An Indiana Christmas

Good morning everyone! Christmas Eve was on Monday as many of you probably know so our President had us switch our P-day to today because that's supposed to be a good day to proselyte.... I guess it depends, haha most people were like "I'm trying to cook a feast right now, I can't talk!" So we decided on Christmas Eve to take all the Christmas candy we had obtained and just start handing it out while we were tracting saying it was part of the Light the World initiative and many were so shocked like, "What's the catch do I have to pay a donation?" and we were like "No, we literally just have so much candy please take some." It was pretty fun but we still have so much candy. Hopefully the candy will help soften people’s hearts to hear the gospel haha. 

So this last Sunday we had the special one hour Christmas program and we decided to invite all the formers taught in our area book. We had EIGHT people come to church! That was huge for us, they haven't gotten that many here in a long time! Four of them were current people we were teaching and four of them were formers, but one of them we're probably going to pick up and start teaching again. Also on Sunday we made a deal with one of our people named Alec. He attends a non-denominational Christian church but has been taking the lessons with us, and since our church was only one hour on Sunday, he came to our church, and then we went to his church with him. 

This church is called Bethel. And it's huge. Like way big. And there are three of them in upper Indiana. Bethel was a blast, like it was so fun. It was pretty much like a concert. So... not exactly a church where everything is calm and quiet but this super hype rejoicing fun group of people who love Jesus. There were some great people there haha. It was quite an experience. In the church they had like a coffee shop and a place where you could go buy t-shirts etc. So it was pretty fun to compare the similarities and the differences with Alec haha. 

This week we also had a lesson with one of the people were teaching and it was super awesome because he invited his mom who is like your average Christian who thinks that because we have a Book of Mormon and no belief in the trinity that means we're a "cult." Eric (the guy we were teaching) was defending us when his mom told us we were full of it. It was really funny because she kept bringing up the trinity, and Eric was like "well explain the trinity, because these guys are answering my questions and explaining things" and she said, "well... it's too deep to understand." 

Oh the trinity, what a belief. It is my firm testimony that the apostasy exists and that there needed to be a restoration. She was a super nice lady though, I love meeting nice people. I don't like Bible bashing though and sometimes these lovely Christians want to do so. Nobody learns anything from Bible bashing! But it was fun to teach that lesson, she had a lot of questions and we answered them and invited her to church to check out our "cult!" but she kindly declined! It’s okay though because Eric was able to make it and enjoyed it!

Another pretty funny experience that we had this week was teaching this lady who was a former who some missionaries who had worked here in the past had called us and told us to start teaching again. So it was super funny because we were teaching the restoration and literally half way through the Joseph Smith story she cuts us off and says, "wait a minute" and this is the part we're thinking "Oh my goodness she's going to tell us that she's never felt this way before and wants to continue learning as much as she can from us!" Instead she says, "This is embarrassing but... Can you take out the trash for me? It's way too heavy for me to lift." Glad that our teaching abilities are bringing inspiring thoughts into the heads of those we’re teaching and making them realize they should take advantage of our youth. Also another thing that was super funny is we were talking about how we feel the spirit and if she had ever recognized the spirit before. She told us "When I feel like I need inspiration from God, I just take my Bible and shut my eyes.... (she shut her eyes and started flipping through her Bible)... And then I open to a random page and start reading."

Guess where she opens? Naturally it’s Songs of Solomon. For those of you who don't really know that's pretty much biblical garbage. Like it's literally like the bibles version of 50 shades of grey by a king who had many concubines. So she started reading it out loud "your love it's better than wine....." etc you get the point. I was literally crying I was laughing so hard and Elder Buckway was laughing so hard too. He was like "it's okay you don't need to read that, it isn't even scripture." Then when we got home that night he took his quad and ripped out all of the Songs of Solomon because he said it's "biblical trash" and that "President Hinckley actually stapled shut the Songs of Solomon to seal it, and Joseph Smith said it wasn't inspired scripture." I don't know if that's true but if it is that's pretty funny haha. So that was a funny experience. 

So that's about it for this week. Of course it was Christmas so I got to Skype home and call my family which was great! Love them all they are the coolest. On Christmas we gave away some more candy and had lunch and dinner with some members who were super nice and willing to invite us in on Christmas day! It was a pretty relaxing day and we got to teach about the Christmas story because why not it's Christmas and it was way fun. It was a good holiday and there are only two Christmases in your life that you get while you are serving the Lord! So this is definitely one that I'll remember. So that's concludes my email for this week, hope everyone's holidays were merry and bright and we'll talk to ya soon! 

Elder Jensen

Pics 

1: Lots of candy

2: Bethel the gr8 and abominable (but kinda fun) church

3: The promised land

4: A weird spooky doll

5: Ice cream worth more than gold