Week 8! 🎃 Halloween 🎃

Photo Album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/QuW5JQQJL6emqhb68 Happy Halloween 🎃👻!! This week was a weird one. Wednesday was Halloween in Altoona (I was on an exchange) and Thursday was Halloween for everyone else. For us we had to all be inside our apartments by 6pm. They made us do a "Halloclean" and clean our apartments for all that time we had for the rest of the day. We did make it spotless so I was proud of us. This week has been great and full of success. We had a friend named Cary and he is awesome. He sent in a referral from the top of our area (45 minutes away) and we stopped by the next day after unsuccessful contacts. We met with him and he's a minister for his catholic church, hes pretty involved in his church but has some disagreements with how they don't give communion to non Catholics. We explained how our church gives the sacrament to everyone. We had 2 lessons with him this week and they were very spirit filled and he commented on how impressed he was with us and how we dedicate our lives to this and how knowledgeable we are and how mature we are. He came to church and he loved it! He said he's going to come to church next week for sure. There is a pretty good possibility he starts to get involved in our church. We had another friend we started teaching this week also named timothy (tim). He's awesome and the most funny teddy bear. He looked like your average biker but is so nice and kinda hard to understand at times. Hes a mumbler. He has such a strong desire to build his faith and relationship with god and Jesus christ. He even gave us apples. His friend Ricky came over and hes awesome, we invited him to church aswell and he said maybe. Amazing people, they're both so funny. Tim gave us both a hug after which was lit, he feels the spirit so strongly. pretty cool guy's. We also had this friend this week named kylan and hes a awesome black guy from Atlanta Georgia. He was telling us about him coming over here for his girlfriend and his story of getting back on his feet. He's a very spiritual guy and read some of the book of mormon which is awesome. His roommate talked to him after we left and he is interested and was in the church before and wants to get baptized. Hopefully we can talk to the roommate sometime soon and state our purpose with them. A cool moment we had this week was when we were getting in the car from shopping at walmart and we get a notification for a referral. Elder Kress says, "This is going to be a find, watch." He calls the referral named Ernie and he answers and is the type of person you try to find out here. He had never been inside religion of any kind, he was looking for a church, and he was looking to build his faith. He searched up how he could get close to God and our church website pulled up. He knows about the Mormons but not anything that we believe. We shared about the Book of Mormon and how this church exists solely for us to get closer to Christ. He said he'd be at church Sunday and we could talk with him more there. Talked about Baptism, he said hes been needing to be baptized. So yeah, pretty cool guy. Elder Kress just predicts everything. My exchange with elder eldredge in altoona was awesome. Elder Eldredge is such an amazing teacher and example for me. His struggles align with mine and he has lots of great advice and is such a good friend of mine already. It was a day full of lots of lessons which was fun. We stopped by one of his friends who is on date named Ashley and she's autistic but is so awesome. She has a big desire to read the book of mormon and join our church. Her friend Brittany was there too and she mentioned that she was interested in being baptized too. This was the day that we had to stay in for Halloween for Altoona. We played this game called Villainous which is this pretty complicated marvel board game which was so fun. His family bought it for him and its really expensive for a board game. Elder eldrege loves to focus on one thing to work on for eachother for the exchange. One thing I wanted to work on was knowing when to lead a conversation on or when to cut it short to avoid wasting time. Basically to sift someone quickly at the same time of sharing the message. He definitely helped me work on that and I felt way more effective in the work that day. ⚠️🚨Long Spiritual Thought Incoming🚨⚠️ In Moroni 7:41 & 42 the ancient prophet teaches: “And what is it that ye shall have hope for? Behold I say unto you that ye shall have hope through the Atonement of Christ and the power of his resurrection… Wherefore, if a man have faith he must needs have hope; for without faith there cannot be any hope.” Here is the same teaching from Preach My Gospel, but this time it is coming from the Book of Mormon. What I love about these 2 verses however, is that Moroni teaches us 2 facts, the first being: The Atonement is why we can have hope. If it weren't for the sacrifice of The Lord, then we would sin, receive no Forgiveness, die and never be resurrected, then go to stand before the Judgement bar of God to face the penalties of all of our sins because of the Laws that God has put in place to help protect us and to know right from wrong. It is quite literally only because of the Atonement that we can have hope in this life. This is because the central Idea of the Atonement is that all things CAN and WILL get better. All things. No ifs ands or buts. Any disease, weakness, shortcoming, injustice, negative emotion, and all other effects of a fallen world will all be taken care of because of one event in human history: The Atonement. The other fact that Moroni teaches us is how we can actually obtain this hope that the Atonement has to offer. In the verse Moroni says, “If a man have faith he must needs have hope; for without faith there cannot be any hope.” Moroni is basically telling us that if we build that faith and exercise that faith we built then we can have hope. James 2 explains gives some good insight on this saying, "But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?...For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also." For us, the works of righteousness, what we might call ‘dedicated discipleship,’ are an unerring measure of the reality of our faith. We believe with James, the brother of Jesus, that true faith always manifests itself in faithfulness. For us, the fruits of that faith include repentance, the receipt of gospel covenants and ordinances (including baptism), and a heart of gratitude that motivates us to deny ourselves of all ungodliness, to take up our cross daily, and to keep His commandments, all of His commandments. If we remove gaining faith and just have exercising faith then it will not equal hope and vice versa. However, if we have both parts, it will result in an increase of hope. It is a factual statement just like how we know the Sun will rise tomorrow morning. It just simply will happen. Not that it might happen, but it will. If I increase my faith, I would have more hope that Heavenly Father would hear my prayers, and it would give me more strength and peace when I spoke to him throughout my days. We stopped by a member (Sister Trent) the other day and she randomly gave us a ton of stuff. Some drinks, some shoes, and some candy. One of those shoes was a pair of really nice timberlands which were size 9 and only fit me which is awesome. Now I have a pair of winter boots pretty much. I'm so grateful for nice people, especially Sister Trent. Sorry for the long yap sesh, but I love and appreciate you all. I'm approaching 3 months out which is crazy to think about, thank you for all the support. With love, Elder Batman 🦇 1000001613.jpg