Visitors

Elder & Sister Smith

Elder & Sister Smith
Elder Casper With Elder & Sister Smith (July 2015-July 2018)

Address

New York New York North Mission
700 White Plains Road Ste 315
Scarsdale, NY 10583


Follow Blog by Email. Enter your email below and once you get an email from blog asking you to confirm your email, then respond to confirm your email. You will get an email every time the blog is updated, about once a week.

Elder Domenick Casper

Elder Domenick Casper
Elder Casper With Elder & Sister Morgan (July 2012-July 2015)

Friday, May 13, 2016

Power House Duo

Hey so one of the counselors on Sunday called elder Casela and I a
power house duo because we have been bringing people to church and the
members are noticing that! It was funny, he also called us Michael
Jordan and Scotty Pippen.. I wasn't sure what that meant but
regardless we are seeing miracles here in south Manhattan! The union
square 1st ward is growing. The members are incredible here and I'm
grateful for their desire to help in this great work! The weather here
has been pretty gloomy, the sun hasn't shown his face for about a
week. The clouds have been take over and the rain has been here, I
guess its springs? Haha. Also, I got a hair cut from Jay last Pday, he
cuts missionaries hair for free and he did a great job, I really like
my hair now. Short is better. Shout out to him. He lives in queens and
I told him that Justin served there and I told him his blog web
address and also mine so hopefully he will read this.

Thursday we had a wonderful opportunity to go to this company called
BioLumina down near the bottom of the island. First some back story.
This member in San Fransisco called us and told us her work colleagues
are coming to New York for a day to do a training at that company and
then will be going to see The Book of Mormon play on Broadway. She had
a genius idea to send us over there to give them each a copy of the
Book of Mormon. We brought 12 copies with us and gave them all out and
even signed one of the ladies Book of Mormon.. That was kinda weird
but the asked us a lot of questions and they were pretty cool people
to be honest. They asked us what we thought of other religions and
what we had to tell them. We invited them to read the Book of Mormon
and to pray about it and they said that they would! It was cool and
then they gave us these fancy cheeses and brownies and other things.
It was a cool experience. As we were walking into the room where they
were at, people were saying "oh it's them" and other things. They
noticed us. When we were weekly planning we were talking about how we
had no baptismal dates. I was joking around and was like "someone will
fall out of the sky and want to be baptized" and I'm not even kidding,
5 minutes later we get a text from one of our progressing
investigators Jose Buco, his text says "Hey! If I want to be baptized
on Sunday, can it be done?" We jumped for joy and told him he could be
baptized but not this Sunday because we still have more things to talk
about. We originally set the date for May 15th but he missed church on
Sunday so we moved it to May 29th. He is awesome, straight up slightly
crazy but a very good guy. I love him so much.

Friday was just tracting and street contacting all day with no
success. It was a tough week overall until Sunday. It's pretty
depressing when you don't see success. I know that this is what
missionary work can be at times but it always gets better.

Saturday was a good day, we helped with some service at the Temple
Village, it's a soup kitchen so we got to cut vegetables. We started
cutting onions... I don't know if I've ever cried as much as I did
when I was cutting the onions. It's always the worst after you are
done cutting the onion. The guy who was cutting the onions with us was
asking about what we were doing, why we are there, how the mission
works, what we will be doing after, and questions like that. His name
is Jason and hopefully he is there this Saturday so we can teach him!
After the service we went to the church to grab the supplies needed
for an APF we were doing up in morning side park which is up in
Harlem. The sisters in our district cover that area so we did a good
deeds dare APF where we challenged others to do a good turn daily. We
invited them to do service and people were really nice to us. We saw a
lot of success as we talked to people, the sisters taught the
restoration to a dude, it was pretty cool. I got some pictures too ill
attach. We did some look ups afterwards of less active members and
there was no luck. We talked to a good amount of people!

Sunday we went to church, the sisters got a call from a guy named Yun
who lives in New Jersey but is going to come to our church. He came
after the sacrament but he is cool. He stayed all 3 hours. Gospel
Principles was about Eternal Marriage and Yun comes from China with no
background in religion. He doesn't even know about God.. It was a
pretty deep subject for him but he understood. He says he will come
next week, and the members were talking up a storm with him too. He
felt welcome and he really liked it. He was telling us about how he
has stepped out of his comfort zone to even come to church. That's the
power of fasting, we fasted as a district for success in our areas and
since that fast we have seen a lot of success. We were gonna bring a
couple of our investigators to a baptism but they couldn't come so we
tracted in these projects and found a guy named Michael George, he
wants to learn! It is the best feeling when you find someone who is
genuinely interested in learning how they can bring their lives closer
to Jesus Christ and learn how to have peace in this life.

Monday we had MLC and us district leaders were invited to attend. We
met at grand central station at 7:30 to get on a train to Scarsdale.
MLC was awesome, here are some of the things that really struck me.
"Do we have the faith to believe to see miracles? This church is led
by revelation in every council of the church. We all had the faith to
come on our mission. We had faith. We are stronger than the adversary!
For the rest of your life, that's why you go to church to make a
covenant that this week will be better. That is why we come to church.
As you understand the atonement you marvel like Enos "Lord, How is it
done?" The sacrament becomes more important to you. Are we looking for
limits to press? What I want to do is who I am! What other limits do
you have? Other than what the Holy Ghost is telling you. Don't flirt
with sin. Be wise stewards, how can we find new people? Drift starts
happening, then you don't know where you are and you didn't mean to be
there. Key indicators is a life lesson. Do you have a sense of
gratitude for that burden that was lifted from you during sacrament?
We take the spiritual experience with us to church. We have to want to
have a spiritual experience. Do you have a sense of gratitude for that
burden that was lifted from you during sacrament? Afterwards we went
to the church with the other leaders in our zone and planned zone
meeting. All 3 of us district leaders were assigned to speak on
Sacrament meeting, I was stressing out a lot that night so we got some
McDonald's ice cream to chill the nerves. I prayed a ton to know what
to say. If I was a zone leader I'd be terrible. Probably not but I
feel like it wouldn't turn out well.

Tuesday we got to the church earlier than usual and prepared the
training, we prepared it nicely but when we gave the training, we
didn't have like any time so we just went through it pretty quick and
asked a lot of questions. It went well. We had a member come speak to
us about how we can use Facebook better and more effectively. He
taught us how Facebook really works and how we could use it for
missionary work. His name is Ryan Koch(Ko) and he told us that he
loves his job because he can talk about the gospel all the time but he
can't invite. That's where we come in! He also told us a really cool
scripture that I will put at the end of this email. We met with Danny
Tan who came to church a couple weeks back. We taught him the
restoration and everything we said made sense, especially with the
restoration and how God and Christ both appeared to Joseph smith. He
was like "oh yeah, like other prophets." He is so awesome! He loved it
and said he will come to church, he will read and pray about the Book
of Mormon and he said he will be baptized. We explained the gospel of
Jesus Christ to him to. Everything made sense! He is so awesome and we
will meet with him again on Monday. We had to wait for mail afterwards
which took way to long! They came over an hour late. Anyways that's
pretty much it. Our day wasn't super productive afterwards. We did
email Danny back and I Facebook messaged some of the people used to
teach in previous areas. I am grateful for Danny, I know that God has
put him in our path, the only sad thing is he technically doesn't live
in our area, so we will have to pass him off to other elders.

Here's the scripture the Brother Koch told us that I really liked:

"For it shall come to pass in that day, that every man shall hear the
fullness of the gospel in his own tongue, and in his own language,
through those who are ordained unto this power, by the administration
of the Comforter, shed forth upon them for the revelation of Jesus
Christ." (D&C 90:11)

Each person will hear the gospel in the tongue they need to hear it.
We are here to teach the people in their language! Thank you for your
love and support, it really means a lot to me! Can't wait for Mothers
Day, love you Mom, you have no idea how much more I appreciate you and
all you have done for me. I love you!

Love,
Elder Casper

1-5. Our little Chinatown apartment, my closet is the first room and
I'm bottom bunk.
6. Good Deed Dares.









No comments:

Post a Comment