"NO"

This week was awesome! I seriously couldn't of asked for a better week! We were able to baptize a special young man, a young man that I have worked with sense I first entered into this area. His name is Lopati and man was it awesome to see his smile as he entered into the water! I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to be here to see him be baptized and see how much his life has changed sense the first time we taught him! 

We also were able to find another investigator named Ma. She is awesome and very funny! She took lessons in Savaii with other Elders, finished, then was unable to be baptized due to some village problems. So then she moved here, and asked if we could finish her lessons and then baptize her. She is awesome! Her testimony is the best that I have heard in a while! 

Funny story time.

So we went to teach this amazing Ma about the restoration. I went in thinking I was on top of the world. I was confident in my language in my teaching and my ability to do the work. So the lesson began and everything was going well, she would ask questions and I was able to answer and teach her why that was the answer. I was getting a little prideful because there were some members there and man I was impressing them way good. As the lesson went on we got to Joseph Smith and the First Vision. I taught well and Elder Vele gave an amazing testimony. Then she asked, "How do you know that the true church that God and Christ told Joseph was the Mormon church?" I gave her my answer and thought it was really good. Then I heard her ask again. So I explained again. Then I thought she was asking if Joseph Smith was the one who created the Mormon church. I then said specifically to that question, "NO!". Then everyone started laughing. I was confused and explained why I said no. 

After the lesson Elder Vele starts laughing hysterically. I asked him what was so funny and he told me that she was telling us that she had received and answer and that she knew this was the true church, and I responded to her statement with "NO!" So yeah you can imagine my embarrassment. Lesson learned, don't be cocky with the language or you will get a moment like this to humble you down greatly. All is good though she is on date now for next week so we are excited to teach and to help her make that sacred covenant with her Heavenly Father.

Other than that we are hopefully looking forward to another baptism this week of a man who has been investigating for 20 years! Yeah he is awesome and SOOOOOO prepared. Hopefully that happens and we can help him make that covenant.

All is good in this area! I love the people and love this work! Thank you for the love and your prayers! 

Continue in faith!

Alofa atu

Elder Bethea

Onosa'i

This week was fun and hard. I have gained a new love for walking....The only thing that has happened this week is calls telling us to reschedule for another day or another week but the best one was rescheduled for next month. That was a fun call to receive. But we do have a baptism coming up this week and a few that will follow in the next few weeks. It has been fun to receive some of the hardest times of my mission but also find the most amazing solutions to others problems so that they can be baptized. I am so glad to be out here working and enjoying the Gospel and being able to bless others lives as well. This is an amazing area and an amazing experience to be here and going from square one to the last square. I have loved the opportunity to be humbled. I have learned to love the word humble/onosa'i. I have been able to study learn different meanings and enjoy trying them all out. God is our loving father and knows what we need when we need it. I truly am grateful for the love and joy that has been given to me through my tough times and many challenges. Jesus is our Savior. He lives and is our teacher and brother. I am always willing to listen and obey his guidance. Yeah life keeps going. This week was just like any other week were we walked, talked, taught, and listened. Truly was a hard week, but also the most rewarding. Continue in faith and know God is always there to guide us and bless us according to our works and desires.

Thank you for your love and support! Continue in Faith

Alofa atu

Elder Bethea

Agency.....

This week has been hard. I will have to say that I spent a lot of time on my knees figuring out what the reason is for this amazing week. We spent a lot of time walking to houses and having people cancel or claim that they were to busy and for us to come back another time. I will admit there were many rocks thrown while we were walking away or many stops at a store to get ice cream. Truly there was a lesson to be learned from this whole thing, and when I figured it out that is when I found the most successful day in the week.

So the subject of this Email is "Agency..." that is only for two families. I am not sure if you all remember the family from last week's email and another family that we found of 8. They all seemed super promising but due to the "busy" times of the week we were unable to meet with the family of 8, but were able to meet with Kauni and her family (family from last weeks email). We went and talked with them and came to find out they did not have interest in being baptized...that was very hard for me to take in and accept, that prayed so much and fasted so much for that family and were not able to help them. Although I did receive a comforting feeling that it was only my job to show them the way and that someone else will come through to guide them down that path. We are still able to baptize their son! We still are planning his date to be baptized.

Other than that this week has had one other amazing experience. After one of our days of no one being home or not busy we went walking. I decided to go down a road I have never been down before. We ended up at a house where a man accepted us and we started talking. Comes to find out that his sons had died in a way that he still has not been able to accept. So we decided to talk about the Plan of Salvation. He stopped Elder Vele as he was teaching about spirit paradise and prison. Then taught the whole lesson again and finished it. We find out that he believes everything we do and knows everything in our church...but he doesn't quite grasp all of it. We are going back tomorrow so we can help him understand everything and help receive all of the blessings that he can in this life.

This week truly has helped me to realize the importance of listening to the spirit. I know that without us being receptive to the spirit we are totally unable to do this work. The spirit is extremely important to this work and he will help us so long as we look to him in the hard times. Always look for new people to share this gospel with. You never know who you will find.

Thank you for all of your love and prayers. Continue in faith and look for opportunities to share you testimony!

Alofa atu

Elder Bethea

Blessings from the Gospel

This week was awesome. Mostly was full of teaching and many humbling experiences that have truly helped me realize my Heavenly Fathers role in my work and in my life.

We went and talked to another family that we are teaching. They are a family of four that we are teaching and are working on. My experience with them is one that I cannot forget.

We had set up a specific time to go an teach this family, mainly to go and try to help the mother realize what we were teaching her two sons, and to try and see if she will allow us to baptize them as well. We got there and taught the Gospel of Jesus Christ, just wanting to show her why we decided to teach and help her sons make this decision. We started the lesson and I wasn't sure what was going to happen, but as soon as we started a comforting feeling came over me, and I knew that we weren't alone in this lesson. We taught, and I don't remember the words I used, or the things I said, I truly knew that I had been blessed in that lesson with the Gift of Tongues. When the lesson ended, we asked if she had any questions about what we had taught. She responded with one question but not for us, but for her son. She asked if he really wanted to be baptized. He said yes, and all I saw was pain and sadness in her eyes. She looked at me after, and said there you have your answer. When she said that I had the inspiration to tell her that wasn't good enough for me. That my purpose here was not to separate families just for a baptism, but to ensure that families are forever. Then I invited the entire family to be baptized. The spirit was so strong that I knew what her answer was going to be, but I had to let them find that for themselves and receive it from their Heavenly Father. So we are going back Friday to get their answer.

This gospel is true. I know it and I love it. I loved the opportunity to hear the talks from inspired men and women at conference this past weekend. It has truly inspired me to become a better missionary, but more importantly a better person. I know God has his hand in our lives all the time. All we have to do is recognize it and act on it. 

Thank you all for your love and support and especially your prayers. They help sooooo much. 

Alofa atu

Elder Bethea

Well this week I don't think that I am going to send a group email and just send one to you because I haven't done that in a while.  This week was awesome! Me and Elder Vele walked a butt ton! We were able to go and teach a lesson with the Zone Leaders to our golden family. They walked out of that lesson telling me and Elder Vele, "You guys are so going to have seven baptisms this month, that is just a guarantee." So that was really nice especially because the lesson was in Samoan and sad to say my samoan is not at its finest so going into the lesson I felt really unconfident about the whole lesson but when we started I just really decided to focus really on helping the family understanding why we use the Book of Mormon. The lesson wasn't long, I didn't say very much. But all went amazing. He and his family accepted the Book of Mormon and now we are going back tonight to commit them all to a specific date. It was amazing to see how the Lord just worked through the two of us to get his message across even if we weren't able to say a lot of stuff, we were able to say exactly what they needed to hear.

We also got a lot of good news about how our investigators who are waiting to be married. We may be able to get them married in the next week as well as baptized. You should of seen how much joy was in their faces when we told them that they could be baptized in the next couple of weeks. I have never really understood why baptism was so important until I saw their faces and realized that this is probably the most important thing in their lives other than going to the temple to be sealed as a family. I love the idea of giving them the news that the lock that was on the gate that leads them to the strait and narrow path that Jesus talks about can soon be unlocked and that they can now start on that path and receive the Eternal Live that everyone is looking for.

This week is GENERAL CONFERENCE AND I AM MORE EXCITED FOR THIS WEEKEND THAN I WAS TO GO ON A MISSION! I LOVE HEARING FROM THE PROPHET AND HEARING WHAT IT IS THAT WE NEED TO DO IN THESE NEXT FEW MONTHS TO PREPARE OURSELVES FOR MORE BLESSINGS! WHAT A GREATER JOY THAN TO KNOW HOW WE CAN RECEIVE MORE BLESSINGS! Sorry I am really excited for this weekend.

Other than that this week was full of sweat, smelly bums, and happy investigators. I am loving it out here and there is no greater joy in this world than to bring others closer to Christ, whether you are a missionary or you are just sharing the gospel because you really want to. I love this opportunity to see the blessings that come from opening my mouth....I WILL NEVER STOP!

God loves all of us! Jesus is our Savior and Redeemer! I love this Gospel and know without a speck of doubt that it is true! Thomas S. Monson is a prophet and does receive current revelation for this world. I love my Savior and thank Him everyday for the gifts and blessings He gives me every day!

Alofa atu

Elder Bethea

God Answers Prayers

This week I was able to receive a new companion, Elder Vele. He is an amazing Elder and has brought so much fire back into this area....that I am still in. But this week was full of blessings left and right! I don't have a bunch of time but I will share this experience that truly touched me and my companion. 

So me and Elder Vele were having a really tough few days because a lot of our investigators were no longer interested and the one's that were progressing were not coming to church. So one of the days we were proselyting, no one was home and a lot of people told us they were not interested. Literally, all of our plans and back up plans fell through so we had a lot of time before our fafaga (dinner) and we had no plans or set appointments for the next couple hours. Tala'i tuitui (Door to door proselyting) was fa'asa (banned) by our mission president because 99% of the people turn us down every time and it wasn't an efficient use of our time, so we had no clue what to do. We were literally sitting on the sidewalk, sweating like crazy because it was super humid, trying to figure out what to do and who to contact. It was at this moment that I received a prompting for us to say a prayer and ask Heavenly Father what we should do and who we should contact. So we said a prayer on the sidewalk and right after we said the prayer, I felt a prompting to visit a family I haven't contacted in 6 weeks because they were always busy and didn't have time for us to visit them. Long story short, we went there and it was a coincidence (not really, it was the Lord obviously) because it was their day off. So we talked with them and it was an amazing spiritual experience. They said that they were so grateful that we came because they have been going though some tough times and that the message we shared with them was something they needed to hear (they were literally crying telling us this). They even told us to come back anytime and teach them some more. And the crazy thing was, when I visited them last time, they were kind of rude to us and seemed disinterested. And not long after that lesson, we found another family of 6 who were super interested in our message. They are a family of 8. I had taught him before and hadn't been able to contact him in a very long time. But we decided to go over. We went over and he told us right after the prayer that he has not stopped reading the lesson pamphlet we gave him last time. And he believes without a doubt that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God. He told us to come back again so we can teach his whole family so they can all convert together. We believe we can baptize in the next couple weeks. It just goes to show that God never abandons his children and that if we ALWAYS put our trust in him, he will bless us with whatever we stand in need of.

I have a testimony of this gospel and know without a doubt in my mind that God is always working with us. We just have to realize what lesson he needs us to learn, then the trials, temptations, hard times will become amazing testimony builders that will help us become the person our Heavenly Father wants us to be.

My blessings and love go out to all of you this week!

Alofa atu

Elder Bethea

No time

No time today I am alive with new companions my Trainee got sent to upolu so now I am waiting for transfers. Living the life.

So that must of been an awesome experience! Love to hear that all is going well. Haha man this week was full of literally me sitting in my house because my companion was sick. Fun week! love to hear that you all are doing awesome! Keep the boys working so they know what hard work is like! Love you!

Alofa atu

Elder Bethea