Monday March 30, 2015 - Conference Week!!

I'm so excited for conference this week!!! I loved conference weekend when I was back home too, but out here in the mission field conference weekend is like Superbowl Sunday. I'm PUMPED!

I'm also pumped for the #BecauseHeLives video that came out on Saturday! On Easter Sunday the church is going to be the only ad on Youtube and It will be that video so if you haven't seen it already go watch it! And tell everyone you know to watch it on Easter! If you're as big a cry baby as me it will bring tears to your eyes when you see Jesus standing there in white. Every time. No matter how many times I see it.

This week has been a testing one to say the least. So many crazy things have been happening to us and to people around us. I'll summarize it by telling you what happened Thursday.

So in the morning we woke up with a missed phone call from Dan at 1 a.m. and we found out later that day that his mom had passed away late that night. Then we went to go see Ryan and Chastity and teach them the about the Plan of Salvation, which they had a TON of questions about, but as soon as we got there they told us they had talked to some people and learned that we grew horns and stuff and told us not to come back. Then on the way back another one of our new investigators told us that her dad is Pagan and that we should cancel the appointment we made. Then we called Maurice and he told us he wasn't interested anymore. Then we went and helped Coreana move and while we were there she got a phone call that her sister has cancer.

Then we went to go visit a referral we got. By this time of the day we were obviously pretty depressed but we were really excited to have this referral so when we pulled up to the house I was drinking a drink and I was reading the back of the can and I just got super excited for some reason and was like "Elder I just drank 200% of my Daily Values of Riboflavin! Let's do this!" Then we said a prayer and went and knocked on the door and some grumpy bald dude answered the door in his boxers and one long red sock on and told us to go away. But we asked if the lady who's name we had lived there and we couldn't meet with her then because she was sick but we are going back to talk with her today so it all worked out. And me and Elder Lords now make riboflavin jokes everywhere we go. I don't even know what riboflavin is.

Then to finish off the day we went to go teach Jackie the stop smoking workshop and the first thing she told us was that her sister-in-law had just died. It was a bad Thursday. But the morale of the story is not how bad Thursday was, the morale of the story is that if we keep having faith and don't give up, Christ will help us through it. And my testimony of that was strengthened by this Thursday because by the next night, Friday we had:

- Talked to Ryan and Chastity and helped them realize the things they heard were false and we are meeting with them again.

- Were able to give Dan a blessing last night to comfort him for the loss of his mom and have one of the most spiritual experiences of my mission.

- Teach Jackie the stop smoking workshop and commit her to stop smoking as well as show her the "Mountains to Climb" Mormon message to help her.

- Find out that the grumpy dude in the boxers doesn't even live there and the lady we went to see is actually very interested in learning about the gospel.

Don't tell God how big your storm is.

Tell your storm how big God is.

Love Elder Cox

I am in the Easter Lake West area. It's just south of Des Moines, it technically is still mostly Des Moines and a couple other small towns.

Love you all and I love the quotes. President Jensen always tells us "Love them to pieces". That's his famous quote, whether he's talking about investigators, other missionaries, anybody. He tells us to love them to pieces. And he is probably the most loving person I've ever met so he's a good example of that.