I was in the middle of assemling my turkey deep fryer when two Mormon guys came to the door to share their faith. One of my neighbors had referred them to me, either as a joke or to get them off their doorstep. I invited them in and we sat down and talked to them for about an hour. We had a great conversation, one where we both talked about our faith, our beliefs and how we live them out. Of the whole conversation, the part that fascinated me the most was the details of their two year mission. These guys take two years out of their life and for two years, just about every day, canvass neighborhoods looking for people to share their faith with. It's got to be a pretty thankless job, and I'm not sure it's the most effective way for them to do it - but it shows a real comittment to what they believe, even if most of it is wrong. We had a great conversation about about the Christian Church, God's revelation of truth and the Bible. They had flip charts, I had no pictures. (Jess suggested that I should have broken out a flannel-graph or taught them the bridge diagram). It was interesting to watch how they responded to questions, and how everytime I asked them a question that fit into their spiel, they were very excited to answer it - sometimes responding with "That fits in really well with what I want to tell you." There was a time where I'd of tried to convince them of how wrong they are and show them the holes in their belief system. I'd of determined how well the conversation went based on how many holes I poked in what they had to say, and how much of "My Stuff" I made them listen to. I'm not not sure that really accomplished much. Instead we had a good conversation where we listened to each other, and I invited them to have a turkey dinner with us. I figure I'll change more people by loving them first and talking second.

I'd read up on LDS (Latter-Day-Saints) a while back, but I'd forgotten some of the wild stuff they believe. They told me the story of God telling Joe Smith that all of the current christian churches were wrong and that he should start his own, and then revealing to him the golden egyptian plates for him to translate The Book of Mormon from. I innocently asked if they'd ever seen these plates, and they explained that the plates had taken back by God at some point. At this point, one of the guys shared with me that if this didn't happen, all of his faith was totally wrong. Interesting. We then started talking about polygamy and why it had been okay at one point, but not now. They shared with me that someone in the church had a revelation at some point that overrode what the Book of Mormon had to say about it, so we talked about that with respect to truth, the bible and Christianity.