Leaving Texas...Coming Home!

I came home from my mission on July 30, 2014.  Twenty-two missionaries left our mission that morning, seven of us flew into the Salt Lake City International Airport in Utah.  My parents, two brothers, my grandparents, two aunts, one uncle, and two cousins came to greet me.  Mom was the first to see me, as we hugged each other, the first words out of my mouth were that I wasn't ready to come home.

My family ordered a personalized banner to welcome me home!  While they were waiting for my arrival, other people at the airport asked a lot of questions and took pictures of the banner.

My family and I came home, ate dinner, and then I went out with the two sister missionaries serving in my home ward.  Then, my parents and I went over to the stake center to meet with the stake president for my official release as a full-time missionary.  It was really sad to take off my name tag for the last time.

I have enjoyed my mission very much, and I love, and will miss, the people of South Texas a lot!  I am definitely happy I made the decision to serve the Lord as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

 

Expect Miracles!

On Sunday, we had a companionship study with our district leader and the two elders who are serving as Assistants to the President, who just so happened to be there since they serve in the same ward as us.  We were having trouble figuring out what we needed to do next in our area to continue to see success.  They laid out five things we need to have/do in missionary work in order to see results:

1) Love

2) Hard Work and good plans

3) Obedience

4) Ãnimo

5) Attitude

We decided our attitude hadn't been the greatest.  We have a great attitude in that we like doing missionary work, but we sometimes just don't expect things to go great.  So, they committed us to change our attitude and learn to expect miracles.  If we're doing everything right we can expect that miracles will happen.  So, that's what we're working on this week!

So, expect to hear about a lot of miracles next week because they'll be coming!

Hastening the Work: When All Else Fails, Just Love!

This week was my companion's birthday. We went over to a member family's home in our area. They are deaf so they taught us the "Happy Birthday" song in sign language than we sang to her in America Sign Language (ASL).  It was really fun!  Later, we enjoyed a nice cake.

Our English ward is the official deaf ward in the area, so during church, there is an ASL translator.  It's super fun to watch during meetings.

I gave a talk on Hastening the Work in the English Ward.  It was short and sweet, and went really well.  I shared Alma 13:24 and talked about how we have seen evidence of God preparing the hearts of his children.  For example, God uses the members to prepare his children - a few weeks ago, we knocked on the door of one house and the people who answered the door were super excited to see us because they had known several members of the church throughout their lives. They immediately let us in, gave us Cheetos, Cheez-Its, fruit snacks, trail mix, and water.  It kept us going for the next week!  We were able to talk to them about the Restoration and they were touched by the message.

Then, I talked about what we needed to do to prepare ourselves to take part in this work.

1) We need to start with ourselves - it's like personal study hour for missionaries

2) We need to help out our families - it's like companionship study for missionaries

3) We need to help out others - it's like when missionaries go out to work each day

Three other missionaries and the Ward Mission Leader also spoke.

A success we had this week:

We stopped by to visit a family, within the first five minutes we were "reprimanded" for asking too many questions.  Things weren't looking so great, but we decided to just listen to them for a while.  The tension eased, then we sang them a song and shared a scripture with them.  We ended with a prayer and told them we loved them. The lady of the house responded that she loved us, too. She also gave us some delicious cookies and little pies to take with us as we walked out the door.  Mission Accomplished.

Moral of the Story: When all else fails, just love.

"Adversity is Necessary, Misery is Optional"

We had another great week!  We found more new investigators in these two weeks than I have found in my mission!  They have been fantastic!  We have seen so many little miracles and we have been blessed to work with wonderful less-active members who are willing to act, investigators who easily accept the invitations to pray about Joseph Smith and be baptized, and an absolutely fantastic ward that is sooooo mission minded, it doesn't seem possible.

Needless to say, I am very happy with where I am at right now.   I'm still learning so much every day!  Yesterday, my companion and I were able to go to a meeting where a general authority was present.  He said something that made me think a lot:

"Adversity is necessary, misery is optional...Our salvation is not dependent on whether or not someone loves us, but it is dependent on whether or not we loved them."

I know that no matter where we are in life, we always are given opportunities to make us happy.  It's up to us to take them and be grateful for what we have.

Lessons Learned!

Well, this week was really tiring, but really great!  My companion and I got this crazy idea to set really high goals for ourselves this week - higher than either one of us has hit in our entire missions!  Well, we worked our tails off, and ran into a ton of problems, and although we weren't able to hit all our goals, we learned some valuable lessons in the process.

1) It's hard to plan and balance time, but it's worth it!

Along with setting almost ridiculously high goals for ourselves, we also set goals to visit every one of our members and less-actives this week....and we have a lot.  We have to really be dedicated and focused on our goals because there is a lot of work to do and not very much time to do it.  One of the biggest reasons for not hitting our goals was because we didn't use our time as well as we could have.  But luckily we have this week to redo everything and fix the mistakes we made last week.  We already have appointments set with almost all of our members and we've identified others who are willing to meet with us and keep commitments!  Talk about golden members!

2) We need to simply focus on the basics

Having so many solid appointments in a day means we're planning lessons like crazy.  Sometimes I think that the next day's lessons are supposed to make our members and investigators make huge, leaping strides in their spiritual progress, making daily planning stressful, long, and exhausting!  But one thing I realized this week as I was reading "Act in Doctrine" by Elder David A. Bednar, was that our individual lessons don't need to be life-changing moments, but rather they just need to bring the Spirit.  Lots of subtle, spirit-filled moments go farther than huge, elaborate discourses.

This changed completely the focus of our lessons and the commitments we are having our members and investigators keep.  This week, we created a small Book of Mormon reading chart for all of them.  Every time they read and pray together as a family, they just check off a box for the day.  It only goes for a week, so they won't get tired of it and we promised them all a prize on Sunday if they can read every single day.  The kids are super excited for the challenge!

3) It's more important to love the investigators than to worry if you're doing everything right.

I think this is a lesson I still have yet to learn!  Often, I am so worried about if I am teaching well or if I am doing every little thing possible to get these investigators to baptism that I forget that these are people with their own thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.  We should really be helping these people get baptized because we love them, not loving them because we want them baptized.  Keeping this in mind has helped us more easily shift our focus to what is most important in this work: bringing to pass the immortality and eternal life of our brothers and sisters (Moses 1:39)