Hey everyone! I have some exciting news about where I've been this
past week! So I have been serving close to the big city for the past
while, and I have been transferred to the most country part of our
mission. I'm currently serving in Fred Texas! Named after the town
closest to where we live. But I'm so glad to be here! I can finally
see the stars again at night haha. It's mostly dirt and gravel/sand
roads down here, so we have one of three trucks in the mission. We
drive a sweet little 2015 Nissan Frontier, and while it may not be a
Toyota Tundra or a Chevy Silverado, but it's great for what we do as
missionaries. It feels so good to have a truck again! And not to
mention we live in a sweet mansion! Well it's not actually a mansion,
but for us it is! The mission's nickname for our housing is "the Fred
mansion". We live in this huge trailer and it's super nice! It has two
bathrooms and its own washer and dryer. It's so big it has two rooms
we dont even use because we have no need for them. Oh and my new
companion is Elder Scow, he's from Payson UT.
The work here is a little different than the city. We have a branch
down here, and a lot of the work is done by working with less active
families and getting them reactivated and their families baptized.
They've had some baptisms in the past couple months so the people down
here are definitely ready to hear the gospel! We even had some legit
contacting miracles down here. We've been trying to increase our
teaching pool this week, so the majority of our time was proselyting
the roads down here. We had this one legit contact where this guy was
trimming his lawn when we came to talk to him (the people down here
are all super friendly btw) and he started talking to us about
religion and stuff, but you could just SEE that the spirit was working
on this guy. His first questions to us were more on the defensive
side, then as we testified and taught, his questions took the form of
"well what do you think about this scripture.." And "what do you think
about this.." Until eventually we had this super spiritual moment
where I used the board and nail analogy to help him understand the WHY
we need Book of Mormon (for those who don't know the analogy, you
demonstrate that if you were to nail a wooden board to something with
one nail, you can still spin the board around. You have some
foundation, but it isn't solid. This represents the bible and all the
different directions you can take it. And then you say that if we were
to use a second nail, the Book of Mormon, the board becomes immovable
and steadfast) after we showed him that, he paused for a moment to
think and finally said, "well that makes a lot of sense, I'm a
carpenter you see.." Wow, I couldn't believe it. The spirit
intensified after that and I knew that The spirit is what prompted me
to use that method of teaching because I had no idea he was a
carpenter, I had no way of knowing. Only the Lord did, and I'm super
grateful he prompted me to use a certain analogy that I've used only
2-3 times my whole mission. So anyways, at the end we offered him a
Book of Mormon and he replied that he was gonna have to pray about it
and we were like "yes! Please ask Heavenly Father if this is true. We
were gonna invite you to do that anyway" and then I said we could take
baby steps. I offered him the Restoration pamphlet but he quickly said
that they do a lot of reading in his house and if we offered him a
Book of Mormon he wasn't going to turn it down.
God works Miracles!
Love,
Elder Blackburn
New address!
23415 FM 92 S
Silsbee, TX 77656
We live at the bottom of our area, and technically it is in Silsbee
but we tell everyone it's in Fred :)
Love,
Elder Blackburn
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