15 Pages (11/11/2019)

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Dear friends and family,

We sent out a mass text to all the people in our area book who were marked as "not interested". Someone responded saying they'd be happy to meet again, but the last elders never answered some of his questions. We said we'd be happy to try to answer them if we could. So we get emailed to us a 15-page document containing the lamest anti questions you've ever read. We're talking questions about Jesus being born in Bethlehem and not Jerusalem like the Book of Mormon says (he even had a visual aid for that one), Jesus and Satan being brothers, the Church of Jesus Christ prophesied to be undestroyable, why the passover isn't mentioned in the Book of Mormon ("Hmmm... Don't know, don't care. How's that?" - Emperor Cuzco), and even how Moroni became an angel ("Like anyone could even know that." - Kip Dynamite). 15 pages of this cr@p! Haha.

The actual visit with him ended up being not as bad as I feared. He kinda just went through about a third of the questions, not aggressively (as I've seen some be), but definitely not very fairly. For one thing, as if the Book of Mormon could be 99% true except for one supposed "error" that keeps him from accepting it as the word of God. Ultimately what I found is that everything we seemingly were similar on in terms of Christian beliefs, in the end he would take a 90 degree turn the wrong direction. Little things like saying the Bible is supposed to make us feel bad about ourselves and emphasizing the death of Jesus over the resurrection of Jesus. Just weird stuff, it's like the same base except mixed in with man's philosophies so it goes off a cliff. Primarily I was disappointed with his answer to how he knows the Bible is true, which went to archaeological finds and prophecies holding true over the centuries and basically anything except for the testimony of the Holy Ghost. Obviously, because if what you really need to spiritually know that something is true is a witness from the Holy Spirit then the Book of Mormon could still be true in spite of what might seem to be inconsistencies in the text or supposed issues in the Church or its leaders. These people don't actually have faith in Jesus Christ, they're putting their trust only in what they can see!

Imagine if all his issues about the Book of Mormon were answered. Would he then join the Church? And if so, what if another issue arose? Would he then leave the Church? What if that issue then got resolved?? It's just SO ridiculous. Your faith has to stand on something solid: the testimony of the Holy Ghost. That's the only certain answer we can possibly get as mortals.

He also asked us what we would do if we got to heaven and God told us the Book of Mormon were fiction. Do we think we'll go to heaven after having believed in a "different Jesus"? Basically I started to bear my testimony that I have the witness of the Spirit but he kinda cut me off. Whatever though, it's a dumb question. If you read the Book of Mormon to the end you'll find Moroni asking you the same question in reverse (which I guess a prophet has the right to ask).

After the lesson we sent him the BYU talk "Stand Forever", which hopefully helps him realize that he isn't exercising true faith (which you'd think he'd have recognized by reading the New Testament already).

Other than that the work has been slow. Nothing much to talk about, or that I want to write about. So we'll just keep working until the end.

Love,
Elder Gallagher

PICS: Something hanging up in our apartment (edited from the original, mind you), some fall pictures I took, and me in a battle I got into against some leaves
 


 

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