Roanoke just keeps getting better and better! It has been a good week. I have never met and talked to so many people in my life! We are just finding people everywhere! It has been really different; I'm not used to all the people still, but it is a blast. I will just summarize some of the great experiences we had here!
So we were tracting earlier this week and we knocked on one door and a lady answered and told us she knew who we were. So we were like, “Okay, how do you know us?” And she told us she was actually a member of the church and was inactive. She told us she had not heard from anyone from the church in 8 solid years. We were the first to make any kind of contact with her in that long. It was sad to hear. But then she expressed to us, in a lot of tears, how badly she missed the church and how she really wants to come back. She just doesn't know how. It was such a sincere desire to come back to our Savior. I'm so grateful we found her and made that contact. It was a blessing. It brought me to think about Moroni 6 where it talks about remembering everyone that enters into the gate. It also reminded me that we are all converts in the Lord’s eyes, heading on the same path home. I hope we are constantly reaching out to our Brothers and Sisters, especially the ones we are responsible for.
We had one more great find this week! We found a great nineteen year old girl that is a single mother with a two year old son. She is living with her parents and she was super open to talk with us. (Before you judge me, we brought a member with us to teach her.) But she is so elect! She understood the restoration almost perfectly. It was cool to see our message help her. She expressed to us that all the Christian people she knows keep telling her that she may be going to hell because she had a baby outside of wedlock. How crushing and discouraging that must be? Those churches are completely false. We taught her that no matter what she has done, if she repents and changes through the gospel, she will indeed be forgiven. That is the blessing of the Atonement. I'm looking forward to our lesson this week!
We are teaching an older Catholic couple here. They are good friends with the members of the ward and have been getting the lessons for a while. We were talking about baptism and they told us that babies need to be baptized when they are born to get rid of Adam’s sin. The thought of that theory made me so sad. I shared an experience with them that my Aunt had when one of her babies was born premature. Through my tears, I was able to express that children and babies do not have the need to be baptized because they are indeed alive in Christ. I expressed that my aunt and my family was able to get through the loss of our cousin because of the knowledge we gained out of the Book of Mormon in (Moroni 8.) Children and all of God’s children have no need in being baptized until they are at the age of accountability. At the end of the lesson, the older man that we were teaching told me, "I always knew that that Catholic belief was false." It was one of the most powerful lessons I have had in a while. I was grateful for the knowledge I had gained out of my personal study to know what was contained in Moroni 8 to help the people I was teaching. It is my testimony that I know this church is indeed true because of these precious and simple truths that other churches do not have.
It has been a great week. My companion is a fire ball! I love Elder Millard we took some pictures during lunch in our apartment. I will send them. Keep the Faith--I love you all!
- Elder Kaleb Bingham
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