Miracles on Temple Square

Sister Bat-ulzii and me

Sister Bat-ulzii and I met Amy yesterday! She came to Temple Square with her family and her missionaries for an investigator lesson. We talked a lot about vision and how things will probably be difficult at times, but if you keep your goal in mind you'll be able to reach it with Heavenly Father's help. She is excited to be baptized and she knows that it's true. 

We got a text from Lorena this week too:

"Hello Sisters! Thanks to God all my family went to church yesterday. The missionaries are teaching me all I need to know for the interview [for baptism]"

Yay! I love that she keeps us updated with what is going on in her progress.

Last week I told you that we were going to be having mission FHE. It was really fun. We had dinner at a park and a fireside at the nearby church building. The fireside was given by the Christiansens. They are the parents of four children with a very rare form of muscular dystrophy. It sounded like they spent about half of their time in the hospital. It was incredible to hear their story of faith and hope. They had a sure knowledge the God loves their family even despite ALL of the challenges they went through.

Yesterday we took a tour with a group of ten people from New Jersey. They came out west for their college geology class and each year this professor brings her students to Temple Square to hear about "the Mormons". While we were in the Tabernacle we asked if they had any questions...they had a TON of questions. It seemed like most of them were very skeptical of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. After the deluge of questions we tried to turn the walking lesson to a lighter level by sharing more about the pioneers so we took them to the handcart monument. On our way there Mike started talking with me and asking questions. He told me that his great grandmother was a member of the church and his mother told him that we pray for the salvation of our ancestors. So I told him about the temple and how we do baptisms on behalf of our ancestors...so we don't really pray for their salvation, but we try to help them with their salvation. It made sense to him. We ended up not talking about the pioneers very much because they had so many questions. They wanted to know if we have our own "Mormon Bible". Then answer is no, we read the King James Version of the Bible as well as the Book of Mormon. One of the women on the tour wanted to look at Sister Bat-ulzii's Book of Mormon so Sister Bat-ulzii handed it to her and she started flipping through it. She looked in the index for a long time and I'm not quite sure what she was looking for, but she held on to it for about 15 minutes. We went into the Assembly Hall and talked about how we worship on Sundays...it's not as surprising as people might think. Then we took them to the Christus. On the way to the Christus I found out that Mike was a philosophy/world religions major and he studied all sorts of religions but not specifically The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, so he was really curious about it. He told me that while he had been on Temple Square that he just felt lighter. I told him that is what we call the Spirit and I compared it to how we feel in nature out amongst God's creations. He completely agreed and I taught him that the Spirit teaches us truth. He was just really, really interested so at the top of the ramp to the Christus we invited him to meet with missionaries. He was really excited about that idea so we got his information and we're going to try to call him on Friday and teach him more. It's incredible how the Spirit has so much power to teach us what is true. What a privilege it is to be a missionary and to help people feel closer to their Heavenly Father.