Mission Miracle from Elder Benjamin Miles

June 2, 2009

This week we had an amazing time finding. One morning Elder Ott and I spent companionship time studying about how to contact better, because the night before we had had a rough night in the blocs just getting rejected by everyone! So we studied and Elder Ott mentioned that we hadn't been referring to the Restoration and so that day when we left our house we were heading for the center of town and we were passing past this middle age man and the thought came to my mind let try out that contacting we practiced. So I stopped the man and I was going through my approach when I got to the point to ask him when we could meet again and he said well can we do the lesson now and I said well sure! And we sat down and said a prayer right there in a park and we had a great discussion about the restoration. It went really well and he invited us to come over to his house and asked us if he could invite his family and relatives and we said YES PLEASE DO! The more the merrier! So we set up with him on Wednesday and so we went over there and there were no joke 10 people in that discussion--an entire family! So we taught them twice this week and it was amazing and the coolest member of the family is their 17 year old son named Emanuel. He does all his reading and he even came to church this Sunday so that was amazing. He told me that he believes the Book of Mormon is true and so that was amazing! But I was so thankful for that blessing because for my whole mission I have wanted to kneel with an entire family and pray. It was an amazing miracle.

Also this week we finally found some service and we headed out to this little village which is next to Brasov and we helped a member build a house. We spent 4 hours shoveling and moving dirt and it felt so good to be able to do some more physical work. The even better part was that we got an investigator of ours to come with us to help us out. His name is Silviu, he is from America, but was born here and he came back to go to school. It was really cool because he is Romanian but because he grew up in America he speaks perfect English. We also had our first lesson with him about the restoration and it went really well and so we are hoping that we can turn him into an investigator before he leaves, because he is leaving for America on the 9th!

But the bigger miracle this week is this one. On Thursday I was at an activity when I got a phone call from the sister in my district. They had had something urgent come up and they needed to get to another city and so they were calling me to ask me if I could go to the bus stop to find out the time for the buses leaving the city. I grabbed another missionary and we headed to the bus stop to see the times. We try to bus contact and talk to as many people as possible whenever we can. So we were contacting people on the bus when Elder Wyckoff ( the Elder I was with) started talking to this lady. We had a neat conversation with her but she wasn't really interested. Then these guys got on that looked like they were from India and so I was like “sweet!” I can talk to these guy in English and I actually felt very strongly that I should talk to them. I hopped over to where they were and I started talking to one and they told me that they were students and that they were from Bangladesh and then the one I was talking to introduced me to his friends and his friend was really excited to see me. He hopped over and started asking me about my church and about Christianity! They had to get off so they handed me their business card and the one who was excited told me to call him! So I set up with him for Saturday at the church and he came and we started the lesson with him. Elder Ott started off by asking him what his background was with religion because we were assuming that he was Hindu. So he started to tell us his story. He told us that he was from a Muslim background but that he was familiar with Christianity because two of his brothers had been converted to Christianity by a missionary from Norway about 7 years ago! He told us that the Lord had given him many opportunities to serve the people of his countries because he, along with his brothers, had secretly translated the bible and other Christian literature in to there native language so that the people could have access to it. Then he told us that for a long time now he has been praying to God to help him to know what he should do because he is not with the Muslims or the Christians and because he was in Romania he didn't have any one to talk to and he had been praying to God for him to lead him to someone who could help him. He told us that when he saw us get on the bus that he wanted to talk to us but didn't know how and that when I contacted his friend he was super happy! He told us that since 1997 he has been looking for something but he didn't know what. We taught him the message of the restoration and he said he would pray about it. The spirit was so strong in the lesson and I know that this is an example of god lead his elect to his servants! This was a miracle-- a person seeking the truth was lead to it!