Hi everyone!
Guess what! I passed my 15 month mark! That's just ridiculous. I still feel like a "greenie" sometimes. But at the same time I've learned A LOT about the gospel, about teaching, about people in general, and I'm a lot better than I was as a greenie. It's weird. And I am shocked at how fast the time has gone and is going.
I really enjoyed this past week! A lot was accomplished and we saw a lot of miracles. Our dry spell seems to be over! We were finally able to get back in with some investigators we haven't been able to teach in a long time. One of them is Mona. We had a couple really good lessons with her, and we got her on date for May 7th! And she's so ready. She understands the gospel really well, and is really excited to be baptized. She just gets it! For instance, we were teaching about faith and we asked what she understood faith to be, and she said "it's believing in God, and trusting him." Boom. That's literally what faith is. A belief and trust in something (in this case God) that motivates us to act. Anyway, she understands the gospel and she feels the gospel, and she's just excited for her baptism, and excited to help get her family to that point as well.
We also received a some really good referrals. One of them, Reagan, we have an appointment with her and her husband set for Tuesday morning. Her husband is a member, and she's interested in joining. And there's also a referral for a family that we haven't been able to contact yet, but sounds like a pretty good prospect. And there was another referral we got who we met on Sunday, but he is actually in the neighboring missionaries' area. So I guess we can't have all the fun. But still, it's been awesome. Between reconnecting with old investigators and also these referrals, it seems like people have just been crawling out of the woodwork. That's fantastic. That's why we're here, to teach people.
And we had a lot of people come to church too! We had 5 investigators come, and that was just in one ward! So that was awesome too.
It's just so nice to see an area start to blossom. We've been putting in a lot of hard work and not seeing too much from it. But now we're seeing it, and it's really good to keep enthusiasm up. To quote another missionary I know, " It gets me REAL hype."
But of course, what is a week of missionary life without some trials? I think the biggest one from this week was that Elder Burt got really sick for a couple days. We don't really know what it was, if it was a virus or just something he ate, but he was sick for a couple days, and we were instructed to stay inside that whole time. Not only was it time we could have been teaching and visiting people, but it was just really boring being inside all day. Now, back home it's easy to make that fun. Just put on a movie or something. Put as missionaries, we can't do that. So staying in gets boring really fast. And we also had to miss Zone Conference. I usually really enjoy those (though they could be a little shorter), and there was a Seventy there, so I missed hearing from him. But yeah, that was our little hiccup for the week. And we still managed to have a really good week anyway.
Alright, spiritual thought of the week. This is something I was thinking of last night. Last night we taught our investigator, Lexie, about prayer, and building our lives on the foundation of Christ, and
how that helps us against Satan and trials and temptations. I almost said that prayer and living the gospel will shield us from temptation and trials. And then I just thought, prayer and living the gospel does not usually SHIELD us FROM temptation and trials. A more appropriate statement is that it STRENGTHENS us IN our temptations and trials. If we were shielded, we would miss out on opportunities to learn and grow. Without the Lord's strength, those opportunities can be simply failures and discouragements. But if we build on the Lord's foundation and trust in Him, our trials can become stepping stones instead of stumbling blocks.
Well, that's all folks! Until next time!
-Elder Oswald
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