General Conference Time

I love Heavenly Father! I love the Savior! I love that we get to hear their prophets speak! I am totally in love with General Conference. I think it's just the coolest thing to be able to have a modern Moses relay vital information from our Heavenly Father about our concerns, needs, questions, desires, etc. Please tell everyone you know about conference! It is such a sacred, special experience that we can't pass up!

 

Do you remember me telling you forever ago about Manuel? He's a man we met while knocking a year ago who became kind of Hna Waite's project. As missionaries, we generally seek out those that are ready to accept the gospel. We know because of the scriptures that He is always preparing someone for it. Usually when we start teaching someone, we can tell from their attitude and desire to learn and change whether they're ready right now. Manuel was certainly not ready at that moment and I wanted to stop teaching him forever ago. But we keep teaching him because Hna Waite wanted to...she kept saying "I know it'll take a long time, but we HAVE to help him!" My attitude at the time was "If we spent all of our time helping EVERYONE that needed help, we will NEVER find the ones that are ready and waiting." Kind of cut-throat and jerky, I know, but Manuel was NOT progressing, not wanting to change and very blinded by his own bitterness and prejudice. For whatever reason, we've kept in contact with him fairly consistently over the last few months and even though the sisters stopped teaching him while I was in the desert, we started teaching him a little more frequently when I came back. A large part of his beef with God stemmed from the fact that he had once been baptized into a church, but became offended by one of the members and left the church. He feels that God has been punishing him by ruining his eyesight ever since. Long story short, he's been improving his perspective on life and challenges over the last few months, he had a surgery which left him completely blind but offered hope of recovery, he made a pact with God that if God helped restore his eyesight, he would "search for Him" again and try to live a good life. The next morning, Manuel started to see light and shadows and recognized that as Heavenly Father honoring that pact.

We've been working a lot more with him to understand why both personal revelation as well as belonging to a church (specifically, the church of God) is important. He's making really good progress and we're going to share Elder Oaks' talk on the matter with him today.

Mom, I told him about how you had the same questions he had about which church to join. He loves everything we've taught EXCEPT Joseph Smith. Could you write me a letter explaining HOW you came to know that he was a prophet? I would love that and I think it will help him as well.

 

I love you all more than all the orange blossoms in NoHo!

Hermana Manzana