Concerts and Good times written February 24, 2014
It was the week of the Belle Harbor Concert 2.0. You might remember about a year ago we did a Restoration concert in Belle Harbor. It was a big ordeal back then, I was in charge of the music and Elder Walton ran the rest of it. We had a bunch of performers from all over the mission come in NAND it was a fun event. I got a call in January from Elder Lavelle, asking me if I would help with another concert. The goal was to do a Plan of Salvation concert this time around. I was again put in charge of the music, so I called up all of my performing peeps. We had eight songs in total and they wrote a script with people speaking in between the numbers.
We had a dress rehearsal on Wednesday afternoon, so everybody headed to the mission office. Some of the songs weren't quite ready yet, so we went through what we had, then I stayed to help some people out their songs. It took up most of our day, especially since it's a pretty far drive from where we are to the mission office.
The concert was on Sunday afternoon at 4. A rough time for missionaries, but apparently a good time for Belle Harbor. We had to miss our branch, so we went to the English ward to take the sacrament. It worked out because I got to play the organ for them. They were very excited to have someone playing for a change. We had to leave by 1 to pick up another set of missionaries and get there by 3. There was lots of frantic last minute setup and issued transporting the other performers, but it all worked out in the end. Everyone performed really well. There were maybe 60 people in attendance and probably some 20 of them were nonmembers. Everyone seemed to have a good time, so I'd say it was a success. After it was all over, I played some postlude music and transitioned into music from Frozen. There were some young kids there that thought it was the coolest thing ever. It was a lot of fun.
So that all went well. We had two other cool events this week. The first was when we met with David. He was the guy from English classes who randomly came to church last week. We got to meet with him after English classes on Tuesday. We explained the restoration to him and he seemed to think it was alright. We gave him a Book of Mormon and asked him to read and pray about it. He said he would. We met again on Wednesday with him. He had actually read the first chapter of Nephi and really liked it. That was sweet. We asked him why he came to church and he said because he wants to change his life. Wow. That's incredible. I asked what he wanted to change. He said that he had made a lot of mistakes in his life and he wants to leave them behind and live a better life. Well good news David. There's this sweet thing called repentance and baptism, you're going to love it. We committed him to try to repent and he agreed to get baptized eventually. He just wants some more time to learn about the church first. He didn't make it to church this week, but he seems very sincere about wanting to change and sounds willing to change. We'll see how things go with him.
The other fun event was our branch temple trip on Saturday. We have been working with a less active member, Hermano Ibarra, who hadn't been to the temple in a long time. He got his temple recommend last week, so we got to go with him to do baptisms for the dead. Every companionship in our district had a less active or a recent convert going, so we all got to go on the trip. It was a really nice trip with all of the members there. We had to leave super early and drive into Queens, then hop on the subway to make it to the temple in Manhattan. Made for quite the adventure.
So in the end, it was a great week. Successful concert, fun temple trip, and a new investigator. Can't go wrong there.
Love you guys!
Elder Erickson
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