Elder Benjamin S. Smith

After being with me for only 3 weeks, Elder Richwine was sent off to Arcadia to work on the mission Facebook Page (its called God's Love in Southern California if you want to check it out) and Elder Monteiro came here to work with me! Elder Monteiro is fluent in Portuguese... So maybe it's time for me to start learning that again. So yeah now I'm serving in Pasadena with Elder Monteiro. A couple solid stories for the past couple of weeks would be with Steven and Vicente. Steven we have been teaching for about a month but he was consistently missing lessons and canceling. So one day we caught him on the phone and told him that we wanted to help him grow in his knowledge and relationship with Christ but we can only do that if it's something he wants for himself. He said he wants it. And he followed through. Since then, he has been calling us, reading in the Book of Mormon, and inviting himself to church as he continues to learn. He's a legend. Another great guy is Vic...

It is a very exciting time in missionary work. Between the nontraditional finding methods missionaries have been learning, and the reintroduction of more tradition ones, the number of people being taught in this area is very high. The number of new people we are teaching and the number of people going to Sacrament Meeting is higher than our pre-covid numbers. Some of the missionaries I work with struggle to find new people to teach only because they have no time left in the day after their lessons!  We had zone conference this week where we focused on teaching people to their understanding and to conversion to Jesus Christ. This training served us well and there are great success stories showing up in our missionary group chats every day. From people asking the missionaries how they can be baptized in the first lesson, to people overcoming challenges that have kept them from baptism for years. One of the experiences I was able to have this week was with a friend we have been t...

  Monday night we get a call at about 10:00 and on Tuesday Elder Ritter is on his way to Whittier. Another missionary was able to go back to their mission in Brazil and we were one of many movements made to fill that missionary's spot. It's kinda fun because Elder Ritter went to the area I came from, so I know a lot of the people he is going to be teaching for the next few months. Elder Richwine came to Pasadena to be my companion. He got to see the Rose Bowl and City Hall and all of those fun places as well as having some classic Pasadena street contacting experiences.  One such experience happened this week when someone rode up to us on a Skateboard saying we are just the people he was looking for. He told us that he didn't see the light anymore and wasn't sure if there was enough good to overpower the bad in the world. We heard about his experience, talked with him, shared some scriptures. Then we asked him to pray and ask God if He loves him. He did and he felt the ...