Ups and Downs

Greetings everyone! This week had it's ups and downs. Well one major up and one major down. So on Tuesday we had a lesson with M, after he took me to his barber and bought me a haircut haha, and we talked about what he thought of the baptism he attended last week and he told us it was a way more powerful and emotional experience than he thought it was going to be. He then proceeded to tell us that he doesn't think he can wait until October to be baptized! He was like I'm ready guys, I'm not sure when exactly yet but I definitely want it soon. And we were like saaaweeeeeet! And we're super stoked. Then the next night we got a text from him saying he read some "disturbing" articles about the church helping Muslim refugees. Now mind you all this was very bad because Michael is SUPER conservative. We knew that we were going to have something difficult to deal with now but we were appreciative that he reached out to us to talk about it instead of just flying off the handle like his dad apparently did. 

So on Friday morning we went over to M's house with our ward mission leader to talk about it. Michael explained to us that he felt hurt and very surprised that the church would do that. We showed him the Matthew 5 Bible video of the Sermon on the Mount and talked about loving our neighbor & stuff. We realized the most important thing for him is to gain a testimony that Thomas S. Monson really is a prophet called by God so that even though he may not agree with what the church is doing, he can have faith that it is under the direction of God. So along with that we invited him to watch conference so that was perfect timing! He agreed and we made plans to watch conference and do dinner with him for the Sunday afternoon session at the ward mission leaders house. Then a few hours before he texted us saying he got caught up at work and couldn't make it! And there was a talk about refugees which was awesome and he missed it! So we are pretty frustrated with all
that but still appreciative that M is still willing to meet with
us and hopefully work through this. He told us his dad who is a member and his brother who is also investigating are both done with the church now because of the whole refugee thing which is really sad. But he has shown a lot of faith in reaching out to us about it and being willing to talk about it. 

I remember sitting in the lesson with him on Friday getting the impression that this whole thing isn't just difficult for him, there's going to be a lot of people that have issues with this and it's not going to be a small thing. Then in the Saturday afternoon session when they were doing the sustaining there was the opposed people and I could be wrong but I think it's because of this whole thing. So yeah there's the M roller coaster. Other than that people aren't really keeping any commitments or anything.  Our investigator L was supposed to come to church last week but didn't and we've had trouble contacting her all week. We had an interesting lesson with D in which she told us "I'm not going to sit here and let you tell me that Book is the word of God! It's an interpretation of God's word. There's no way it hasn't been changed.  But I do believe the things it says are true!" Among many other ridiculous things she said. It was a very frustrating lesson and that's pretty much all I got to say about that for now. So that's what's going on. Conference was awesome! I hope you all had the chance to watch and learn from it. Love you all

- Elder Poulsen