This week...

Hey y'all! It's been another great week! 

This week I went on exchange with Elder Blanco. He's from Bogota and is the best missionary ever! It was super fun. We had some pretty good doctrinal conversations about the Book of Mormon and I learned a ton. He was telling me he was thinking about how the Book of Mormon has the fullness of the gospel, but doesn't have a lot of detail about all of the plan of salvation (war in heaven, pre earth life, kingdoms of glory, etc). While he was thinking about that he read Alma 2, which is kind of randomly placed in the Book of Mormon and talks about Amilici trying to overthrow the Nephite government. He pointed out that if you read that story thinking about the war in heaven and putting Amilici metaphorically in the place of Satan, the story pretty much tells the war in heaven. 1/3 of the total deaths in the battle were Nephites, and Amilici wants to take the people's rights and privileges. There's a lot of other neat details in there, but now I'm going to be looking through the Book of Mormon for more metaphorical plan of salvation pieces.

While on exchange we met up with Tommy and his friends. I was pretty happy to have Elder Blanco with me because we threw down on them by the Spirit and they realized how out of context those prophecies were and how little they knew about the sources they got them from. It was petty good. We committed Tommy to read the whole Book of Mormon cover to cover before he developed his opinion of Joseph Smith. He said he'd read up to Mosiah by Tuesday so hopefully that goes well!

Transfers are this week! I don't think I'll get transferred, but you never know. If I don't go Elder Snyder most likely will. It'll be weird having a different companion, it feels like I just got to Providence but I'm also used to teaching with Elder Snyder. When I went on exchange with Elder Blanco, we taught this guy the restoration and I realized how different everyone's teaching style is.

Allen started a new job so we haven't been able see him much, but it sounds like we're going to teach his kids this week. Keep praying for them because they're super ready.

On Tuesday we got a call from a film maker that works for a YouTube channel I used to watch. He said he was on a shoot and one of the volunteers was from NC. They started talking about his mission and this volunteer, Nick, was really interested in the church. So he sent us over to meet Nick, a 19 year old kid studying film in college. I was really excited to meet him because he's a lot like me. Turns out he loves all of the standards our church teaches and would totally be a Mormon, but he's doesn't believe in God. So this week we're gonna go teach Nick how to pray so he can figure out if there's a God. Sadly he leaves in a week of two for California for the rest of the summer, but I'm hoping he'll want to learn more and meet up with missionaries in Cali. I'm so happy the guy that called us wasn't afraid to open his mouth though, MEMBER MISSIONARY WORK!!!!!

I don't have any pictures form the week, sorry! But I still love you all!!!

Elder Earnest