February 24, 2014
Area: Humble
Companion: Owens
My week went by so fast and it was very successful! We started out the week decently slow for lessons, but we were trying out a new style to teach that would have cut down the time in our lessons, but it didn't work out very well. This Wednesday we got to go to the Houston Temple, and I really payed attention to what it said and the different covenants and promises. I felt the spirit really strong, and I felt the truthfulness of the promises and I thought of ways that I can live more fully the covenants.
The biggest miracle of the week is the number of people
we found. We started out the first half of the week by getting about 3
new people to teach, but then it just exploded! Thursday we were
starting the new and improved way to do weekly planning which is really
just the way you should do it and it took about 4ish hours. It was good planning. We
finally got out of the house to pick up one of the young men to teach a
lesson with us and then knock with us for Hour of Power. We ended up
getting 2 potential investigator,s and then right at the end of the hour
we ran into a really funny thing(funny in my mind)--we knocked the door of a person from
Laos...I know what you're thinking--I too, had no idea where it is
either...Well, she only spoke about 10 English words, so we tried our best and
I thought just a little, and realized we had Jesus (our member helper) and he could use a
translator on his phone! We translated "Hello, we are missionaries from
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" and translated it...it
came out with a language that was way harder to understand than
Japanese...you have to look it up! But, anyways, she got super excited
and went off talking really fast, probably thinking we understood her,
but we were all confused...we ended up not teaching her.
Now actually to the miracle of the many
investigators...we started the week with 6 new from Monday-Thursday,
which in itself is a lot, but then on Friday we had zone meeting. We learned about having 20 minute lessons, which has been found to have people much
more willing to let us come more often, so we decided to try that out a
little later with one of our investigators and he was perfectly fine
with it! Saturday was where the real magic happened though, we were on
exchanges with the Zone leaders. I was leading our huge area for the
first time, and I was with one of the best missionaries I have ever met!
We made a really great plan to just go out and visit a lot of the
former contacts and potentials to church (when we didn't have anything else
planned), but we didn't really follow any of those plans because
something came up when a member needed our help. We went over and helped
her move a couple of beds and actually half-way through the service we
found out that there was no man there...we didn't know what to do
because we were already there and everything, but it is against the
rules of the mission to enter a house without a man. We decided to be
obedient and tell the sister, then we went outside and called our ward
mission leader (hoping that he could come over for like 20-30 minutes,
but sadly he couldn't). BUT the Lord blessed us because the mission leaders son, Moroni,
could come and help us out. So, Moroni came right over and we all finished moving
and putting together the beds, and we even got to know Moroni better. After that service, we went back to work and biked over
to a trailer park where we had a scheduled lesson. We went to the
trailer and knocked the door and somebody new answered it, but she was
interested in hearing our lesson, so we taught her a quick 25 minute
lesson going over almost everything about the restoration. We thought of
where to go next and I felt like we needed to go down the street a
little bit more, and there was a man and his wife with their 2 kids. The wife
said that she had actually been going to the church for years with her
uncle before she moved over here. They didn't have time right then, but
we set up a different time to come by and invited them to church and
told them where it was. She seemed really excited to come again. We then
started on our way to another person to invite them to church, and on the
way we found a family that was outside stepping on cans they had
been collected to recycle. We talked to them, and helped crush some cans, and
then we taught them a really short restoration lesson overview in about
15 minutes. We left them with a pamphlet to read, saying that we
would come back Tuesday. After that, we went to the house of the person
we were going to invite to church, but there were people across the
street, so we went to talk to them first. We found out that they had
been taught by missionaries before, but they had no idea why they
stopped coming, so they invited us in and we taught part of the
restoration lesson with the husband and invited him to church. Then as
we were leaving, I saw a guy walk into the house of one of our former
investigators and it reminded me that I wanted to invite her to church
too, so we knocked on her door. When she opened the door and was super
excited to see us and invited us in. She was super happy we came by and
we taught a review of the restoration lesson with her, and really focused
a lot on the guy, who was her brother-in-law. We set up a time for
today to go back to see her. She's planning on moving in about a week, but at least the seed was planted. Then to end our adventures in that one trailer park, we went
to a bunch of people who were outside grilling fish and one was really
interested, but didn't live in this part of town, so we got his
information for the elders there. In only about 3.5 hours, we got 4 new
investigators, and set up a lot of new appointments, and got a referral
for other elders! I am pretty sure a lot of that was because we had been
obedient mission rules earlier that day in getting Moroni to help with finishing the service. Even though it would have been easier to just ignore the rule, our obedience was blessed with an opening up the doors to missionary work. Then that night we went to the lesson we set up with the
huge family and we taught a decent lesson, but it was hard because
there were so many of them... There were 4 non-members there, and each
were at different levels, and apparently they all have been taught before
in El Salvador.. But in one day we taught 8 new investigators, 4
lessons without members, and 1 with a member present. It was a very blessed week
and especially a blessed day.
I don't really know what else I could say, but I felt the spirit really strong this week and I love you all,
Elder Stanley Scott Dye
No comments:
Post a Comment