This has been a pretty good week. We set a baptism date with Colleen! She says that stopping smoking would be easy, but giving up coffee will be her biggest challenge. We had a really good lesson with her last night though about making sacrifices and leaning on the Lord for support. She's supposed to get baptized the 29th of this month but we may push it back a couple weeks depending on how she's feeling with everything.
We had a mission-wide conference call on Thursday discussing some of the changes that will be happening in the mission as a result of the age change. President said that we will be possibly opening up 3 new areas in the next transfer, which is next week, and more areas with each transfer through the spring. There's going to be a dramatic increase in the need for more trainers and more missionaries will be training sooner in their mission than normal. Needless to say, I'm really hoping that I won't have to train this next transfer, because I am NOT ready for it! And, Elder Willard and I are starting to really figure out how to work together and get things done effectively. But I like something Joseph Smith once said. "The Lord calls us in our weakness, but He qualifies us for His work." I've been thinking about that a lot lately, that if He needs me to do something then He will help me do it. And most likely, I've already been gotten ready for the assignment without even knowing it. But we'll see. I'm hoping that we both just stay here for at least another transfer.
Last night we started teaching Ron and Darcy. They're an older couple that live in our neighborhood that we met while knocking doors last week. We had given them a Joy to the World DVD and we went back last night to talk about it and answer any questions. We talked about The Book of Mormon pretty much the whole time, just answering questions and reading the introduction, etc. We'll be going over again on Thursday to teach the full 1st lesson to them. I've noticed as I've been out here that The Book of Mormon doesn't make sense to anyone if they don't first understand prophets, the Great Apostasy, and the Restoration. But, they're willing to read some of it and keep learning about the Church.
My list of interesting responses I get when I knock on someone's door is growing. "Are you Jehovah's Witnesses?!" "No ma'am." "What are you?!" "We're missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." "Mormons?! Just as bad, with the knocking on people's doors!" I do have to say, I'm getting kind of sick of people telling us "We're not interested, but we sure are sorry that Romney didn't win." We seriously get that at least 5 times a week. But, as has been told us many times by President Summerhays, we aren't out to convert the whole world. We're here to gather Israel and the elect of God. And that has always been a minority in this world.
Have a great week and enjoy your Christmas season!
Elder Petersen
No comments:
Post a Comment