Elder Street 11/15/2010

Hey players, HOWZ IT???

So this week has been pretty swell i would say. We found a couple new investiagators this week and they are so solid. But we found out that they are moving to Samoa in a month and we most likely won't be able to get them baptized here in the Hawaii.. It kind of upsets me becuase the previous missionaries, Fiefia being one of them, didn' really try to teach this family and they were just going over and hanging out with them and not teaching them anything at all.. Now that we started teaching them we have found out how amazing they really are but its too late and hopefully any progression will have to be picked up when they move to Samoa. The only problem is the girl, Pai, has a less active boyfriend who is really nice but not motivated in the least bit to come to church. When she goes back to Samoa with her non member Samoan family it probably won't be very good because the people in Tonga and Samoa that have not yet converted to Mormonism are very, very obstinate and hard to change. There is a reason why they are not part of the like 80% of the people who have converted to thte church. So i pray any progress we make with them will not be erased when she gets home and has the influence of her family weighing in on her decision to get baptized. We will cross our fingers and bend our knees every night though, that is for sure.
We had an amazing referral come in last night from the Laie Zone leaders over on Northshore. They asked what Elders were serving in Mililani 4th ward and i was like, that would be us! They are really cool elders and i am pretty good friends with one of them from Idaho, his name is Elder Tominaga, he was like, ' Well Streeter, happy birthday from your trunky friend, we have 5 people basically lined up to get baptized for you!" We always joke around about each other getting miracle baptisms and he is dying this transfer so he was kept giving me a hard time. But anyway, long story short, they have had the Temple open house for the Laie Temple for the past 3 weeks. Thousands of people have went through and some really awesome things have happend becuase of it. Elder Tominaga said he was going to give Elder Eubanks our phone number (he and his wife are over the Temple in Laie) and that he was going to give us an address to a family that is reall promising. Usually they would wait a few days and the referral process works by getting sent to Headquarters in Honolulu and then they send out a text message full of the information we need to go and contact the people that are being referred. But these ones were so so solid that they wanted us to contact them right away.
After Tominaga had hung up, Elder Eubanks called and told the story of the Lyon family. He said that yesterday, so saturday, the last day of the tempe open house, a member had brought one of her best friends and her family through the temple. As they neared the end of the tour the member's girlfriend was like, " I feel so... I can't explain how I feel in here, it feels wonderful! I have never felt anything like this in my life before..." And so the member waited back and they sat in the temple for a little while longer than the rest of the group. The non-member friend startedt look at a picture on the wall. She asked her member friend, "What is that?"
The friend responded and told her it was Joseph Smith and then she expounded on the first vision and how the restoration of the Gospel had taken place through him. The non-member friend nodded her head and said,"You know, i really do believe that it happend. I believe Joseph saw that."
The friend must have been excited out of her mind and even more so when th friend asked,"Well how do I learn more?" She immediatley told her that missionaries are out here and that they teach about the Gospel full time and that they would answer any questions about any concern or thing she wanted to know. She then went on to say that when missionaries come over they are very bold. They will pray with you and invite you to say prayers, they will commit you to read the Book of Mormon, they will invite you to come to church with them, and that they will even commit you and ask you to be baptized... The non-member friend just smiled and after hearing all of the words her friend had uttered, she stated, "Well lets send them over to our house!!!"
I was so excited when i heard about this referral, we basically stopped everything we were doing and went straight to the house to meet the family. When we got there we found that the husband had been reading the Book of Mormon already and they wanted Books of Mormon for the kids. The husband was kind of standoffish but then the wife came out and she was so excited to see us. She really must have felt something in the temple. She told us sorry, that they were just getting home and having dinner right now but that they really wanted us over and that she loved the temple and that she had so many questions and she wants us over to read with the kids and meet with her family. The husband acted kind of annoyed by her, but she is solid, it looks like we may just need to work on dad a little bit. They have 3-4 kids, and i think they are all over the age of 8. So we will see, we have an appointment with them this week, so keep the Lyons family in your prayers at night, we are so excited!!!!
Oh and a funny thing that happen last week that i forgot to tell you all about. So I am sure you all know Dog The Bounty Hunter and his show here in Hawaii. Well actually, one of the people we are teaching with was on liket the entire episode a week ago. She said she was tripping out when she saw all of the cameras and things. They were looking for her ex-boyfriend becuase he owed something, but he had had a stroke or something and hadn't paid up yet. Her name is Cammee Robinson and her son's name is Oakland. I am pretty sure Dog was like playing with the little guy, it was pretty funny to hear Cammee talke about it. She is an awesom girl and was baptized like last year but has had some struggles with staying active. She is doing a whole lot better now though. So if you want to see what some of the area looks like where I am serving now, just watch that new episode of Dog The Bounty Hunter, ha! I thought that was funny though.
At the start of this week we had a day that was just rough. I have never ran into so many Anti-Mormons in my life! It was crazy!!!! The first one was this late twenties, early thirties lady that was outside working on her grass. We decided to go an OYM her. I went to give her an invitation to the Temple and she flipped the freak out..
"I don't want anything to do with your false religion! You are a cult! You are a cult! Joseph Smith was a fraud! I don't want anything to do with that liar, whoremonger, adulterer, stealer, cheater, murderer...BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH!!!" "My great great great great grandmother lived in the same town as him and she knew him and she hated him! The entire town hated him! He was of the devil and satanic! He was a murderer! He plaguerized the bible and tried to say it was the book of mormon! He mentions horses and elephants and grain and all kinds of things in that book and they never existed in America at that time! Where are all the ancient civilizations that is in there? He is a liar and you are too.... The dead sea scrolls prove that he is a liar! You know, it was a bad thing for those people to barge into the jail and shoot him, that wasn't the Christlike thing to do, but you know what??? HE DESERVED IT!!!! He deserved to die like that!"
I was pretty upset at that moment, i hadn't said anything to her about anything, i had just asked her if she would like an invitation to the Temple and then she completely wen phsychotic for ten minutes and every time we tried to say anything she would yell louder. The thing was, we weren't in the ghetto or anything, we were in some nice, nice neighborhood, like in the millions of dollars kind of neighborhood. And she looked like a really nice person, she wasn't the crazy looking type and yet she yelled at the top of her lungs about how much she hated us the Mormons. I couldn't really understand what would drive a person to do that to two missionaries walking down the street. I still have no idea. The worst part about it was that she was misinformed about everything she was talking. There is evidence of horses and elephants and grains and all sorts of things in America at the time of the Book of Mormon. There is evidence of entire roads and citis buried deep in the earth. The Book of Mormon contains many verses of the Bible, a lot of Isaiah. Isn't it interesting to note that there are a few differences in a few words and in some places entire verses. Hugh Nibley mentions that in Isaiah 48 and 49, which is found in 1 neph 20 and 21 i believe, he mentions that there are three verses that are very very different in wording as compared to the King James version of the Bible. When the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered and after having searched through them and thumbed through those ancient documents, he found that the exact same verses that differentiate from the King James and Book of Mormon, those exact same verses contradict between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the King James Bible. How could Joseph had known that, if the scrolls were found decades after he translated the Book of Mormon?
I wanted to own her, but bashing never goes anywhere and so we smiled and continued on with our day. A few hours later we knock on a door and this crazy guy comes out saying how religion is the root of all evil and that if there were no muslims, and catholics, and buddists, and mormons, that the world would be rid of all the calamites that man has inflicted upon himself. He said that religion is superstitious and that we need to stop being like that and just live life becuase when we die we are dead and nothing happens. He said there is no God and that we cannot comprehend anything about our purpose in life becuase that is of nature and we are human and not of nature. We asked him why people know to do wrong and right and he just said it is becuase of nature and that we are all born with a conscience and then we asked him, well why do we have one if we end up dying and not going anywhere after that. He just said we need to relax and before he left he was like, "There is no God, there is no purpose to our life, quit being so superstitious and just live life!!!!" We just smiled and knocked the next door... And the very next door turned out to be some old guy talking with his family about the bible.
This guy walks out and says the second he comes out, "I was born again in 1962....... Blah blah blah blah.... Have you been born agian??? I hear you believe that Jesus is brothers with satan? You don't even know you believe that do you? See there is just a lot of things your leaders don't tell you about your church, they are hiding secrets from you and you need to know that."
I was like, "Well actually, what are you made of, what is inside you?" 'He said, "A spirit..." I asked,'Where do spirits come from?" He said, 'From heaven with God." I said, "So when Isaiah, which is in the bible, talks about Lucifer thou son of the morning falling from heaven, what would that make satan if he fell from heaven.. A spirit??? And if we have spirits and we are brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ, what does that say about satan and himself, being composed of a spirit before he fell from heaven?"
But he just changed the subject and started quoting some stupid scripture about being saved by grace and then we busted out James and how we need to do works.. You can prove somebody wrong a million times and they will never change or do anything, they just change the subject. Anyway the son in law comes out and he is like in his late thirties and he is like ," You don't know what you are talking about. YOu have been decieved and then he mentioned 2nd Thessolonians which talks about being decieved and he said that we are preaching in ignorance and that we are naive and don't know anything about Christ. He even went on to say that we don't know christ and that we don't believe in the same Jesus as they believe in. He said i want this known to you loud and clear, "You and you church leaders and everybody that ever was, is, or will be a Mormon are all under condemnation and you need to repent. You are all liars becuase Joseph Smith was a liar, he was not a true martyr, he tried to fight back in the jail when he was murdered. He is not a true martyr. He was a liar, his book is of the Devil, Joseph Smith is a liar and you are all going to fall under condemnation from God!"
I asked him and was like, "Do you say i am going to hell?" And he was like, "Yes you are and all of your church!" I was just like oh wow, thats nice. They said we had not been born again and becuase of that we are going to hell. And then we asked them what happend to all of the people in china that have never been born agian, and the said they are predestined and foreordained to go to hell. They said that God creates people to be means of causing sin and sorrow and that all people who never get a chance to hear the Gospel were foreordained to go to hell.
We just shook our heads and left after awhile. I have never ran into so many people that hate Joseph Smith, and Mormons and God in my life. It was seriously crazy!!!! But it is just sad to see that some people are misinformed and it is even funnier to hear people tell me that Joseph was a liar and that the Book of Mormon is false. Becuase there is not a thing, or power, or any kind of principle or doctrine or idea or opinion that could even scratch my testimony of the divine authenticity of the Book of Mormon. I know it is true. I know Joseph was prophet of God. I know that we have prophet in our day. I know without a doubt and i would rather give my life than deny that testimony because i cannot doubt it and i cannot deny what i know. I know that this is God's church and Kingdom on earth and i know we are led by god... I pray all of you young men out there contemplating going on a mission will come out becuse you can gain a testimony you never thought was possible and you life will change beyond what you ever could imagine. I love you, have a good week, OFA ATU, Elder Street