You never, ever stop working hard.

 Only two more weeks of the transfer! Time is flying by! I can't believe we are already four weeks in! The chances of me getting transferred on the 17th are really high, but there is the slight chance that I will stay in Stanford for one more so I can be with Elder Ayotte for two transfers. We will have to see what happens when the time comes around. ​

    There are times on a mission when you work really really hard. You never ever stop working hard. Every waking moment you are striving to work and focus on the work. We have been doing this for the past three weeks. Work work work! The strange thing is the entire time it has been what we call a trial of our faith. We really didn't see any miracles, didn't see any new "golden" investigators. We just worked hard and came home at the end of the day at the same place. This became very frustrating but we knew we just had to keep moving forward! Then we had an evening that changed all of that. It made being in a trial of faith stage worth it. Saturday around five we decided to go to Stanford campus. We were planning on walking around and trying to talk to people. We had been walking on campus for no more than a minute and this man who was with his six year old son came up to us and said that we were dressed up quite a bit to be here on campus. Then he read my tag and shouted out, "oh, you're Mormon!" He then turns to his son and tells his son, to listen closely, the Mormons are about to tell you what they believe. Then he turns to us and told us to teach his son what we believe. So my companion tells the little boy about prophets and how we have a living prophet here on earth today! Then the father looks at us again and says, "go ahead, tell him what you know." So I come in and teach him about the Book of Mormon. Then the father starts to ask him questions about what he believes. It was very strange at first but after a while we got acquainted with one another and we ended up having a really good conversation. They were very friendly and we talked about a lot of aspects of the Mormon church. He didn't really have questions but he had a lot of praise and good things to say about the church. 

  

    One of the coolest parts was that as he was talking with us. This girl walks by, probably in her 20's, student at Stanford. As she walks past I say hello really quick because she was on the phone but I still wanted to be friendly. She said hello and then continued walking. After a few steps she turned around, ended her phone call and came back to me. She asked me if she could ask me a question. I said sure! She then said it was a personal question and asked if that's okay. I responded, absolutely! She then asked if a Mormon can date someone that's not a Mormon. I laughed inside and was more than happy to teach her about eternal marriage and how important it is to us. Then I told her it is 100% okay for a non-member to date a member. I talked about how eventually most people date someone who is at least interested in learning about the church. I asked her if she was thinking about dating a Mormon guy. She said maybe with a smile :) then I asked her if she would ever want to meet up with us and learn more about the church. She said yes and as we started to exchange numbers she got a call that she had to take but she said she would come to church sometime. (We talked about church earlier) I don't know if this experience will lead myself personally to any new investigators but it was a really cool experience being able to see God place people in our path that were ready to learn and ask some questions. They will most definitely be asking more questions in the future and that will eventually lead them to Christ. 

   Great week! I have nothing to complain about. I am so happy!  We got to go look at really nice cars and we had a great day driving around!

Till next time...

Elder Maxwell