January 28, 2013
This past week has been one of fascination and quite
frankly miracles.
Work-wise, it can be summed up quite easily. Almost all
of our appointments
cancelled and we were literally forced to go for the
hard grinding finding
ALL week. Our potential investigator pool and other
people we are working
with it small and shallow right now, and so we were
determined to build it
up. But that is where the successes and miracles came
in. But I'll get to
that.
Wasn't able to meet with our baptismal date this week,
but he did come to
church. Had a good conversation with him and it seems
he's doing great!
Just that hiccup thing with the date. Our mission-wide
conference is this
next Friday, (yes!) with Elder Keron, but because he's
in the area, they
are also having a leadership training and so they booked
the church all day
Lørdag, so... that's really annoying. But anyway, I'm
sure our date will get
there!
But yea know,
speaking of faith and goal setting, that has come to be our
theme for the week, and I can't even express how cool it
has been. I'm not
even sure what it was this week to spark it. Maybe
District meeting. But Æ.
Singleton and I began doing real, focused, dedicated and
most importantly,
spirit guided planning sessions and goal settings. We
started really
trying to excercise our faith that the Lord would help
us reach our goals
and give us success. Where our average was once 1 or 2
books a week, and a
scattering of lessons, it exploded into great success.
We gave away 11 BOMs
and taught many other great lessons. Contact info and
everything. So what
changed? Our excercise of faith in the Lord and what we
were doing, and
through that, goals. It seems to my understanding that
making a goal is
sort of like making a deal with the Lord. We want this
Lord. We'll do x, y
and z all day at these times if you will help us reach
that. It can sound
dumb in some contexts and perhaps not hit the goal
exactly like we thought.
We also have to do our very best and make smart plans
and stuff. But to
several of our daily numbers we were focusing on, we hit
them solid and so
my testimony of this aspect of the work is growing.
Desire is one of the
aspects of faith and as PMG says, Goals reflect the
desires of our heart. I
have a (growing) testimony of making spirit bekrafted
goals. Getting
specific is also important to it all. The whole thing
just makes me super
excited!
There has been a lot of street contacting and knocking.
In the cold and in
the dark. It seems to be a reoccurring theme each week,
but I seriously
almost froze my toes of the other night. The only thing
that kept my hands
alive was the hand warmers Æ. Peterson (the bald) left
in our apartment. A
few fun stories to tell. First of all, we walked a
TONNNN this week. One of
the days, we unfolded our route and it literally spanned
almost the entire
length of the island of Amager. I'm putting some hard
miles on my shoes
now. Getting good at contacting. We are also doing some
good house
knocking. They have some very ornate and rich houses in
our area. One
night, while out knocking, we approached this locked
gate, with a buzz box.
We buzzed it and suddenly a pair of lights flashed on to
illuminate my face
for the camera. It was loud and shocking. I expected to
talk to the guy
though the box, but he buzzed us in. Wasn't interested
unfortunately. High
tech security system though. Anyway, partway through the
week, we started
running out of books to give out so we had to swing by
the office to grab
more. After chatting with the office Ægtepar, we found
President at his desk
stewing over his I pad. (It is ridiculous how common
they are getting.) He
greeted us warmly and told us that he was looking at the
incoming missionary list. They just added 2 more elders
to the may
group. That puts the may group at 17... 9 sisters, 7
elders.... I'd be
amazed if they don't kill each other in the MTC. Those
rooms are not
very big and they don't have entire buildings dedicated
to one language
like Spanish... It will be fun to see what happens...
One of the highest notes of the whole week is that while
knocking we found
a family. (I think.) The whole situation was amazing but
I'm a little
skeptical still. I'm still waiting for the follow up to
see if they will
still be interested next time. But wow we were pumped
that night. What we
thought was going to be long days of grinding unsuccess,
we exercised some
faith in planning and the Lord and had a startling
amount of success! All
very exciting!
We have Mission Conference on the 1st of February and
I'm excited for that!
It will be good to be spiritually ready for it. It will
be a time for great
and powerful revelation. I really hope I'm ready to
maximize the experience
and get the most out of it. That, and I hope I won't be
in total awe so I
forget to take good notes or something, ha-ha!
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