Elder David

ear Family, I have had a super week this week and you probably arent going to get individual emails because I wrote a long email to the president. Mostly I wanted the experienc I had in my letters to him because at the end of the mission I will get them back. So I copied the email and pasted it here. Love you all, Elder Jarman.


Dear President Dyches,
Well President we are doing extrememly well here in Salem. We have seen miracles this past week. I personally have had a wonderful experience. The work continues to progress here, on monday during our weekly planning session as I was updating a few records (I know that that is supposed to be done in daily planning but there is no way that we can get everything updated in the amount of time we have, we are still way behind) Elder Henriod was writing on the big white board our investigators and our people of interest. Our focus investigators was over 10 people and the people of interest was bigger than that. We have tons of work to do.
This last week instead of music we have been listening to a couple of talks on cd that Henriod has by Gene R. Cook, teaching by the spirit, and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Elder Cook is an amazing speaker and he gave a many stories to illustrate the principles he was teaching. Two imparticular were stories on faith. He told of a time when he was responsible for the funds of a temple in south america. He was meeting with President Faust and in the meeting they were discussing how president Kimball was coming down for some reason and then he turned to Elder Cook and said, dont you think it would be wonderful if all the funds were collected to build the temple in 3 weeks when president kimball arrives. Elder Cook said that if was good for President Faust it was good for him and his counselors. President Faust said wonderful and he went on his way. Elder Cook turned to his counselors and said do you have faith that this can happen and they both agreed. It had been over a year and they only had half the funds it would take to build the temple. So Elder Cook said to them we need to make another donation as evidence of our faith. He said each of them wrote a figure on a paper and the figures were small but they were great sacrifices on his counselors parts. He said would you be willing to pay the rest of the funds if the money isnt provided? That would consist of them selling everything they owned all of them house, car, clothing, etc. All three of them made that commitment. He said from that point they didnt just beleive they would have the money, they knew. Another story was as a mission president he put a hard working missionary of his in hard area. He didnt know this missionary well, he said the missionary kind of avoided him, so he didnt know how strong he was, but on faith put him in this area. When Elder Cook asked him about what he thought, he said I have been told that you dont baptize in this area, that the members dont do their part, that even if you do teach someone you will have to get them married before they can get baptized, and i was told how hard their hearts are. Elder Cook was fearful, until he said I dont believe any of that. It is december 1st and by christmas we will have 25 baptisms.
Elder Cook talked about what we want, and what we have to do to have faith that it will come, all of us have our favorite sins, he said that is the one that the Lord is going to ask for. He said pray for the gift of faith, and he gave many examples of faithful prayers. So I took it to heart and as I started an exchange with Elder Massey in his area I planned on excercising great faith. We planned out our day tuesday night. We had 2 appointments and so we had a goal to have a member at 1 of those. Then we set a goal for 3 new investigators. Now I have done better than 3 before but this day we were particularily confined. We had district meeting in the morning and we were going to be dropped off at our first appointment and work for another 2-3 hours till the next appointment. We decided to go on foot because of how far away both the appointments were. And so we trusted the Lord. We had maybe 4 names to give us a starting point, no bike and the first appointment no one was home. We started down the street, and I was weighed down because of how helpless I felt and we hadnt had a prayer since district meeting. We found a quiet place and knelt down and had a simple prayer where we expressed our dependance and our need for spiritual guidance. We got up and I could feel the presence of the Lord. We went down the next street, it had lower class homes toys strewn down the street. As we knocked on a few doors we saw a girl outside and some inside. The ones inside waved to us so we went to talk with them. It is a russian family 11 kids and the parents dont speak any english. They at first told us they have a church but soon the wall melted away and we testified of the restoration and gave away a BOM. the next door we met a family as we were walking up the walkway the door opened. She was somewhat startled, but we found out that she has had lessons from the missionaries before 6 yrs ago. We asked if she was busy right then, she said come back in 20 minutes. We went to the next door she was southern baptist and very cold at first in a matter of moments she was warm and inviting, we had a gospel discussion and she accepted a BOM which we didnt have to give out because we both only had one copy on us and they were given away. I gave her a Joseph Smith pamphlet and a fam. proc. and promised that she would have the BOM tomorrow. We went back to our appointment and taught a powerful first lesson. Her daughter was there and her sons girlfriend. They listened intently and felt the power of the spirit, that fuzzy feeling, we pointed it out many times during the lesson. We also told them how we had specifically prayed that day that we would talk to people who were willing to listen to the message we shared and how they were an answer to our prayers.