Wonderful Investigators!

Hola to my family and friends!

This week was a fantastic week! We taught and found and had lots of success! Everything just came together and it was a really AWESOME week where nothing canceled pretty much! We are finally finding investigators that want to progress so we are excited about that!

Highlight of the week is we went to the L.A Temple with one of our investigators and his wife and it was so awesome! They really felt the spirit there. Also, we are still teaching the atheist. He actually came to church this week with our other investigator. That was really awesome! We also had a bunch of members help us with lessons so that was really good!

Another one of the highlights of this week is that a family in Rimgrove that I was working with called me! The mom said she missed me and wanted to see me so she came to El Monte so I could talk to her. Of course we taught her a lesson being missionaries and all :-)

We also had transfers this last Saturday and I am staying in El Monte! I am really happy about that because we are going to have a baptism June 30th! Our investigator said he knows the church is true he just needs to be prepared more. So we will do all we can to help him to feel completely prepared for baptism this weekend! We have faith that we can do it now we just need to do the works part.

We also taught the mutual activity this week which was really cool as well. Other than that we are just trying to do the best that we can so that we can hasten the work.

I loved the worldwide training meeting that we had on Sunday! It was so cool talking about how we are going to use more technology and about how we just need to have the faith and work with the members more. So we are going to do our best effort to work more with members because right now we are finding by knocking on doors. For us that has been the most successful way of finding our investigators. Both of the people that we are working with right now we found that way. We will definitely see what we can do to help get the members involved. 

Have a great week everyone!

Elder Reisner

A wonderful week of teaching!!

Hello Everyone!

This last week was really good! We had a lot of unexpected lessons all of the sudden there were a bunch of people letting us in and referrals and stuff coming out of nowhere! It was really cool! 

It all started on Monday when we get a call from some English speaking elders in the mission who knew this missionary that is actually in Provo, Utah. They told us that the missionary said that his family is ready to receive the missionaries. None of his family are members of our church. They needed the Spanish missionaries because the family speaks more Spanish. So we went over there and they accepted us in and fed us all in one. It was pretty cool!

Then on Tuesday I did an exchange with Elder Morell and we were able to teach a lot of lessons! It was a great day!

Wednesday we taught some lessons and we did some finding. We were able to teach our investigator from last week a lot this week! He had the question of whether his baptism was valid. We asked him what do you think? He said well it isn't right to be baptized like 5 or 6 times and then he said now what can you tell me? So, we did an object lesson to show him that we only need to be baptized once but by someone who has the proper authority. He said OK and that he would pray about the things we talked about. He is reading the Book of Mormon and he and his wife came to church on Sunday!!! That was really exciting! We were super happy he is making good strides to be baptized on the 30th of this month! It would be so awesome because this area hasn't seen a convert baptism in 10 months!

We also found this really cool 17 year old guy who said he was Atheist but only because he didn't know what to believe. Then all of his doubts were resolved through the things that we told him. We sat down for an hour with him and answered his questions and then he agreed to read The Book of Mormon and come to church. He couldn't come Sunday because they had a fathers day trip but he said he'd come next week!

Other than that really just moving and plugging along. We are excited for all of our investigators and pray that they will all continue to progress. Thank you everyone for keeping me in your prayers!

Love, Elder Reisner

A happy healthy missionary am I!!!

Dear family and friends, 

 

This last week was really good! I had a meeting for the District Leaders and it is really weird to think that I have been District Leader for 8 months now! I really enjoy doing it so that's great! 

 

Last week we did have a tender mercy while we were on exchanges. I was with Elder Garry who only has 4 weeks in California. He and I went to one of our investigators house. We taught him the restoration and invited him to be baptized and he said yes! He then said he would prepare to be baptized on the 30th of this month!! So we are praying and doing every possible thing that we can so that he can make his date. We also asked him to offer the closing prayer and he did and then he started to cry so it was a very touching experience. 

 

We also taught more lessons this past week and we are inviting everyone to be baptized because that is how we are going to baptize every month  I also ran into some of my old investigators from San Gabriel. They made a U-turn and pulled off on the side of the road while I was on exchanges just to say hi to me! So I gave them my address and told them to write me. It was really cool! They still haven't been baptized but one day they will! 

 

We had Stake Conference yesterday and I was able to see all of the people from Rimgrove. That was cool too! We had a member of the Seventy at our conference and he talked about missionary work. He gave some really cool stories about miracles in missionary work. It was awesome! 

 

Other than that we have just been trying to find. This last week being graduations and all that fun stuff nobody has really been home to talk to us so we are hoping this week will be better and that we can find new people to teach. I know that good things will come if we continue to put our trust in the Lord.   

 

I am doing so well! I am MRSA free and sickness free I am happy and healthy and I am doing my best to purify myself. I think I want to be a Zumba instructor when I get back! We also had zone training which President Becerra came and blew all of our minds!! He talked about stuff we could do in the first lesson so we can get it centered on baptism and really set expectations and explain our purpose so they can know from the get go what we are all about. 

 

Anyway, that's all I have for this week.  

Love, Elder Reisner

Purifying myself

Hey everyone!

So everything is going good just my companion has been sick for the last few days  :-( We have been working really hard finding and teaching as many people who want to be baptized when my companion has been feeling well.

We had a Zone Conference in which we were told that we aren't asking people to be baptized as much as we should be and I am guilty of that.  We also learned that we need to purify ourselves which means get rid of all the things that are causing us not to dedicate ourselves 100% to the work. This last Sunday what I did is I fasted and made a list of all the things that were distracting me. Now I am taking that list and I am fasting from those items for 40 days in order to purify myself and really serve the Lord with all my heart might mind and strength.

As for all of our investigators we didn't have a chance to meet with any of them that we found last week due to sickness and canceling their appointments. We did find new investigators to teach so that is always good. When I left the Zone Conference it made me really think about what repentance is and how to be a pure missionary who can teach with power and authority. I want to be more humbled and repentant than ever before.

We also had our soccer activity which was quite successful. We had investigators, non-members and less actives so it was good! This next week we won't have soccer but the 15th we will play again against another ward. We also helped move some people and we found a family that is having some problems but we know that the gospel can really help them out in their lives!

I think that's all I have this week. 

Love, Elder Reisner