Before I totally forget, I thought I'd share a cool link with y'all that you might enjoy. I was looking on the church's websites before I started this email and found this: http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/two-churches-forge-bond-after-devastating-storm. The article is about the friendship between the Joplin wards and the local Community of Christ (RLDS) since the tornado in May last year. You'll have to read the article to understand all that has gone on, but the coolest part is that I've totally been a part of this! The first few pictures are of members of our church painting the chapel and font of the Community of Christ church here in Joplin. I was there! I'm super bummed that they don't have a picture of me in my service clothes, painting like a champ. Either way it's been awesome to gain such great relationships with members of the Community of Christ church. We call each other cousins all the time :) Last night our church invited a lot of our "cousins" to come and watch the First Presidency Christmas devotional with us (so yeah, I did get a chance to watch it Mom. I loved it!). Afterward there were some refreshments in the gym and I was able to chat with a few of the nicest people. There's this one guy named Ben Peterson who I talked to. He's 80 years young and still going strong. He told me about his experience with the tornado and how blessed he is. Funniest part? He used to be very anti-Mormon when he was younger. Now he's a member of the RLDS church. Figure that one out for me...
This week has really gotten me into the Christmas spirit. We had zone conference on Wednesday and President Shumway introduced us to the church's new Christmas campaign. If you haven't already heard about it, the top story at mormonnewsroom.org talks about it or you can just look up mormon.org/christmas. Basically our church is spending millions of dollars on spreading Christmas joy. Sounds good to me! Our job is to talk to as many people as we can about this website and to spread the message of hope that comes through Christ. At zone conference we practiced door approaches/lessons that were specifically tailored to the Christmas message. President Shumway also wants us to share this with members so that they can in turn spread it themselves. Elder Nordine and I have already had some fun talking about the meaning of Christmas with members at dinners. I've decided that I'm going to make this the best Christmas I've ever experienced.
Yesterday was quite the crazy day. As we showed up before sacrament meeting, everyone was frantically talking about the church being vandalized the night before. Sure enough, we walked passed everybody to the south-side doors on the church. One of the doors had been smashed with a huge rock! Come to find out, the police called President Jones late last night after they discovered the smashed door while driving around. I'm sure there's a lot more to the story, but everyone thinks that somebody just doesn't like us. Probably some dumb kid whose parents hate Mormons. How immature.
To add to the excitement to the day, the new Joplin YSA branch had it's first sacrament meeting since being organized recently. There were about 40 to 50 people in attendance, and Elder Nordine and I are going to cover the branch until further notice. It was cool to hear from the Stake Presidency as they talked about how historical this day truly was. I guess the Joplin stake has been talking about creating a singles branch for years now. President Jones talked about how he thinks this will help the youth stay active in their transition into married life. What a blessing!
This week we were able to set a baptismal date with Ruben for the 29th of December. What's cool about it is that Ruben asked Bro. Wilstead (his friend in the church) to baptize him. Bro. Wilstead happily accepted and told Ruben that he'd be his first-ever baptism. Just like me! It's been neat to see the Lord bless Ruben and Erin as they have met with us through the past few weeks. I'm a firm believer that if somebody puts the gospel first in their lives, the Lord will take care of everything. And boy has he ever. Ruben got a random bonus at work, somehow their mortgage is paid off for two months, and many other cool things have happened recently - all since Bro. Borup gave Erin a priesthood blessing on Monday. Now our biggest hold up is the Word of Wisdom. Ruben smokes and Erin drinks coffee like it's nobody's business. We warned Ruben on Friday that now that he's set a date for baptism, the adversary is going to try extra hard to bring them both down. It'll be important that they keep coming to church and meeting with us.
Other than that, we taught some great lessons to new investigators in Galena and in Carl Junction. The one's in Carl Junction are students at Ozark Christian College and are training to become ministers and such. If we had time, I'd tell you about our first lesson on Thursday. Just know that I was so nervous going into it because I thought that they were going to tear us apart. OCC is extremely anti-Mormon and I am sure that they have been trained on how to talk to Mormon missionaries. Luckily, they were very nice and asked really good questions, but I have a feeling that it was because we had a member with us. They've asked us to come back again, so we'll see how that goes.
Have a great week! Tell Joey hi for me when he gets back home. Have fun walking Sunny in the mornings. Keep being awesome :)
Love, Elder Atkin
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