Hello Family!
We decided to travel to Bacolod first today and then write our emails, which means I've just gotten off a bus ride that was 6 1/2 hours long from our area to Bacolod city...
Main news: My new companion is now Elder Baird! He is actually one of the missionaries from the Tacloban mission, but he decided to take a short rest period back home before he came back out and finished his mission. So he is having quite the time switching his language from the Waray-waray that they speak in Tacloban to the Ilongo of our area.
He is from Minnesota and he actually is half Filipino, from his mom who is from the Philippines originally, but fully American in culture and speech. He is pretty quiet but is very intelligent. It will be interesting since he is getting used to the new mission culture and language all at the same time as being assigned as a zone leader the second he arrived to our mission. But I feel optimistic for the future of our area and for everything else now which will greatly help me get back up to speed this month.
I just wanted to share an experience I had yesterday that was a tender mercy of the Lord to me.
This last week I was able to work in my area very little due to rough situations at the beginning of the week and then traveling to Bacolod to pick up my new companion, and needing to stay in Bacolod a day so my companion could get interviewed by president before we went to our area. So in short, we lost a lot of ground as far as teaching and progression of our investigators go, not to mention the member work had slowed down a bit and it felt like I needed to catch up for approximately 2 to 3 weeks worth of work that didn't fully happen. But the Lord has a plan for everything.
After a few days of working and trying to at least salvage what was left of the week, Sunday arrived and we were at least able to see acceptable success, but still not as much as we were hoping for, and still not adding any new investigators to our teaching pool this week. So after church we made some plans to go with some members to a further area in Hinoba-an that I hadn't been to yet. I was somewhat hesitant to go since we didn't have solid plans there, but I felt like it was something that needed to be done so we went ahead with it.
We arrived at the house we were supposed to teach at, waited for 45 mins, and ended up just teaching a short five minute lesson and then leaving as soon as we could since the tricycles and the buses stopped early in the area. If we missed it then we would be in trouble trying to get back to the house.
It turned out that we were a little late and it appeared as if there was no transportation coming, so we decided to start walking and look for someone who would be willing to take us back to the main city.
Along the way I saw a man sitting on a bench at a nice looking little shop on the side of the road, so I asked him if he knew about any more buses that would be coming by. He said that there was one more coming, so we decided to stop and sit at the shop to wait for the hopeful last ceres bus.
As we waited he talked to us a little about the church, and we found out that he and his wife had listened to all different kinds of religions, but that they still felt unsatisfied. In their own words they said they were looking for "the perfect religion" which they clarified to mean basically the original religion of Jesus Christ. Of course this was an obvious cue for me and my companion to start talking to them about the restoration, to which they were immediately interested.
Eventually it appeared that a bus wasn't forth coming, so we texted some members to come and rescue us, and with the time that we had we shared the entire first lesson about the restoration of the gospel, which this couple soaked in every single word and were asking every right question themselves even before we could ask them. By the end of the lesson when we invited them to pray about our message they said, "Oh yes, we will definitely pray about this. This may be exactly what we have been looking for all of these years!" which basically melted my heart and I testified to them that this IS what they are looking for and that the Lord had a plan for them to find this gospel.
Of course this isn't an extraordinary missionary experience by far, but after the last few weeks of not so smooth sailing, that couple was exactly what I needed to remind me of why I'm out here in the first place, because there are people like that, so prepared, so ready and waiting, are just waiting to be found.
I need to rest and prepare for Mission Leaders Conference tomorrow.
I love you all so much! Thank you for the prayers.
~Elder Butler
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