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Sunday, July 25, 2010

Science, Religion and Rain

It's been another great week as usual. Last Preparation Day Elder Piiparinen and I were extremely tired from everything so after we wrote our emails we went to the store, and then just slept at the apartment. It was so nice to finally get a nap. It's the first nap I've taken in a very long time. So Elder Piiparinen and I decided to go through the entire hymn book during our comp studies, and we sing one hymn a day, but like half of the hymns we've never even heard before, so he plays some chords on the ukelele while I do drum beats on my knees and we rap out the ones we don't know. I'm not sure if that's the best thing to do with hymns, but it sounds awesome. We do what we can. Anyway, we've had so much success this week. We do a lot of tracting and contacting, and have been finding a lot of people for others in our Zone to teach. (When they are over 30 or under 18 other missionaries teach them). We've also been helping our investigators prepare for baptism. Chelsey is getting baptized on the 25th, and she is so solid. Devin is getting baptized in early September, and he is a stud.

On Friday there was a guest speaker at UAF that was on a tour giving this speech about the relation between evolution/science and religion. Two of our investigators said that they were going, so we went to see what it was about. The speaker was making a joke out of religion and worhipping God the entire time (he's an atheist), and it was pretty obvious he was trying to disprove religion. The cool part about all of this is when he finished his speech and was open to questions (this was in an auditorium of about 500 or more people), one of our investigators, James, got up to ask a question. Elder Piiparinen and I really wanted to ask him questions, and it would have totally made him look ridiculous, but obviously we can't do that. But James got up and asked a question along the lines of this: "I believe in the string theory, and parallel universes, that we can't count how many billions of universes there are, so how can you prove that there isn't a god in one of those universes?" A lot of people in the auditorium started clapping and cheering at his question because it was pro-religion. The speaker said that he does believe that there is at least one universe with a god--which totally disproved everything he was trying to prove before. Why couldn't that universe be this one? It was really awesome because it seemed to me like it strengthened James's faith, and he even went into a grove of trees to pray about what we're teaching like Joseph Smith. He's still waiting for an answer, but we know he will receive that answer like Moroni said, "after the trial of (his) faith."

That was definitely a cool part of this week. On Saturday we were at the stake center here, and it started raining out of nowhere, as it does a lot here in Alaska. It rained harder than I've ever seen it rain in my entire life. It was so hard and so thick that when we opened the door of the church rain was coming in the entry, and you couldn't see very far. Then it started hailing, and the parking lot was like a lake. When it finally stopped and we could leave, we had to drive through some small ponds to get out. There was a car that had backed away from a road because the water was too deep for it, but we had a Silverado so we busted through it like nothing. It was a crazy rain storm.

Well, I hope everyone is doing great because I know I am!

Love Elder Squires