Elder Austin Cahoon's Mission: A Super Saturday For a Beautiful Baptism with a Wonderful Woman!

Hello Family and Friends!

It's Elder Cahoon! I'm still out here! 😂 I'm probably becoming a distant memory but, no worries I it has been great out here! This week was awesome!! It was full of some fun times and some great lessons learned for good ole Elder Cahoon! We did some good service around here as well! Love doing service! It's pretty awesome!

Thumbs Up For Service!

As for our service opportunities, we helped out at a local charity center here. We stocked some food in fridges and helped move boxes for them! The people of the Center love the missionaries because previous missionaries have gone there and helped. We also helped make food and then serve it to the young men and young women in the Ward! They were going on a Temple trip and we got to serve them lunch/dinner before they left!

As for a missionary learning experience, I went on am exchange this week with a missionary who is from Mexico!! His name is Elder Martinez! He is super cool! We talked a lot about Mexico and he taught me some good Spanish! I then taught him some Mandarin! I know a small bit of Spanish and I am trying to learn some Mandarin- just because I think it would be cool to know some phrases!

As for the best missionary experiences, JoAnne is doing great and we are so excited for her to be baptized THIS SATURDAY! We had some great lessons this week and we read a little bit of the Book of Mormon with her! She is also super excited to her Baptism! She no longer drinks caffeinated coffee so we took her some Tang to help her through this change. She loves Tang so she loved our gift! She has her baptism interview on Wednesday. We have some great things planned this week for her Baptism on Saturday!

We also had a really cool miracle this week! So a few weeks ago I stopped by a house and a woman answered the door. She told us to come back because her husband might be interested in talking to us. Well, it didn't seem like she was really interested but I decided I would go back when I was in the area again. Well, this week E. Hatch and I were in the area and I told him we needed to stop by. When went to their house, the husband and wife were taking groceries into their house. We knew that was the perfect opportunity to help so we help them take the groceries into their home. We talked for about 10 min about life and where they were from and how long they have lived in the area. They were really cool. We then talked to Justin (the husband) about what missionaries do. We asked him if he knew anything about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He said no but that "I have been to a bunch of different churches. I'm just trying to find the truth." Oh yeah! My companion and I got pretty giddy after he said that! We told him we would love to talk to him more about the church. We asked him if he knew anything about the Book of Mormon. He said no. So we asked if we could read the first chapter with him and his wife. He excitedly said yes! Before we began reading with him we told him we would be reading about a family. We likened Lehi's family to his family so he could understand that Lehi's family is like his family (all of our families really)- there is love, there are disagreements, sometimes you don't understand the actions of other family members, along with a lot of other similarities. They loved reading the first chapter of Nephi with us! It was super cool to have them recognize the Spirit as we talked to them! We should be seeing them Tuesday afternoon so we are really excited!

We asked them how much they could read before we met again and they said 2 chapters. So we committed them to reading Nephi 2 and 3 and told them what they would be reading about- receiving revelation from God, how the family responds to revelation from God, family arguments and how to respond to disagreements and contention. I love teaching about the Book of Mormon in this way. Introducing the Book of Mormon this way is what we learned in Zone Conference and I have been able to implement this type of teaching a couple of different times so far.

There is a cool, young ward member that hangs with us and his name is Logan. He just received his mission call and will be serving in the same mission as Sam Lucas! He will be going to Rio! I told him about the crazy miracle Elder Lucas had with his baptism! He leaves in February. I think he should be there before Elder Lucas leaves! I Love you all and I'm so grateful for your prayers and support! Have a great week!

Elder Cahoon