Helping People

Well, this week thankfully went better than the last one. After a week of contacting, we managed to find some cool people to teach. We found a really cool family who we're teaching right now. We talked to their teenage son on the street and he said he'd be interested. When we went back for the appointment, he wasn't there but his dad invited us in for juice. We taught them how to pray as a family and they seemed pretty enthusiastic about it.

The one really cool thing I got to experience this week was on Friday. Elder Peterson had a leadership meeting in the morning, so me and one of the other district leaders' companions were riding through the park to contact people. The first person I talked to told us he needed help. We asked him why and found out that he was homeless. Now, in our area, that's not a big surprise. But what was unique about him was that he had his 2-year-old daughter with him. He told us her mom had dropped her off with him the night before and that he'd been kicked out of where he was staying. Now, I'm normally pretty wary of helping out homeless people, but I definitely couldn't leave a little girl out in the blazing heat of the day. Plus, he wasn't a typical gross homeless man. He was in his twenties and didn't look too crazy or anything. So I made some calls to people in the ward and found somebody who said they could take them in for a few hours. It was a pretty crazy group of events that led to that, though. We were in that park at 10am, when normally we don't leave the apartment until 11 and the park is out of our area. The guy told us he had been walking the other way in the park when he felt the need to turn back. He said when he saw us passing by that he was just hoping that we would talk to him.

Anyways, the family who said they'd take him in for a few hours now offered to let him stay with them for a while (talk about generous). He was even at Conference on Sunday! That made me pretty happy to see him there. He's in the Sisters' area, though, so we won't be teaching him. The Sisters are pretty excited to be teaching somebody like that, though. It reminds me that the last person we found who really needed help and we got the ward to help them with was baptized two weeks ago. I hope the Sisters have success with him. They've been doing a lot of hard work recently with little success to show for it, so hopefully this is a blessing from the Lord in recognition of their hard work.

Most of all, though, his daughter's now safe with her grandmother. That was what I was most concerned about. I really do know that God loves little children and we were sent to that spot at that time to help that little girl, and hopefully her dad.

That was the big event of the week. The rest was mostly just General Conference. It was very uplifting to hear from all the prophets and apostles. I loved the messages about how to develop a testimony and receive revelation, and how it's often not what we're expecting. I also liked the talk by the woman from the primary about how we have to become more like little children. It seems to me like a big part of our lives is occupied by trying to return back to those childlike attributes of love and faith.

Anyways, those were the big events this week. It's getting really hot here. I don't think I'll be able to bear summer.

Love,

Elder Grasley