Elder Kopischke visits NC

Hey Ya'll!!!

Sadly Elder Clarke did not survive transfers. He's packing as I type. Pretty sad to be losing him, we were pretty tight, but I'm also excited to see who my new companion is.

Highlight of my week: Elder Kopischke of the first qurom of the seventy was at mission conference!!!!! He's spoken in General Conference a few times and is such a cool guy. He's from Germany and knows a ton about the gospel. He started out by talking to us about listening to the promptings of the Spirit, and then just opened it up for questions. For four or five hours we just asked him whatever questions we wanted, it was so cool. I asked him what are the best things we should be studying. He told me to study The Book Of Mormon, The Four Gospels, The Pearl of Great Price, and The book of Acts in that order. He also talked about the cycle of faith using Alma 32:27-29. He explained that faith is a principal of action and power. We have to do all we can to act on our faith  or the action side, and then God takes care of the Power side and that's when we see the miracles happen. He said we're really only responsible for the things we can control. Sometimes, especially as missionaries, we feel guilty for things we can't control, but we shouldn't at all. We just have to focus on the things we can control and trust God for the rest.

After the conference President Alexander selected a few missionaries to interview with Elder Kopischke, Elder  Clarke was one of them. I sat in the hall while they interviewed and got to talk to Sister Alexander for a bit. Turns out she has some family in Newburg! It was nice to get to know her a bit more, she's so kind and loving and is just filled with charity for everyone.

So yeah, that was super fun! We also have three super solid investigators, Ivan, Holly, and Siena. They came to church yesterday and are progressing really well and are on date for baptism on the 7th of November so we're super excited for them!

So it looks like I'll be in Danville for the next six weeks! I'm pretty happy, there's a lot going on here as far as missionary work and I'm making pretty good friends with some of the ward members. I love you and let me know if I can doing anything for ya'll!

Elder Earnest


An excerpt from Grandma's letter:

So I'm not sure if I mentioned it it in my weekly email home, but a few weeks ago we had a huge mission conference all about family history and the spirit of Elijah. Our mission president's son-in-law works for the church's Family History Department, and he was there and gave a great training on how we can use family history as a missionary finding tool and also trained us using family search. I have the family search app on my ipad and have been doing a bit of family history work lately. Most of the work is done on all sides of my family, but I was able to search through some records and attach someone to their wife so that was pretty cool! At that huge conference they said something I thought was cool. They said the Spirit of Elijah can usually be felt a lot faster than the Spirit of the Book of Mormon, so if people aren't interested in the restored gospel of Jesus Christ, they might be interested in family history and that can lead to the gospel. So that's been a big focus in our mission the last few weeks. 

Elder Earnest and President Alexander