Hello everyone! This week marks the start of my third transfer in Moncks corner with Elder Anderson! It was a little slow but overall a great week!
Tuesday we had an interesting experience with a less active member. He asked us a bunch of questions and we answered them to the best of our ability and more often than not be was not satisfied with our answers. Which was a little frustrating because we just wanted to help him understand what we were talking about. After a few failed attempts to explain some misinterpreted doctrine, we told him that ultimately it comes down to faith. There is an awesome quote that I have written all over our apartment. I don't know the exact original quote but it is something to the affect of "if you want to do something you will find a way, if you don't, you will find an excuse." I am going to modify it a little to demonstrate what we shared with this gentleman. "If you want to believe something you will have faith. If you don't you will have an excuse." If you really want to, you can always find a reason not believe something. What takes real courage and strength, is relying on your faith to believe something you don't quite understand. While we are here and on earth of it is not, and cannot be given to us to understand all things. It is simply impossible. So we are asked to have faith and trust that the Lord knows and wants what is best for us. After we explained that to him, he invited us to come back next week. It was amazing to see the Spirit soften his heart and I am so grateful for the opportunity to be the Lord's instrument in that way.
Then the next thing that happened was Friday. We have been having very little success in the area of expanding our investigator pool and helping people progress to baptism. So on Friday, after our weekly planning session, we had a pretty intense, but very spiritual planning on how we are going to hasten the work here in Moncks Corner. We prepared a list of people to start seeing and area to work in and then set a faith as a power goal! Which I think I talked about in the last few weeks but I will tell you what it is anyway. We took our desires to the Lord and put it in his hands. We told Him what we are going to do to accomplish our goal and we have been promised, by prophets both modern day and in the scriptures, that after an intense trial of our faith, if we persevere with our side of the work, the Lord will help us fulfill or righteous desires. It won't be easy, that we are also promised. And our faith will be sufficiently tried, but if we endure it will, the Lord "shall exalt [us] on high" (D&C 121: 8). So that was awesome and very uplifting and hopefully our faith will be sufficient to accomplish our goals and become more effective missionaries. If anyone wants a better explanation of our faith as a power goal setting, the concept is found in a book called "drawing on powers of heaven".
Saturday was so awesome!! We had a mission wide conference with Elder Gary E. Stevenson of the Quorum of the Twelve and a few other General Authorities. Elder Stevenson talked to us about a few things but there are two I would like to highlight and share. The first is something I have come to know more about in my mission am appreciate more than I ever did before. Repentance. Repenting allows us to grow closer to God and utilize this time of trial and probation He has given us. It is the ultimate manifestation of His love and Christ's love for us. Good sent his only begotten son, and Christ willfully suffered and died so that through him, we can be made whole and our losses made up. Because of him death hath no victory and the gave no sing. Christ lives and because of him we will live again. The other thing Elder Stevenson talked about was obedience. As missionaries we have a lot of rules. And some of them seem trivial and irrelevant. But Elder Stevenson encouraged us to look at them not as rules, but instead as ways to receive blessings. That is a really cool perspective and, in retrospect, that is something I have seen on my mission. The Lord wants to bless us! And through our obedience to his commandments he can and will bless us!
On Saturday night, shortly after this conference, me and Elder Anderson were able to really see the blessings that the Lord can give us. We are walking to an appointment and we got this weird feeling not to go the way we were headed. So we decided we would back track and loop around the other way. Then as we were walking back we had a strong promoting to get inside because for whatever reason it wasn't safe. And it was getting later so we just started walking really fast back to the apartment. We had only been walking for about a block when a member saw us and offered to take us the rest of the way home. We gladly accepted and got back fine. I still don't know what the Lord was moving is away from. But I am so grateful that we found ourselves in a position where we were able and ready to received that prompting.
Sunday was really good too! We had a special stake conference in the Charleston stake and we got to hear from Elder Stevenson again! He talk mostly about prayer and encouraged us to pray more frequently and am the Lord's help always. It was really awesome and as he was talking I could feel the Spirit testify to me that he is an Apostle called of God to assist in leading and directing us today. I'm so grateful that I had the opportunity to hear from him and meet him and hear him talk about missionary work. It was so uplifting and awesome. I love you all and miss you so much! Have an amazing week and pray always!
"He could sell a ketchup popsicle to a woman in white gloves"
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