September 14, 2015
Hi everyone!
Hi everyone!
This week has been good. Things have settled down a lot. We taught a lot of lessons this week, and I didn't have to make any trips to Enterprise. We didn't get any new investigators this week, but I think
we're really close to getting several new.
We had a zone meeting this week which was fun as always. On Friday I also held a District Meeting, my first one as District Leader. And most of the district didn't even show up, and most of them didn't even let me know before hand that they weren't going to make it! So District Meeting ended up being shorter than usual and a lot of the stuff I was going to do I will now have to do this week. Since it was
on 9/11, I decided for the training to watch President Gordon B. Hinckley's talk that he gave in the October 2001 General Conference, all about the perilous times we are living in. Even though it is
directed at the time immediately after the attacks, it is still incredibly applicable to our day. He told us how to get through these times too. Basically be prepared physically (food storage, stay out of debt, etc.), though he warned us not to go all "the end is near" doomsday fanatic or anything like that. But even more important than physical preparation, is spiritual preparation. The Book of Mormon promises that the land of America will be blessed for those who keep the commandments. This land will be a land of liberty and shall be free from foreign oppression as long as the people are being generally righteous. So President Hinckley just expounded on how we need to keep the commandments, as a people, and as individuals. It's a super great talk, and I'd highly recommend reading or watching it.
I got sick this week. A stupid cold. It was extremely uncomfortable! There was one night where my entire face, neck, and throat just felt awful, and if I weren't so freaking tired I would have gotten hardly any sleep. It's been going away these last few days, so that's good. It just made being a happy, enthusiastic missionary REALLY difficult for a few days.
In our Stake Missionary Correlation Meeting on Sunday morning, a the stake leadership dropped a huge game-changer that kind of exploded my brain a little bit, and I'm still trying to process and digest everything it will entail. The Stake Presidency has decided to designate three nights a week as nights for "splits". Each night will be with a different ward. One of us will cover our appointments with the usual fellowshippers, while the other goes with the ward missionaries in the assigned ward area for a couple hours that night. This will keep us busier and hopefully help us find a lot more people to teach. I like the idea because it is the missionaries working with the stake, which is something Elder Bednar talked about. And it will keep us busier, and should help us find a lot of people. However, I do have my reservations. For one, I'm a little uneasy about the Stake sort of taking over our schedule for the most busy and productive evenings of the week. Our schedule is our schedule. It will also take a lot of logistics and planning/coordinating the day before. Now that's not a problem I guess, but it's just more stuff we have to deal with, and it makes our schedule REALLY inflexible, and if we're splitting for the majority of the lessons, that also means that there will be a lot of lessons where we will not be teaching as a companionship, which is not ideal anyway, but also, kinda tricky because I'm a trainer, and Elder Bright is supposed to be learning from my example. Also there are going to be days where it simply just won't work. All this being stated, and we've told this to our ward mission leaders, we reserve the right to say "this night isn't going to work, we're too busy". So yeah. That happened. Overall, I think this will be good. There's just A LOT of kinks that will have to be worked out of this plan to make it really effective and worthwhile. It's a start though.
Well, those are about the only major developments to report on this week. It's weird. A lot has happened this week, just not much to write about. I'm still loving my mission. I'm so thankful I'm serving, and I know that this Church is true, and that Christ Himself is directing this work. I love it.
Have a fantastic week!
-Elder Oswald
P.S. For P-day today we went to the St. George Temple. It was so awesome! I really wish we were allowed to go there more often. Anyway, here's some pictures from that.
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