6/29/2015

Hey Dad, 

I am totally okay with Elder Coggins speaking the same day as me, if he is as well. It's not like a Homecoming Sunday becomes that RM's day and only his. It's still the Lord's Day. I think it would be great though to have us speak together.  

This week was a little slow honestly. Tuesday night after P-Day, we went out with a member, Brother Anderson and he had some people for us to try by but none of them were home. There was a crazy storm though which caused their whole community's power to go out.  

On Wednesday we went on exchanges and I stayed in Stroudsburg with Elder Harman. We did a lot of service for a member which took longer than I was anticipating and we were planning on doing some work out by where he lives because he lives about 30 minutes away. He then took us to lunch but it was ALL the way back to near where we live so we had to find some more things to do in the area before our dinner appointment. Afterwards we were back near our apartment and we saw a lot of people playing at the basketball courts next to us so I wanted to go play in our shirt and ties. As soon as we walked up this one guy (we were the only white guys there) just hounded us and said we're not welcome here and to take our beliefs somewhere else. I just ignored him and asked one of the guys playing if we could play with them and they all said yeah, kinda curious to see what was going to happen. They started a one on one line going, first to make it stays on. When it was my turn I beat the first guy easy so everyone on the other court stopped playing to come watch and when I beat the other guy, I actually almost made him fall, everyone started cheering haha. The third guy we went back and forth and I just got winded so I lost, but everyone on the sideline came up to me and just started talking. Then I heard my companion for the day still being yelled at by the first guy. So I went over to help and he was drunk and high and he kept calling Elder Harman all of these names and accusing us of being racist and slave owners for the reason of, and I quote, " 'cause y'all white!" It was really sad seeing the ignorance in this man. He then asked about my ancestry so I told him a couple European countries and then he interrupted, "so did everyone slave owner that lived!" There were some young women next to him that just kept apologizing and actually had some real questions about who we were and what our religion is. He tried interrupting and accused the Latter-day Saints of not helping out the slaves and I told him some church history of how we kept getting thrown out of homes in Missiouri, I said it in a tone that probably wasn't the best but eventually it just got to the point where we needed to leave. Everyone else though loved us so that was good. After that we were able to have a good follow up lesson with Jess, she's get baptized on August 2nd. She had not kept the commitment we had left her, but she had told her parents (who are catholic) that she was going to be baptized in the church and her parents were not happy at all about it. She was feeling very down after that so she prayed and asked God if He wanted her to be baptized and she got another overwhelming feeling when she said "Amen." It was great:) 

We also met with a woman named Cecilia and she's just feeling sad but we were able to have a great lesson about prayer with her. We plan on seeing her again this week. 

There's a lot of changes happening here in units but the work is still progressing! I love Stroudsburg.

I love you Dad.

Love,

Elder Barker