I didn't know how I was going to get through this week. Not sure if you've ever felt that way before, but I felt this dreading in my heart to work through everything that needed to be done last week. If I do something I want to do it well, and the chances of that go way down when you have more and more things to do. The first big stress was the zone training that Elder Fuller and I were supposed to plan and put together. It's like a district meeting for over 50 people, so we want the meeting to be well worth the time of everyone that attends. The first training was done by some of the sister training leaders of the mission and they covered the plan that President Cooke has for the mission this year. To intro one of the Sisters stormed in and slammed a white board on the table which scared everyone, especially me and even President, it was great. Then she started yelling about members and missionaries working together like she was a coach. Then we had a training on using the spirit of discernment in our teaching which went much better than I expected. We used the Preach My Gospel videos to show where the spirit of discernment is used, and I felt the spirit testify of the principles that we were teaching, that the Lord knows every single person and if we ask Him, He will reveal something about the person to us. I got to give a training on using the gospel library application to our zone and every zone after that throughout the week.
On Tuesday I also got to go on exchange back into Chinese! Our first stop of course had to be to go visit the Fengs! I ran up to Paul and gave him a big hug, I forgot how much I missed him. I can hardly believe it's been a year since I met him and his wife. We have so many good memories together. I was overjoyed to hear that he taught Sunday School last week and is preparing to go to the temple to be sealed next month. Ah! I would serve another two years just to help a family have those blessings. Elder Yang said that he has not seen a missionary have that kind of relationship with the members and that it's something he wants. In the evening I got to see the Azucenas, which we both took as a sign because we ran into each other at the store the same week. Elder Yang is such a great missionary, he loves the branch and wants to serve there, that puts me at peace.
The biggest stress for the week was the missionary stake coordination meeting that we needed to prepare for. The Washington DC Stake leadership has men of a lot of power and influence in it, so of course we want to prepare a meaningful report. We are hoping to change the system a little to improve the accountability of members working with missionaries. We spent ten hours on Saturday preparing the report the next day, and then a killer snow storm hit and the meeting got postponed until next month which means that the information we collected is all obsolete! I can't express how frustrated I felt. I felt like all my sacrifices and my work went to waste and I felt hateful for it not going to any use. I had a hard time showing any gratitude and feeling the spirit in my prayers that night. But when I opened the Book of Mormon I found verses that told me to trust in God, and that you can't know that you are unsuccessful because God sees the bigger picture. The first talk at sacrament meeting was on patience, that was a message definitely just for me. Then 6 investigators showed up to church! We got to teach three of them separately, then there was a baptism after church! Ivan moved his baptism from Valentines day to Sunday so we had to rearrange everything. Then we tried to fill the font an hour early and it was filling in super slowly. But we got the water high enough and he got baptized and it was amazing! I love my mission. My experiences are teaching me that if we hold on and trust in god, even though we don't see the whole picture all things will work together for our good.
No comments:
Post a Comment