Happy Fall! (9/30/2019)

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Dear friends and family,

You may recall last week I said this:
• Vicki is awesome
While on an exchange with Elder Johnson, we tracted into an old Greek lady named Vicki. She had a heavy Greek accent and was really sweet.

I also said that we had a lesson with her that night. Well, turns out she wasn't home. It was pretty disappointing and I was ready to tell all of y'all that it didn't actually pan out and there aren't miracles anymore, apparently.

But then...we stopped by a few days later--and met her husband Eugene. Well, he said she wasn't available and proceeded to spout his own opinion on religion (which we told him we agreed with). He wasn't that interested, though he was nice. Didn't really give us a time to come back or anything.

So we were still disappointed. THEN last night we were working around her area and decided to stop by, really not expecting much. We knocked on her home and after a few minutes a younger guy came out and asked why we were there. We explained we were looking to teach Vicki about our church and he went to get her. Turns out that was her son George, and Vicki ended up inviting us INSIDE (!!) to sit down and talk. First, her house is super nice and super Greek. It was one of those things where you feel like "whoa, I'm like, in an actually legit situation here. These folks don't know how utterly unqualified I am to be in this nice place trying to talk to them about what I've been sent here to talk about all while I secretly play with the tassels on the tablecloth!" Hahaha.

BUT we prayed for support and ended up having a nice conversation which was fairly on topic throughout most of it and we also got fed pumpkin pie and Greek zucchini-feta cheese bread which was quite good. She wants to come visit our church sometime and George ended up respecting us a lot, which was awesome. By the end he was almost defending us, saying things to his mother like "these gentlemen are not here to recruit us, they're men of faith!" The whole thing made our week. She has redeemed herself!!!!

We also had Zone Conference this week. I've realized that I only have two more (next transfer's and then the Christmas conference). For me it had two huge highlights. First, a mental health professional senior sister missionary gave a presentation about dealing with stress which was fantastic. She started talking about how we can recognize our thoughts for what they are (just thoughts) rather than instantly believing thoughts that come to our mind. I wanted to stand up and start applauding, haha.

The second high point was an interesting exercise about Christ's Atonement. We all sat in a room with chairs in a circle. President Stratford had Elder Foster (our District Leader, one of the YSU elders) in the center representing the Savior. President Stratford had a box of York mints "of salvation". One by one he went to each of us asking if we wanted one. When we said yes, Elder Foster had to do 5 pushups to earn it for us. We learned from one sister that if we said no, he still had to do 5 pushups and we got one anyway. At first it was pretty funny watching Elder Foster have to keep doing pushups over and over but about halfway through, President Stratford going one-by-one to each missionary in the circle, the Spirit started hitting us. I couldn't believe it got as emotional as it did. Some did cry a bit, but just about everybody had wet eyes.

Oh yeah, we also reconnected with Kelly! She's the lady who was super golden but we haven't been able to reach her much lately. We just stopped by one morning and managed to catch her. Got to teach her more and even showed her the first Book of Mormon video (both of those so far released having been really awesome, by the way).

So overall it was a good week, though some setbacks have come to others. Just keepin' on, gaining hope, doing good stuff.

Stay frosty.

Love,
Elder Gallagher

PICS:
- Memorial Park in Champion, Ohio with what I was glad to discover is a statue of Jesus Christ. (I had always seen it from the road out of the corner of my eye and thought it was beautiful but wasn't 100% sure that it was supposed to be Jesus, but we finally checked it out this week and found out it was!). There was also an inscribed depiction of what looked to be Adam and Eve elsewhere in the park, which was honestly rather "restored gospel"-y in style despite not being made by the Church.
- Some pictures from the evening before Zone Conference when we stayed with the Youngstown State University elders for the night. As you can see, they live in the city! (Their apartment is on a building's 9th floor and is SUPER nice)
 
 



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