Winter Quarters YSA #22

Hello everyone! So it's kind of been a crazy week with covid and everything going on. We ended up having a few days with all of our lessons falling through, but that gave us a lot of time to get some things done that we needed to. Some of the highlights were:

We met a guy named Caleb this week! He sells cars and two of his coworkers are a couple who are members of the church. They are good friends and about a month ago they started having gospel conversations. Anyways we went over and met with them and taught the whole restoration, and then he had tons of questions. So we ended up talking about the Godhead and the temples and all sorts, but he was really excited about it and we are going to go on a tour of the Mormon Trail Center with him this week, which is right across from the temple so that will be really good! He'll also be coming to our ward next week!

We have been doing a lot of facebook finding recently. Basically we will friend people and then when they accept our friend requests, we send them short videos introducing ourselves and asking if we can share a quick 2 minute video with them, and from there we try to progress to a video call or a Book of Mormon drop off and so on. And it's always interesting to see the kind of people that respond to those. The people who we get video calls with are usually either super ready for the gospel and excited to learn, or they are not and they kind of just wanted to do a video call to argue with us. Anyways we got this crazy guy this week that was going off about everything from reincarnation to child prodigies to the Hebrew versions of the bible names, and it was kind of crazy. We shared the restoration with him as quickly as possible and then got out of there because he clearly wasn't ready for it. 

Something I've been thinking about is how we can offer Christlike love to people. I think so often we are really good at offering Christlike love to people that we know, or that we are friends with, or that are like us. But how can we show love to those that are different than us? What about those who don't seem to even be trying to live a good life? I think that if we ever struggle to know how to offer Christlike love, we just need to look at Christ himself and see how he did that. He never got upset or angry. He always sought to understand people, while still showing them what he expected of them, because he knew that they would be blessed by turning to Him. I know it's a little bit cheesy, but when we are struggling to love someone, if we ask ourselves, "What would Jesus do?" then we will be given a lot of guidance and clarity and we will be able to make the world a better place. Anyways I hope that made sense, and I hope you all have a fantastic week!

-Elder Olsen