30, I'm so exhausted and they are already having a conversation, etc" pretty much every excuse you could think of.  But then for whatever reason I just turned around and went to talk to them anyway, and they turned out to be super interested in the Book of Mormon and want to meet! Such an awesome feeling when we follow promptings :)  Well this is longer than I thought it would be.  Big news is next week we are getting a smartphone and Facebook

access in preparation to implement it into the whole mission. Exciting! 

Luv from Canada - E. Bonny

Weekly Scripture: 1 Nephi 13:30- USA!   

Lets take a closer look :)