Monday, November 24, 2014

11/24/2014

Kinfolk,
 
Here's a little about my week:
Zone Meeting:
We had a combined Zone Meeting this week, with the Round Rock and Round Rock East zones. President Slaughter was there and gave an excellent training on 'Apostasy', and how it occurred. He also talked about this new initiative the Church is doing this Christmas season. It's unlike anything I have ever seen before. It is called, "He is The Gift". Helping people draw come closer to Christ and focus on him this Christmas season. They will be sending out millions of cards. Each missionary will be giving away at least 10 a day for over a month. On December 7th, The Church will be THE ONLY advertiser on YouTube's homepage..... all day long.... the only advertisements..
ALSO, The Church bought many of the billboards and mega screens in Times Square, those will be going off all day, every day until January.
This is crazy!!! The work is hastening so fast! The Gospel is flooding the earth!

Elder Nichols and I also gave some training's at the meeting. I prepared mine that morning haha, I've gotten pretty good at shooting from the hip.

Exchanges:
One of my best friends from the MTC, Elder Butterfield, is in this zone now! We haven't really seen each other since the MTC. This week we went on an exchange together, so he came to my area and we worked together for 24 hours. It was so much fun! haha we just instantly picked up where we left off in the MTC. 
We taught a lesson together to a college student in Georgetown, Texas. He is an agnostic, and doesn't really trust any religion. We started teaching him about the Restoration and we just blew his mind! hahaha he was loving everything we said, and he agreed with all of it! We gave him a copy of the Book Of Mormon, and he is going to start reading it. The Spirit was strong in the lesson, and he definitely felt it. We are teaching him again this week.
One of the lessons we taught was to Malik, where Elder Butterfield gave him his Baptismal Interview. I'll send a picture of the 3 of us together. It was such a fun day!

I also went on an exchange with Elder Hobbs. Elder Hobbs is getting towards the end of his mission. I went to his area with him. Half-way through our day it started to ran really bad, so the rest of our day we were just completely soaked! We had a lot of good times though. We just happened to find a lady in her garage cleaning some furniture. As we talked with her, we found out that her husband is an inactive member of the Church, and she is a non-member. However, just recently they were both talking about going back to Church.
That was the first day they moved into the house. It was a miracle! They are going to come back to Church, and i'm sure that she will get baptized.

Brother Abdul:
Ladies and Gentleman, we have a new member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His name is Malik Jamal Abdul-Khaliq.
From the first time we taught him until the day he got baptized was only 11 days! haha crazy, right?
Malik was just so prepared. He always shares his testimony on how the Lord has been preparing him his whole life for this moment.

He was baptized on November 22, at 3pm.
His good friend, who he is living with right now, baptized him. Also, a friend he met at work, who is a recently returned-missionary, confirmed him on Sunday and gave him the Gift of The Holy Ghost.

Malik's mother, who is an inactive Muslim, came to the baptism. She could feel The Spirit and seemed to really enjoy the baptism. Afterwords, she grabbed a copy of the Book of Mormon and some pamphlets that we had set out. Awesome!

As soon as the baptismal service ended, and everyone was standing up. Malik walked over to me and gave me a big hug. While we were hugging, it sounded like he was holding back tears when he said, "thank you". Just a simple "thank you", and everything up to that point was worth it. No trial on the mission is too hard, when you're standing next to the font with your new recent convert, and he is hugging you saying "thank you".


Malik and I have become really good friends. Every time we see each other he just comes up to me and gives me a hug.
 
I love y'all so much, and I am grateful for each one of you!
Love, Elder Giles

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