"Share the Gospel at all times and when necessary, use words."

Hey everyone how is it going? It was good to hear from all of you. I really loved reading your email this week. Thank you Devin, Treyson, Taggart, and Marissa! It sounds like you guys are having a really good summer! I'm glad to hear that everyone is doing well again.  Well this week has been a pretty good week.  Transfer calls came this week and I bet you are wondering where I will be serving for the next 6 weeks... well the answer is the same place!! :) Elder Mathewson and I will still be companions this next transfer and I'm stoked about it. I honestly did not really want to leave Spain at all. I love serving in this branch, there are some really awesome members here and I have grown to realize that this is probably the strongest branch in the mission.  I didn't believe it when I first got here but after hearing about all the other branches around the mission this is def the strongest! Spanish Town is a good place too. It has a little bit of everything you would expect in Jamaica. A little bit of bush (like countryish) and some city, some nice areas and some really ghetto areas. Dirt roads and paved roads.  Spain is a good place.

So I told you last week that we would be moving this week and we did.  We moved into a house in Inswood Village. Maybe you can check it out on Google Earth or something IDK. But it is a nice area. The people and neighbors seem really friendly.  The house was a definite downgrade though.  I am now taking cold showers, and there is no AC in this house.  It is hot all the time.  It is smaller too which is going to suck because come Wednesday it is going to be a 5 man house.  Elder Nelson will be getting a new ZL with him as well as he is going to be training a brand new missionary.  Crazy huh! Pres Brown through a curveball at the mission for his first transfer! Elder Faumui, the other ZL that I have been living with will be the new AP as well.  

So this week we got rained on a couple times.  There were some tropical storms that passed us, It was some super intense rain as well as the lightning was the biggest, loudest, closest, and most lightning I have ever heard in my life. It was fun though. On Thursday when it was raining a lot we were heading to a lesson and like all the roads were flooded and we got to this certain section in the road where it is always bad and it was just a complete river. We were like we can either take a little detour and go around a different way, or this is the closest we will ever get to swimming for the next year and a half and we can just ride up through it.  We decided to ride through it!! :) I wish I would have had a camera on me, the water was as deep as our tires, we just put it in the easiest gear that we could and then went for it for about 40 yards. It was a dirt road too so it was just muddy gross water but it was still fun.  We were already completely drenched so we didn't even notice a difference after we rode through it. Some people were watching us and laughing at us too.  

Well on Saturday we were riding in the neighborhood and we saw a couple vans of white people, I think I actually caught myself staring at them.  I even wanted to yell "WHITE MAN" and some other stuff that we get yelled at us everyday but I didn't. I resisted the temptation.  I think they were with some church doing something over here. They were total tourists though. It was funny, like only the 2nd time I've seen white people on my mission besides missionaries.

Yesterday we had another lesson on a couch inside the home of a less active, yet awesome family! It was the 2nd time for both of those, having a lesson inside of a home and sitting on a couch.  It felt a lot better than a cinder block or a 5 gallon bucket!  The family is the S. family though and they are preparing to go to the temple.  For the lesson last night we had it on missionary work.  We role played with them talking about the gospel to their friends. They absolutely loved it! They were so stoked last night I thought Sis S. was gonna go out right there and baptize 12 people! It was cool to see their enthusiasm.

S. is also doing well, he is such a boss!  He can't wait until Aug 3 which is his new baptism date that Pres Brown had to extend to him.

Wednesday was zone meeting and Pres Brown and his family came and introduced themselves to all the missionaries in the zone.  He also shared some stuff with us.  He shared about how we are in the last inning of the 6th seal, how the choicest spirits were saved until now to come to earth, that we have had 6,000 years in the premortal world to watch others and to see how we need to conduct ourselves. Now everyone is watching us, old prophets, other people in the Book of Mormon, seeing if we are going to step up to the plate and see if we are going to do what we have learned.  He said that you have known what you need to do, and some could use the excuse of the veil to say they don't remember, but really there is no excuse at all.  We know what we need to do, we have the White handbook, Preach My Gospel, prophets and apostles and now we need to get it done. He said it about a trillion times better than I did though! That is what he used to do though, he used to be a professional CES teaching and coordinator of the island.  The spirit was there, and it was one of the strongest I have ever felt it.  He taught some of the doctrine behind missionary work and why is is important and how this is an eternal work that we are doing.  If every LDS youth heard this lesson he gave there wouldn't be one who stayed home from a mission.  It was absolutely amazing and what I have said doesn't even give it an ounce of justice.

Well one more thing before I go, I listened to the talk called 'His Grace is Sufficient' by Brad Wilcox this past week.  Everyone needs to listen to that talk if you haven't already, and relisten to it if you have listened to it.  It is an amazing talk, it is one of my favorite talks ever. Listen to it and just be in complete awe at the things you learn and how simply it is put.

Well I got to go, uhm well to answer your question mom about how to help with missionary work. I would say take whatever you felt to do as you were watching the New Mission Presidents Seminar (Worldwide Leadership Conference).  As it said there are resources to tell us what to do but not how to do it.  There are a lot of ways to do missionary work.  The work in Utah is the same work but it is done differently because of the different circumstances.  "Share the Gospel at all times and when necessary, use words." Do what you feel needs to be done.  There are soon to be 100 thousand missionaries in the world and that's awesome! But there are 15 million members, that's a little bit better number.  If every member were to bring one person into the church each year, it would only take 10 years to make everyone in the world a member of the church.

 

Do your part, be a missionary at all times especially to less actives.  Well that's my 2 cents.

Love Elder Colton Harris

                                 
                   Apparently Elder Wilkerson schooled Elders Strickland and Harris in Monopoly.