Elder Taylor Bradley Abel: I Never Doubted it's TRUTH!
I Never Doubted it's TRUTH!
How are you doing?! It was super good to hear from you all. Thank you for your love and your support, you guys are always there for me and I will be forever grateful!
I will be honest, this past week was pretty hard, probably one of the hardest of the mission.. Concilio (Leadership meeting in Mtvd with President) was great and that was probably the highlight of the week however (well actually we got an email from President Smith telling us that Elder David A. Bednar will be coming to the mission in February!), the rest of the week was challenging. We had our Zone Training and it was going really good and we got to the part to challenge the zone to doubling the baptisms and we failed in our purpose.
On the upside, I finished El Libro de Mormón for the first time in Spanish and it was so accomplishing. I dove into it at the end of October and on Saturday I was able to finish it up. It wasn't easy but I must say that it helped me to understand just how important and how worldwide the gospel really is. It was humbling to read it in Spanish and understand a few things from a different perspective. I can honestly say that it has brought my life such happiness and peace and I am so grateful for the hands that wrote it and translated it. What a blessing it is in our lives. I know that if we bind ourselves to The Book of Mormon and ultimately to the will of the Lord that we will be blessed. Everyone in the last day will know that The Book of Mormon is true and us as Latter day Saints may say now that we know it to be true. I know it is true. How blessed are we to already have the knowledge of The Book of Mormon and the gospel of Jesus Christ. Elder Orihuela said that other day, "I will never know how it feels to be a convert and sometimes I wish I did so that I could help more people convert to the Gospel." I was thinking.. yeah it would be cool to be a convert but I think that it is even better to say that I have always been taught about Christ. What a blessing it is to have mom and dad who live the gospel and make it easy for us to follow their steps. As we follow their steps we only follow after our Savior. Family.. you are great!
Pretty neat experience.. We were told in concilio that we need to baptize more youth in the mission. We went out looking for a youth that the bishop gave us to contact and when we got to the house there was no one there but there were 5 young men sitting in a circle talking. We decided that we would go ask them if they knew who the young man was. Turns out that one of them was the brother and the rest were his buddies. We were able to teach them about the Plan of Salvation and now we have another charla with them tonight, we are going to teach the Restoration and see where it goes. We also found another one while we were teaching an older man, his grandson showed up and we asked him if he would like to join us.. we again taught a little about the Plan of Salvation. God is great. We were able to find 6 youth this week between the ages 16 to 21. The Lord truly does bless us as we put our faith in him and look for more youth to baptize.
I hope you all know that I am doing good.. I just have been having a rough time. There are only 2 weeks left and hopefully I am free! Ü I hope you guys all have a lovely week! I sure do love you to the moon and back and then back to the moon and then back to the earth.. yeah.. a lot! Keep smiling and I will too!
Love, Elder Taylor Abel .... a missionary learning patience at its finest.
Right after finishing The Book of Mormon and praying about it.
The destruction of the flooded river. It killed all of the leaves on the trees and left a good line where the water was. Pretty crazy.