Serving in Kentucky: i-Pad!

June 1, 2015

Dear Family,

Now that I have my iPad emailing will be easier.

Speaking of which... IPAD! I HAVE AN IPAD!. The church restricted the crap out of it but none the less... IPAD! It's an iPad mini 2, the same model Ammon has. It has 32gbs and about a million church restrictions but it still works really well. If you go on the app store and download the app "LDS Pamphlets" you'll see the app that we are teaching from now. It was a bit of an odd adjustment going from pamphlet teaching to iPad teaching but it feels more like a powerpoint presentation now. I also downloaded "Gospel Library" and have downloaded so much stuff it's like 6 gigs big now. I'm in the process of downloading all the Mormon Message videos.

I had a couple interesting contact's this week. Contacting people on the street/in their yard is probably my weakest area right now. I'm fine with everything else, teaching, studying, etc. but contacting still kinda scares me. I'm getting better but It's a slow improvement. I've been praying for experiences that will strengthen my confidence and this week I got 3.

1: Mr N

2: Mr L

3: Mr T

In all of these instances I didn't really feel like talking to anyone. They were all at bad times when I just didn't want to talk to people.

We met Mr N towards the end of a day where most everything fell through... again... We were walking down the street and I saw him on the edge of his yard before Elder Lynch did but I didn't feel like talking, probably because this guy was a cop in uniform with guns n' tasers n' stuff, so I didn't say anything. I pointed him out to Elder Lynch and he started talking with him. We found out that he and his son LOVE the Bible. They love anything relating to the word of God and they especially love the idea of more scripture (the Book of Mormon). He also loved my Eldredge Knot. I wasn't expecting the contact to go as well as it did since yard contacts like that never seem to work.

Mr L was another yard contact. We had to go quite a ways into his yard before he noticed us. He's a preacher at a local church but he loved everything we told him about the church, what we know to be true, and how the church is organized. We ended the contact with asking him to pray about it and he said he would make it a priority.

Mr T's story is this: Elder Lynch and I had just left the apartment to go to an appointment. I saw Mr T but he was a ways down the road and we needed to leave soon to get to the appointment on time. Elder Lynch happened to be dropping a bunch of stuff that day so by the time we were ready to leave Mr T was by our apartment. Now, I wasn't going to contact him because we needed to leave at that moment to get to the appointment on time. And I'm the kind of person that doesn't like to change plans. Elder Lynch saw him and contacted him and we found out that he recently got out of a 3-month coma that a brown recluse spider bite caused. Because of that, he had been searching for God and a good church lately.

In all 3 of these I didn't want to talk to them. Whether because I was tired, or had something else to get to, I just didn't want to talk. Elder Lynch was the one to initiate the conversations. I never showed anything negative to these 3 people when we talked to them. Even though I would have rather been somewhere else, I didn't show that to them. And I talked to them just as much as Elder Lynch did after he initiated the conversation. After these 3 experiences a thought came to mind. A rather clear thought. It said "The people you don't want to talk to are the people I have prepared the most." I thought about that and realized that Satan would make it harder for me to talk to the people who are prepared than the people who aren't. One day Elder Lynch will be gone and I'll be training someone. I'll have to be bold and contact people with the same boldness that Elder Lynch has and as long as I try to make progress everyday, then I'll obtain that same boldness.

Thank you for your letters. Thank you for the advice. I completely agree with everything you said and am really grateful for your willingness in helping me. I'd say my greatest weakness now is street contacting. I think there are 2 main reasons why contacting scares me. 1: the rules/suggestions/whatever-they-were 2: I've never had this much experience talking about the gospel in my whole life. I'm getting better but it's a slow climb.

Now that I have my iPad I can read your emails whenever I want. I just can't respond until P-Day. Any tie knots you want to send, I can view on the iPad now. Here's my request for the week. On my iPhone (Ammon's iPhone) I had a blue, purple, yellow, and orange Matterhorn Mountain background. I want you to find that background and find the full version and send it to me. Search on google images and please send the one with the highest resolution. I would also like some good Temple backgrounds. I would search for the backgrounds myself but they don't want us going on google images. I tried going on the Church's Temple site but the pictures they have aren't HD.

pics are on their way.

Thank you,

-Elder Benjamin Kohkonen Cox