Week 21 - Changes

So this week has been crazy. It feels like so many changes happened, but as far as I can think of there was only the change to the missionary email, and communications with family. If you haven't heard, all missionary emails have changed from @myldsmail.net to @missionary.org. It's a fairly small change, and any emails sent to the old address will get sent to the new one. But the big change is how we can video chat or call home now. Our mission president has made some rules for now about that. We can only call twice a month for thirty minutes at a time. President Leishman told us to think about the reasons why President Nelson made these changes. One is to help involve the families of missionaries in more missionary work. Another reason is to help missionaries in rough times. Now we're able to get help from our parents easier than a series of emails of the weeks.

Other than that, we had another Why I Believe fireside last night that was pretty good. The convert stories were still really cool, but I liked the one I had down in Lacey better. I dont know what the difference was, but it was a lot more powerful. But it was still pretty good.

On Tuesday morning we got a call from a member that someone they knew needed help shoveling snow, so they gave us shovels and we went over and helped out. When we went over, we noticed that it was near one of our old investigator's house. We had tried visiting her before, but she never answered so we dropped her. We were cringing as we came over because we thought it was going to be super awkward. It turned out that the lady who needed help, Jenny, was that past investigator, but when we helped her, she became more open to us and we were able to get a time for us to come meet with her again. Also that morning we had interviews with the president. Those went pretty good, and president gave me advice to not get overwhelmed with trying to learn and grow. He told me that it won't come all at once, but line by line, precept by precept. That really hit me hard. It made me think of the gift of tongues, for example. I always thought that when you were given the gift of tongues it all came at once and you either had it, or you didn't. But I never realized that it could come little by little.

Wednesday was district council, and Elder Loader and I gave our first combined training. To say the least, I didn't like it. We were given the topic of receiving revelation from church. So we split it up and I talked about revelation, and Elder Loader talked about the church side of it. I'll attach a talk that I based my training off of. That night we met this guy we had knocked into for the first time. He was hanging out with his friends and they were all drunk so things were pretty interesting.

On Thursday night, we met with one guy named Gatlin. He was a lot like Proctor. They're both very doctrine based and they do their own research. With Gatlin that night, he wouldn't let us pray with him because he was afraid that we believed in different gods. He's an Orthodox Trinitarian or something like that. Both he and Proctor get stuck on the one point and we cant teach them anything else because of that one point. Then we explain the point and they're still stuck. Its frustrating.

On Saturday I got stolen by some other elders for the day. They had a baptism and they needed me to play piano for them. And we had to fill up the font so that took a few hours. But that's most everything this week. Until next week!

-Elder Smith

Interviews with Pres Lieshman

Temple trip

Week 20: Lots of walking and lots of snow

This week was great. It really was, even though at times it got discouraging. So last week we had a big snow storm on Monday that made it so we couldn't drive that day. But from Tuesday to Thursday we were driving again. Friday night we were sent in early again because of another big snow storm. Saturday we didn't go out at all that day, Sunday church was canceled, but we got to walk to places for appointments, so it was better than nothing. Today we've been able to use the car, but only to get groceries and other necessities.

The discouraging parts were when we had lots of people lined up to talk with, but that we were walking so we couldn't get to very many. Plus, on Saturday I felt completely useless. All we did was stay inside and clean and play board games. Friday we had service in the morning, and lot of walking between helping some members move. So we didn't get out to teach anyone that day.

Thursday was temple day. It was really awesome. We had to wake up extra early that morning to get there on time, but it was worth it. We took up until dinner that day at the temple, so we didn't do any work until after dinner.

On Wednesday we had district council which took up a good chunk of time, and Tuesday was just a normal day. So I feel like this week took a really long time and we haven't gotten to work very much. And we just got sent home again. All of us are so tired of sitting inside. It's nice and all to relax, but there's not much to do and we all want to get to work. But anyways, that's mostly all that's happened this week. We didn't get to teach very many people because of the weather. Everyone is also rescheduling on us. Have a great week!
-Elder Smith

Pictures:
1. Picture of a cool tree

Week 19: It Snowed

So to start this off, it snowed. There's so much our mission president won't let us drive in it today, so we can't go to the store and get groceries. There's literally an entire inch of snow! It's ridiculous!

The rest of this week has been super great. Monday night we had a great lesson with an old man named Proctor. He really knows his stuff, and he asks really hard questions about the plan of salvation. But it was super cool.

On Tuesday we fasted as a mission to prepare ourselves for mission tour the next day. Mission tour was really the highlight of the week. It took the place of zone conference, and we got to listen to Elder Kevin W. Pearson from the quorum of the seventy. He is an amazing man. We got to listen to him speak directly to us, and we learned so much that we need to use to better ourselves. Some of the main points were faith and prayer. Some of my favorite things about those were how the more we be obedient, the more faith receive. He explained faith as if it too were a blessing. He also said something by Neal A. Maxwell that I really liked: "The Lord does not ask us about our ability, but only about our availability. And then, if we demonstrate our dependability, the Lord will increase our capability." Another thing he said about prayer that I really liked is that we need to pray to the Lord as if everything depends on Him, and then get up and work as if everything depends on us. There were a lot of cool things he said that really helped out, but those are some of my favorite things.

As for the end half of the week, not too much else happened except for us trying to apply these things to the work. And because of the snow the library is closed and we're emailing late. We did eventually get our groceries fortunately though. That's all for this week!
-Elder Smith

Pictures:
1. Walking back from lunch
2. View from the apartment