Elder Daniel Goold: "It's A Christmas Miracle!"

This last week was hard and kind of slow due to freezing coldness (I got a video of the first snow), but it was super fun with our booth and other cool things. Plus I have pictures!

Zone Conference was awesome. It went for almost the whole day Tuesday. President Salisbury is great. We did the Iron Rod teaching again and talked about "clinging" vs. "holding fast" just like last Christmas. It is still a really good example to learn from. I'll have to show everyone once I get home.

So we did a booth at the Student Center for Marshall University and it was pretty awesome. We did it all around the Light the World theme. We had people come up and write on a paper table cover what they could do to "Light the World" during the Christmas season. It was cool to see what some people wrote up and it was awesome to see how that thought process helped a lot of people feel the Spirit and then they would ask more questions. It went pretty well. Pictures attached!

We got to teach a really cool guy, Brother S. He was a referral we got for a Bible and Book of Mormon. It was awesome, we got to teach him about the Restoration and he really accepted the Book of Mormon. We will be giving him a call today to see him later this week. It was a really good lesson though and we are excited for him!

We had an awesome miracle this week. It strengthened my testimony of Heavenly Father's knowledge of all and being in the right place at the right time. We were working in Proctorville, Ohio Friday night. It’s in our area just across the Ohio River. It was really cold and we were walking between places to save miles. We tried some less-active members in the area and did some finding and then we were going to walk back to the car to head home when we decided to just spend a few more minutes knocking on these town homes we found. We only knocked on 3 or 4 doors and then we left. One of the doors was opened by a young girl, who's parents were busy, so we just gave her a Light the World card. Then Sunday, Bishop Kirby pulled us aside and said he needed to give us something. He said there was a part-member family that lived in our area who moved there within the last year. The wife is a less-active member and her husband and daughter aren't members. The less-active wife's mother is active in 2nd ward, so they went with her to 2nd ward earlier that morning for the first time in a good while. They came up and told the Bishop that missionaries had come by the other night and they wanted us to come back and that he would be interested in learning about the Gospel. We were pretty confused since we never talked to any family with that name. Long story short, their daughter was the little girl we knocked into Friday night!! We had no idea that they lived there and we just happened to knock on their door! The parents took it as a sign to go to church and we had no idea anything had happened! Since the husband has had exposure to the church through his wife and in-laws and he told the bishop that he wanted to be baptized along with his daughter!!! It was totally amazing. We are going to be seeing them this week and we are excited. It's basically every missionary’s dream come true.

We are going to have 2 exchanges this upcoming week so it will be a lot of fun driving and traveling! Martin is doing well with Elder Baggett and Elder Scott. It's cool to be in the same zone because now I get to see how my last area is doing, so it's pretty exciting. Other than that, everything is good! Christmas is definitely upon us, so keep sharing #lighttheworld with everyone on Social Media!

Hope y'all have a good week and I hope you stay warmer than I'll be:)

Take Luck,

Elder Goold