January 28, 2013

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!