Elder Coleman Thompson: This Week's email and pictures

Hi everyone!

This week has been really really busy and loads of stuff happened. I
feel like I say that every week, but it's true it keeps happening! I'm
just gonna give the highlights of what happened, if I explained all
the stuff we did every day this email would never finish.

On Tuesday Elder Nielsen took his theory test, and failed... haha I
told him he needed to study more, but he thought it was gonna be fine,
lesson learned.

On Wednesday we attended 2 District Meetings, in South
Shields and in Gateshead, so that was sweet, I actually learned a lot
from them, and was able to give some good feedback about the meetings
to the District Leaders, so that was good.

We also went on exchange that day! I went with a missionary named
Elder Minnich, who is in his second transfer in the Mission, and he is
so funny. He is from Fort Worth Texas and loves his Dr. Pepper! But he
always tells me that the Dr. Pepper in England is way worse haha. We
were knocking on doors and we met this guy who was deaf, so he
couldn't really talk to us, and so we just kind of awkwardly gave him
a Mormon.org card and then left - and afterwards Elder Minnich was
like: "I would rather be deaf than be blind. Like if I was blind how
would I know if my clothes matched? Oh, I know - I would just FaceTime
my mom every morning and be like 'does this match?' And then she would
be like 'you forgot your pants!'" I was dying.

Anyways on exchange we found a bunch of people to go visit within the
next few days - and we did, and it was good! We found this guy named
Rocwan, who is from the Congo and speaks semi good English, but mostly
French. So we brought him the next day a french Book of Mormon and
tried to teach him in English, but it wasn't working so I just taught
most of the lesson to him in French, and he loved it so much! It was a
really cool experience! Teaching in French is really cool because I
don't know as many words so I have to be very simple, but sometimes
using simple words actually gets the meaning across better. Like for
example in English when I'm describing how I know that the Book of
Mormon is true, I'll explain the feelings I've gotten etc. In French I
just say like 'you feel warm in your heart' and 'peace in your head'
and stuff like that, but it totally made sense to him!

We also while knocking on doors this week talked to this Muslim guy,
and usually they all just tell us to go away, so we've gotten in the
habit of just asking if they have any Christian friends - and this one
guy this week was like, yeah my friends are from Iran and they're
Christian now, go visit them. So we did, and they were both super
happy to see us! Well what happened was one day we went and visited
one of them, and then two days later we went back to see him but he
wasn't there, but his roommate was so we taught him too! Should be
fun. We have one lady in our ward who is from Iran who was baptised
last year, and so hopefully we're going to bring her with us because
she speaks Persian, so that will be sweet.

On Friday was Mission Leadership Council again, so we drove down to
Leeds for that and were there all day on Friday. That's two Fridays in
a row now we went to Leeds, and three Fridays total this month that we
were in Leeds all day. It was a really good meeting though!

And then on Saturday and Sunday we watched General Conference, and
that was super sweet too! Susan and Sophie went and watched some at a
Members house, and some of it at home too. Some of our other
investigators watched it at home as well, so that was awesome.

Oh, a few more stories about knocking.

On Saturday we went knocking and while we were knocking (in a place
called Benwell, which is not such a nice area) there were some little
foreign kids playing football on the street. One of them kicked the
ball in our direction so I started to play with them a little, and
then one of the kids was like "are you guys knocking on people's
doors" and we were like yeah, and he was like "you should come talk to
my mom, she likes talking to people about Jesus" and we were like
okay. So we went to their door and his mom answered, but she was from
Slovakia, and couldn't speak much English. We showed her the Book of
Mormon and told her we had one in Slovak in our car (which we did,
somehow...) and told her we'd be right back. So we went to the car and
grabbed the Slovak BOM, and called some Slovak speaking missionaries,
and then went back to her house and handed her the Book of Mormon and
the phone, and she talked with the Slovak Elders! And now we're going
back on Tuesday so that the Slovak Elders can teach her a lesson over
Skype. Pretty cool stuff.

Also that same day we were knocking and across the road and a bit down
from where we were (it was a major road so a bit wider than usual,
which isn't saying much it was probably only as wide as my side Street
at home) there was this kid who was having a major argument with his
drunk dad. It started tame, but then got really bad and they started
throwing stuff and screaming and all kinds of nastiness. Then the kid
like ran out and was freaking out - and then a police van showed up,
and the kid ran away, and then another police van showed up, and then
another, and then another, and they like surrounded the area - and
then a helicopter came, and a drone went up, and like all this crazy
stuff started happening, and we just watched the whole thing while we
were knocking on doors - and actually found a few people whilst
watching haha. Crazy tho. We have no idea how the story ended because
we had to go!

Also I loved watching General Conference. I spoke to Sophie on the
phone after one conference and she was talking about how one of the
talks had stuck out to her and how much she loved it - and I was just
so happy. We are doing god's work and bringing people closer to him! I
was just so happy to hear a recent convert explain how much Conference
had meant to her - it was really cool.

A few talks stood out to me, but one of the ones that stood out the
most was by Jeffrey R. Holland, where he spoke about being unique, and
about how we need to be tolerant of others, and respect everyone and
accept each others individuality. I loved it and it made me so happy
to know that the church isn't full of people trying to be better than
one another, it's about loving everyone despite their imperfections.
Everyone in the world could benefit so much from loving their life
they way.

I really do believe that a God speaks to men and women today just like
he has in the past. I really believe that Thomas S. Monson is the
Lord's prophet on the earth at this time. I believe that the Apostles
are chosen of God and inspired leaders. I know their we heed the
messages shared at this conference, our lives will benefit so much. I
believe that Jesus Christ is at the head of this Church.

Love you guys!

There's a recent convert in our ward from Iraq named Gary who works in a garage. We go visit him there and have invited a few of his friends to church, but they haven't come yet. One of his friend name is Sam, and Sam's English is really bad, so sometimes we have no idea what he's saying. The other day Sam was pointing at this one car and calling it 'scooby' and we were so confused. We couldn't tell if the car was called scooby, or if sams nickname was scooby or what He was like "I'll show you" - and showed us the inside of the car and we were still just like "what's scooby??" hen we came back like three days later and the car was turned around - and we finally found out what scooby was...