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