it has been one busy week.
Last Thursday we had an MLC with Brother Donaldson from the missionary
department come and speak to a lot of the leaders and future leaders
in the mission. Since we are office elders we get to go to every
meeting which is a blessing and a curse. We get to hear all the
meetings in the mission but our days are always packed and we don't
get much time in our area. Brother Donaldson was the mission president
in the District 2 series that the church produced. We learned how we
can be better missionaries, how we can use the footage from the first
district as "game film" and how we can watch it and ask what did they
do? It was a super spiritual meeting and we really learned how to be
more effective missionaries and how we can use our planning and
companionship study time more effectively. That time is sacred and we
need to use it wisely because we are given that time to plan and study
for our investigators. I learned a ton and now president smith has
established a new standard of excellence, it's is that we get 3 new
investigators a week, invite to be baptized on first lesson, invite to
be baptized on specific date on the second lesson and 1 baptism every
other month. We were promised that we will reach the standard of
excellence every week that we will see success. Oh yeah that night we
did some tracting and we found a gay Quaker family that are interested
in hearing about what we believe in. That's awesome!
Friday we got to go to the new missionary training meeting and feel
the spirit. It was honestly a good meeting and it's always fun being
able to feel the spirit. Something president said was "If you feel the
spirit, follow it. If you don't feel the spirit, dismiss it to the
source it came. Truth comes from God." Something Elder Leishman (the
new AP) said was so dope and it really touched me. "When a thought
comes into our mind to be disobedient, chase it out because we love
the lord more."
Saturday was straight up amazing, I was on a split with Elder Gallego
(pronounced guy-ego) and we saw mucho the miracles. One of which was
awesome.. We spent a lot of the day doing look ups of potential
investigators.. We tracted and met this dude named Kevin who is just
cool.. He had a lot of questions about our church and we answered them
and testified. It was so glorious and it was so much fun. We then did
another look up and this is where the awesome miracle happened. We
were looking for a spot in mount Vernon (which is like the Bronx) and
we found an open spot but elder Gallego passed it and quickly went
into another spot right next to this telephone pole. There is this
paper on the telephone pole that says "garage sale" needless to say we
go to this garage sale. After some look ups and we go talk to this
lady and elder Gallego speaks to her in Spanish and we look around and
she has this box of ties. We talk to her and she is totally interested
in learning more. These ties though we 2 for a dollar but she gave us
the entire box of ties, like 20 ties! That was totally a spiritual
prompting and we listened and we found her. Solid! We also met with
one of their active members named Heraldo (pronounced hair-I'll-do)
but we taught him the restoration simply and I've never felt the
spirit that strong. We testified of Joseph smith and we invited him to
pray about the Book of Mormon and he said he would. I even accepted
that invitation and prayed about it and I know it's true, the spirit
bore witness to me.
Sunday we had stake conference and all us missionaries in the stake
got to sing called to serve and the spirit was there for sure. It was
a great meeting and it's cool to see how the spirit works and how we
can hear things from our leaders. Our bishop talked to us about how
revelation comes to him. It's not just him sitting there and the
visions of heaven opening up to him but it requires council. When we
receive revelation we are a council of 1, but we need to be in
councils to receive revelation. That was awesome. We planned a sweet
lesson for our dinner appointment and the spirit was so there as we
planned the lesson. We also learned that we will be going to all 4
zone conferences.
Monday our day was destroyed. We got up at 5 am and at 6 we headed to
Newburgh to help out with the zone conference. We got 16 pizzas that
we had to pick up with one of the senior couples. We took a couple
pictures and yeah. We just helped out and yeah. We filled orders and
we went and saw one of our investigators who is progressing well. We
testified to him of the importance of reading the Book of Mormon. We
could feel the spirit testify to him that he needs to read. He prayed
right then and there and kneeled and it was awesome. We felt the
spirit.
Tuesday we had our zone conference in kingsbridge so we shuttled
missionaries. We only got to sit for a couple of hours in our zone
conference. We drove with one of the senior couples around the Bronx
to find radio shack, yeah they don't exist anymore.. Eventually got to
Best Buy. Didn't have the part that we needed. President told us a
story of a missionary who was getting ready to go home and one thing
the missionary told president is that they didn't want to go less
active. President responds "well why are you planning on it?" And I
think it's important that we don't think about those things. If we
keep thinking how we don't want to be less active, then we probably
will go less active. It's important to do the little things, like
reading, praying and going to church. We got to see the new Christmas
video, go to christmas.mormon.org and you can sign up to get notified
when the new video comes out. Go check it out. We did some less active
look ups and ended the night.
I'm so grateful for this opportunity I have to be here to serve the
lord. I've learned and grown for this past week. I've seen the hand of
the lord in my work, I've been prompted by the spirit to talk to
people or go to specific places. I'm grateful for this gospel and I
can't wait for the week to come. I love you all, have a great week!
No comments:
Post a Comment