Elder Gavin Milius: I LOST MY INNOCENCE WHEN…31 October 2022

OK so I probably won't give a full run down of every day of this week, but!!! Some pretty crazy stuff happened so I'll tell y'all about that!

Tuesday we had an exchange with the zone leaders and I had a blast!! I went with Elder Burt and he is literally perfect! One: he's a giant teddy bear and gives the best hugs; two: he is absolutely hilarious and we share, like the same humor so we were just cracking up the entire day; and three: he's so smart and so confident in the gospel! I mean obviously, he's been out for 18 months, but like, the guy could give a five minute restoration lesson to some random person on the street, get their phone number and set up a return appointment in less than ten minutes. He does it so naturally and is like a pro.

But after the exchange we went back to our normal grind. Wednesday was kinda crazy though. The middle of the day was normal. We had service with the sisters which was super fun. We had to clean up a bunch of rotten meat and cheese and dairy though so it smelled like straight up death. Let's just say we came home and had like three showers to clean off the stench. But after that we were making some phone calls, and this one guy we called answers and we asked if it's Jeremy and he's like maybe, then we offer a prayer and he just starts rambling about the most unimportant not applicable stuff ever. He starts talking about how we should pray for everyone, then he starts talking about Adam and Eve, and how she was lustful and then he starts talking about how she lost her innocence in the garden, THEN and I kid you not, this is a direct quote from him, and he says, "I lost my innocence when I was six years old..." but to keep this email PG I won't put in the rest of what was said but you can assume that it was very funny and a little inappropriate. And me and my companion just died laughing, we couldn't keep it together. We obviously put it on mute but we were dead. And then the guy kept rambling about the woman with the blood disease and how we don't know what her specific blood disease was and that our uplinks or our leaders were lying to us, and we were like, the whole point of the woman with the blood disease is she had faith to be healed, it didn't matter what disease she had. And he was like nope your wrong, she was on her period and had some terrible blood disease and you don't know it because your leaders follow man. And we just were like uh OK, we'll go pray about it and then call you back so we hung up and didn't pray about that because it was very dumb lol.

Anyway then comes Thursday and we had an awesome lesson with one of our progressing people. We brought a member too and we all just had a great time. In fact we put him on date!!!! We are still gonna have to work with him some more, but he said he wanted to know how to become a member of our church and we were like uh wanna be baptized, and he said yes!!!! We are super excited for him and can't wait to see him enter the waters of baptism.

Friday was also really interesting and kinda crazy. We were talking with this guy, who told us he felt prompted to tell us to come back 2 weeks later. So two weeks later we knock on his door and we were prepared to give him a restoration lesson. Turns out he kinda was a basher but a super super nice basher. He was asking us great great questions and we were just having a conversation about what we believe and what he believed. I personally learned so much because this guy was a flipping genius!! But his only problem was that he didn't have concrete physical evidence of the Book of Mormon so he doesn't think it points to God and Christ's love for all his children. Which isn't true and he said there are contradictions in the book but they aren't really contradictions. Moral of the story he believes what he believes, he learned a lot from us and we learned a lot from him. Then out of nowhere we were about to leave and he goes, so which one of you wants to pursue the medical field. I was like uh me? And he was like, see how easy it was for me to ask God and he told me what you want to do with your life. I never told him anything about wanting to be a doctor or anything about my family being in the medical field, yet this guy basically just told me I need to be a doctor. Now I don't know if this is like what I actually need to do, that'll take a lot of praying and pondering but I couldn't believe what I heard. Anyway! This guy was super super nice and he said to come back if we ever wanna talk more about stuff or if we wanna say hi so we may or may not do that but he just was a super smart great guy.

Saturday wasn't crazy except it was my comps birthday!!!!! So happy birthday Elder Smith!! Hope 20 treats you well lol. But Sunday was super fun, I always love Sundays. We had to prepare talks because the first counselor was like hey the bishop is giving the closing remarks but he is a little sick so we don't know if he's gonna be there. So me and my comp prepared 10 minute talks in hopes that bishop was there, which he was so we got off the hook. But other than our friend who's on date showing up to church nothing crazy happened until Sunday evening. We ended up calling Jeremy back just to see what would happen and he thought that we were the leaders now, and he starts rambling again just about the most confusing stuff that made absolutely no sense, we honestly were just messing with him at this point but when we said we needed to go because we really had to go. We had a mentoring call like right then. We said we had another call and he got so mad, he was like "ohhh so the devils calling, gotcha, you guys are scared of the truth! I died and saw my whole life then begged for mercy from God to bring me back to life!! And he did!! I have been instructed by the holy spirit blah blah blah!" Then we just hung up, probably won't call him again because he's a nut job.

Well I guess the one thing I learned is that the Book of Mormon has a lot of power. It is a true book because whenever we teach about it, and even when we were talking with the guy who was the super nice basher, I just felt so strongly of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon and I can testify that it is the record of the ancient Americans and their dealings with Christ. It talks about our Savior and how much he loves everyone on this planet. It is the word of God, and with the Bible next to it, it can bring power into our lives and give us direction, cure our sadness, and bring light like no other to us and to those around us as we stand as a witness of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon. Because, if the Book of Mormon is true then that means Joseph Smith was a true prophet and he did see God the Father and Jesus Christ which then means that this church is the true church that Christ established on the earth in the Bible.

Pictures

1) Waffle house with the boys (I know my arms are massive, no need to compliment me 💪😤)

2) Thrift shirts going crazy!!

3) Funny frog spitting facts

4) Richmond temple is almost done!!!!

5) I like soda