Tests of faith....

Hello hello hello~

This week started out a bit wild to be honest. I'm just going to jump right into it...

So on Tuesday I had the chance to go on exchanges with our Zone Leaders in our neighboring area (same district). We had plans to teach our golden investigator 박상민 (Sangmin Park) and intoduce him to one of our zone leaders (since they would be the ones interviewing him, and possibly attending their ward since he recently moved). On top of that, we were teaching the Law of Chastity (never taught it before) and we had invited a newly wed couple who was visiting their parents to accompany us in the lesson. And I was the one to lead the area and this lesson, so you can imagine the amount that was riding on this lesson..

But when it came time for the lesson, he wasn't there. We waited longer, I made some calls and texts. And by the time it was thirty minutes past due time, it looked like he wasn't coming. We totally just got punked by our golden investigator! It was a suprise to all of us. More on this later...

So I continued with the exchange. The newly wed couple fed us lunch and chatted with us for a bit (they were fluent in English so that was really nice). They were also on their honeymoon too by the way. The set the golden standard for righteousness by coming out to help the missionaries on their own time. Goals, big time. Anyway, I got the chance to go on echange with Elder Jenkins who is not just a great missionary but is hilarious. It was a fun time and we got some good work done proselyting the entire college campus in our area. And I find that whenever I'm on exchange I like to grill other missionaries on how to do good missionary work. I have what feels like a constant crisis on whether or not the missionary work is effective, how it can be more effective, what am I missiong, how could I be more useful in the Lord's hands, how can I better know what He wants me to do... The list goes on. But aftert talking about it with Elder Jenkins, it's literally every missionary's crisis. Everyone is trying to find the perfect balance. We talked about Elder Holland's "Be Ye Therefore Perfect, Eventually" talk and just came to the conclusion that it is natural to struggle in finding out what to do and when you finally figure it out, you're always going to have something else to contemplate. It all boils down to just trusting in God, doing what you already know what to do, and having the faith that he will shape you and lead your paths. 'Twas a good exchange.

Back to talking about 박상민... I had called him the night that he stood us up hoping to hear what's up, that maybe he slept in or something. But when I called I got no answer. When my companion Elder Seely came back from exchange and informed him of the situation, we called him again, and still got no answer. We called him every day of the week hoping to get some contact, but it was never recieved. We were pretty bummed out to say the least. 박상민 had progressed SO well. We were absolute homies on top of that. It didn't make sense that he would just drop us out of knowhere. We came up with different theories, we prayed every night and every opportunity we could for him, we thought and talked about him for the majority of the week. By the end of the week on Saturday, we had resolved that we were going to find some way to contact him. We decided that we should try a different phone to call him and see if he would answer. So we called through the sister's phone and he answered! He had gotten in a motorcycle accident on the way to see us on Tuesday and he broke his phone! He had got it fixed literally hours before we called him that night, but he was totally fine and totally still loved Jesus and the missionaries. He came to church the next day and he is still keeping all of our commitments and is going to sacrificing a lot of time this week to meet us so we can prepare him for baptism. Our golden investigator was still alive and golden!

We had been rattled a bit that week but early on, Elder Seely and I resolved that it was in the Lord's hands, whatever may have occured with him, and that the best way to deal with it was to continue in faith and do our regular missionary work. I don't know what the future holds when it comes to situations like these but we found comfort in trusting God and doing what we already knew we had to do. Amazing experience.

Sorry it was long but that's what I got this week. Thanks for reading/writing~

-Elder Metcalf

1) My exhange companion and zone leader, Elder Jenkins 2) Elder Seely and I getting close trying to share an umbrella in the rain (we forgot ours...)