Wednesday, December 10, 2014

VISIT christmas.mormon.org

Letter #67
December, 8, 2014
Area: Trinity River
Companion:  Gamez

Hey guys, have I mentioned that I love being able to read about your week? We should definitely continue doing this weekly email thing after my mission ends. But Carolyn, maybe you should set a reminder on your phone for every Sunday at like 7pm to remind you to email :P

This week was a very interesting week, but a good testimony builder. We weren't teaching many lessons at all at the beginning of the week, we had only one lesson going into Thursday, and we were disappointed in ourselves. I had noticed that Elder Gamez wasn't helping at all during planning, and I was frankly just annoyed with him because it seemed like he wasn't trying very hard to help or to pay attention at all. During Weekly Planning I opened up about how I was feeling, and even though it didn't really fix the problem, I haven't been bugged by it as much, so I guess it fixed the other problem, my patience. We made plans to fix that and we started planning a little smarter, and from Thursday to Sunday we had at least 2 lessons a day. We got to meet with more of the less-active members that Brother Christiansen asked us to meet with, and we had the opportunity to bring out a couple of members to lessons.

We had a couple of really good lessons with the Chavez family this week, but sadly they couldn't make it to church because of car problems the day before caused Francisca to miss work that day, meaning she had to work Sunday. We also had the opportunity to teach a few of the less-active families, of which 3 families came to church Sunday, so we can see the progress from them. We also got to meet a couple of the part-member families that the hermanas were teaching, and they came to church as well, so we were very pleased with the response of the people this week. We were also glad for the opportunity to listen to the Christmas devotional and still have time to meet with the Chavez family afterwards to see why they didn't make it to church.

Elder Gamez has been doing well and as a companionship we have been able to have some spiritually edifying lessons. We luckily haven't had any accidents like him falling out of the shower again, but our ceiling started leaking this week, so it flooded the bathroom, which the apartment office had fixed, but then the next day Elder Gamez didn't notice that the curtain wasn't fixed from them moving it to fix the ceiling, so the bathroom flooded again... I was glad that we had a bunch of random extra towels in the apartment, which I used to clean up the water.

I personally have been reading more out of the Ensigns because I was looking for an article for the Chavez family, then I remembered that I really should be reading articles, so this morning I read an article on discerning the promptings of the spirit. I really enjoyed the message and I feel like it helped me understand a little more of how I can receive inspiration for the missionary work.

I know the missionaries are doing the same thing, but I want to remind you guys. VISIT christmas.mormon.org! It has a great video that reminds us of the true meaning and importance of Christmas. I invite you to watch it as part of Family Home Evening (FHE) and then to share it with friends, both member and non-member. And I would say to try to invite some non-member or less-active friends over for a nice FHE to help love them into the gospel. When I was in West Lake Houston, one of the part-member families was invited to do FHE with one of the other members and that was one of the non-member husband's favorite things about the church. :) Plus if you do these things, your missionaries will love you :)

I love you guys,
Elder Stanley Scott Dye

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