Week 20; 🚗💥🚑

Photo Album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/QuW5JQQJL6emqhb68 Last week on Tuesday, I drove a couple hours up to grab my new companion and head back down to Hershey. Elder McCurdy is an awesome guy and it's definitely going to be a really fun transfer and I'm excited. We've already had so many fun moments this past week and a half. We are currently teaching this part member family right now and it has been so blessed. The dad is a historian that works for this Catholic Association and he just knows everything about every religion and can translate multiple languages and can speak multiple languages as well. After one of our lessons with him we just ended up talking with him for a while just about other religions and pretty deep stuff. They are active and have two kids that are unbaptized and one of them currently really wants to be baptized and she is almost 10 years old named Abbigail. The family is kind of holding them back and wants them to really understand the Covenant they make at baptism and that they're making that choice for themselves and not because they're pushed by their parents. So we are really trying to help them understand the need of baptism and why it's important and trying to make Abbi pray about it for herself. We had some pretty cool miracles this past week and found some pretty amazing people. We found this awesome lady named keiana who originally at first wasn't really that interested, but I ended up calling your randomly one night and talked to her for around 45 minutes about our church and specific beliefs we have about the Book of Mormon and how that can help her. She really loved it and I talked a lot about baptism as well and she said she's been baptized before but she asked if she can get rebaptized and so I talked about Acts 19 with her and how we can get baptized by proper Authority and received the gift of the Holy Ghost in our lives. She really wants to and we set a date for March 1st for now. Over here in Hershey we got a ton of snow throughout pretty much the whole mission and we couldn't really go outside for 2 days pretty much. On Sunday morning we woke up to a ton of snow and a snow storm that continued the whole entire day and our mission president told us to stay inside. We ended up getting probably almost 2 feet of snow. We also had Zone p-day on Monday but that got pushed till today due to all the snow. Sunday and Monday were pretty boring but I had some fun opportunities to play some games and read a lot of my scriptures. This Tuesday we had an exchange with the Allison Hill Zone leaders and it was so fun and a wild day. I was with elder Lusk and he is such an amazing and Powerful missionary and we ended up talking for so long just about life and ended up bonding a lot and he gave me some great advice and some great reassurance that I definitely needed. The whole day was so Spirit loud and we were exactly where we needed to be the whole day. After we stopped by some referrals in middletown. We didn't think that the next block is where we needed to be and so we prayed about it and we had one more referral that we could go to up in Hershey and then hit some apartments after and so that's what we did. We stopped by this referral in this ginormous apartment building and he did not answer. We knocked on his next door neighbor and he answered and tried to knock the door himself but he didn't answer as well. The guy just ended up asking what we were doing and started firing off questions and wants to get back into religion and to grow closer with God and maybe be baptized eventually. His name is Shemar and he is such an elect soul. If you pray about it God is working on it and he definitely answered our prayers there, that's definitely where we needed to be at that time. Near the end of the night of my exchange with elder Lusk, we were originally planning to go to a lesson with a Haitian and so we wanted to grab a Haitian Creole Book of Mormon from the other elders and so we went over and they were at a member's house. We saw some police cars while we were pulling in and a tow truck and so that's where they said they parked so we went over and saw that their car had been hit pretty bad by this big van while their car was parked and their car was totaled. If we hadn't been there at the right time then they would have just pulled off without us figuring out anything. We ended up not going to our lesson because we had to deal with all the car wreck drama but it was a wild night. Now the Zone leaders just don't have a car. Far from being anxious to condemn, our Heavenly Father and our Savior seek our happiness and plead with us to repent, knowing full well that “wickedness never was [and never will be] happiness.” So Ezekiel and every prophet before and since, speaking the word of God out of a full heart, have warned all who will to turn away from Satan, the enemy of their souls, and “choose liberty and eternal life, through the great Mediator of all men.” The motivation for raising the warning voice is love, love of God and love of fellowman. To warn is to care. The Lord instructs that it is to be done “in mildness and in meekness” and “by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness … , and by love unfeigned.” It can be urgent, as when we warn a child not to put his or her hand in a fire. It must be clear and sometimes firm. On occasion, warning may take the form of reproof when moved upon by the Holy Ghost, but always it is rooted in love. Witness, for example, the love that motivates the service and sacrifices of the missionaries. It is Saturday morning in the Lord’s scheme of things, and we go complacently about our work, concerned with the ordinary cares of life. But many of us carry a restless, anxious feeling. And in these days we have heard the prophet and the apostles raising a voice of warning. "‘Come out of the valley,’ they are saying. ‘Come to higher ground. Come away from the flood of mischief, and evil, and spiritual disaster.’ And I repeat, it behooves every man who has been warned, to warn his neighbor. You who hear and are warned must warn your neighbors. If we fail to heed the warnings given, or fail to warn our neighbors, we all may be lost." Ezekiel 33: 6-7, "But if the watchman see the sword come, and blow not the trumpet, and the people be not warned; if the sword come, and take any person from among them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at the watchman’s hand. So thou, O son of man, I have set thee a watchman unto the house of Israel; therefore thou shalt hear the word at my mouth, and warn them from me." With Love, Elder Batman