Faith, Hope & Leadings of the Spirit

Greetings from Kabankalan City!

I hope all is well back in the states, and that you are enjoying the winter cold setting in. While I on the other hand am still over here sweating it out in the Philippines. Who would have thought that I would be sweating my way through Christmas?

This week has been a great week with some good progress in our work, finding many new investigators and feeling the guidance of the Spirit. I have been able to grow my faith a lot more by simply trusting that things will work out in the end as long as I continually have hope and keep working.

One cool experience this week was where
we had finished working in our further out areas outside of the main city. We had had a measurable amount of success with our key indicators and had already visited all of our planned appointments, so we decided to explore some of our city area a little more since we didn't have any investigators in some certain areas and no members that we knew of. So we looked around for a bit and went down a few streets just to take a look and try to find some finding opportunities.

 As we were walking down one of the streets a man came out from one of the houses and called to us, asking us to come in. Of course we're not ones to decline random invitations to enter a house so we went in and found out that there was actually a member of the church who lived there that had moved in about a year ago with his relatives who are non-members. (This member had suffered from a stroke a while back so he had to be taken care of by his extended family.)

They were all very nice and receptive, and said that a bishop from the brother’s old ward had been calling and trying to get the member in contact with the church there, but they didn't know any members so it was hard for them to find a way to contact the church. That's why they called us in when we walked by because they knew we were part of his church so we could help him.

It was all just too well timed to be an accident really. They also said that the member would sit out and look at the street every night waiting for people like us to pass by. We felt pretty good and it built our faith a lot in the guidance of the Spirit. The Spirit led us there because of that man’s faith, which then also led us to his family who are all very receptive and prepared to hear the gospel.

It's just little things like that that build your testimony about how Heavenly Father is in control and as long as we are following his commandments we will be led where we need to go.

Well that's about it for now.

I love you all!

~Elder Butler