Monday, October 6, 2014

If We Try, There's Always Time For Missionary Work

Hey
Sounds like everything is going pretty well over there! Glad to hear that everything is...well..going well...I guess. Haha but seriously, thanks for all the emails and support!

This week was pretty good. Hectic as always. Last sunday we all set some companionship goals about getting to our areas this week. So I actually managed to go out and work 3 times! That was way nice. Unfortunately we had to really squeeze that time in there, so each time was only about 30-40 minutes long, so we couldn't do a lot, but we all definitely enjoyed getting to finally get out of the office and do some missionary work, even if it was just a little bit. And we're all way excited for general conference today. We've all been trying to prepare ourselves for that. Should be awesome.

Did I tell you about the "activity" we did last sunday? It was definitely a different idea, but our ward is pretty well known for not really retaining new converts or helping investigators....so the sisters thought of an idea. We had to get it approved first, but it was kind of cool. Half of us missionaries showed up at the church wearing normal street clothes and giant signs that said "investigator" on it, while the other missionaries and the ward mission leader tried to tell all the members that they had brought an investigator family and to get the members to come welcome us and take us to our classes (we have sacrament meeting 3rd hour). It actually turned out really good, and the members loved taking us to their classes. We were all posing as people of different ages, so they needed to get people from each organization to help us. Then we changed clothes before sacrament meeting and spoke a little about our experience and about some gospel basics. Hopefully they'll be better prepared for the next time they get to welcome a non-member friend into the church.

This week Elder Barton double schedule the visa work he was going to do with missionaries, so I ended up having to go with new missionaries pretty much every morning this week to take them to go do visa work, while he took the other groups. Its always fun getting to be with the new missionaries. Haha they say the funniest things sometimes. But I guess I did to when I first got here...haha I guess I still talk like that sometimes actually. But whatever. But doings visas every morning meant I had twice as much financial stuff to do in the afternoons, which kept me way busy since its the beginning of the month and I had to pay everyone's rent. But I feel like we all really managed to prove to ourselves that if we really really try, there's always a way to find time to go out and do missionary work, even if it isn't as much as we'd like to. Before, if we got towards the end of the day and only had like 30 minutes, we'd just start working on the stuff for the next day since we figured it wasn't really enough time to go do anything, but this week we decided that if that happened we'd go out to work. It was hard to coordinate with companions being free at the same times, so I went with a different missionary everytime I went out, but hey...its a start.

So, verse of the week. This week I chose Helaman 5:40-41. It is when Nephi and Lehi are in a prison, and a cloud of darkness comes over the other people there. The people ask among themselves about what they can to do get the darkness removed, and one of them answers that they must repent and cry out to the voice they had heard until they had faith in Christ, so that the darkness would be removed. When one considers that sin is like a darkness we have over us, this becomes very applicable to us. In the moment, those people had no faith in Christ, but finding themselves with the need and desire to be cleaned/forgiven/helped, they found the need to cry out to Him, or in other words, pray. It shows me that to begin the repentance process or to begin to pray, we don't need to have great faith or knowledge...just desire. But as we pray and repent, the faith and the blessings will come. The hard part is just taking the first step.

Anyway, I hope you all have a great general conference and a great week!! I'm sure we'll all be able to learn a lot as we listen to the Prophet. Hopefully we'll be able to apply what we learn :)

Love

Elder Webster