Chapter 47: Victories

 Video about how Satan can deceive

Sister and President Rees with Elder Anderson

The Montrose District (Elder Carter Eden, formerly of the 

Bothell Washington Stake, is also in this picture!)

5/19/2021

Today was a great day. We had an opportunity to meet with a few member families today. The highlight of our lessons was probably when one of the families wasn’t there, and in the process of checking to see if they were in their barn we came across their cows and got to feed and pet their cows for a bit. We also got to pick up a couple of new people through service today. The project went really well and we shared a short thought afterwards on the sacred nature of Christ’s sacrifice that seemed to strike a chord with them.

5/20/2021

Today was great. We had a service project with a nonmember family; we sprayed weeds for them, but since everyone has massive yards and live out in the middle of the country the project was a little daunting and took us a couple of hours. We shared a scripture with them at the end and they seemed to enjoy it and all our help, which we count as a big success. 

5/21/2021

Today was a pretty busy day. We had some service work to do and a lot of lessons. Today was also our day to plan out the rest of our week, which always makes our day busier than normal. We were assigned to make a Facebook post for our area page tomorrow, and ended up making a beautiful 15 second video. This definitely makes my top 5 list for videos that I’ve made on the mission. We also met a new family today and they had a picture perfect yard for painting, so I made sure to take some pictures. They were very friendly with us, so we’ll have to go back and take some more pictures soon.

5/22/2021

Today was a lot of fun. We got to help Sister Dearmond paint her house, and she made us an amazing pizza in return, which was an awesome exchange for us. That saved both of us a lot of time, and we thoroughly enjoyed her superior cooking skills. We also had a power outage happen today and it made for some interesting situations for us, since most of our teaching is happening over Zoom. We ended up driving to a couple different church buildings to find internet access.

5/23/2021

Today we had our church services and a Ward Council meeting. Our meeting went really well, and we were able to discuss the Ward’s plans for reactivation. Today it really felt like we were all on the same page, which was amazing since we were falling short for so long. Today our whole Ward decided to step up, and that we were going to do even better things together. We also discussed as a Mission about ways that we were going to move forward, principally in what sounded like the permanent abolishment of our dinners with members. During COVID members have been providing meals-to-go instead of us eating with them, and tonight our Mission discussed about the very real possibility of permanently taking meals to go rather than eating in homes. While good for friendship, our Mission President worries that meals may take away from the spirit of short, frequent, and powerful interactions, and asked us to consider whether or not that was something that we would be permanently willing to give up.

5/24/2021

Today was our Zone Conference, it was amazing. Definitely one of my favorite Zone Conferences because what we talked about felt really relevant to what we were struggling with and how we would improve.

The scripture that I wanted to share today comes from an account of when the Sacrament was administered to a congregation, as recorded in 3rd Nephi 18:9 And it came to pass that they did so, and did drink of it and were filled; and they gave unto the multitude, and they did drink, and they were filled.

Somehow I doubt that the "filling" spoken of here was signifying that they were physically filled, I think that much more likely what is being spoken of here is the spiritual filling that accompanies those who use the Sacrament as a time to reflect on Christ's sacrifice. That reflection leads us to perfection; That reflection completes us, it fills us.

Chapter 46: Losses

This week was a semi-disappointing one. My phone screen broke, which is the reason for my short weekly today, my broken phone screen makes journaling a lot more difficult. We also lost an investigator this week. Cybele's grandparents felt pressured by the commitments that we were making with them, and decided that we would no longer be meeting to teach Cybele. We have increased our focus with the rest of the people we have moving forward though, and are looking forward to seeing the additional people who are put in our path.

One funny story came late Friday night: We were walking back to our apartment and were stopped by a lady asking if we were "Mormons", we corrected her with "Members of the Church of Jesus Christ" and she stared at us blankly. We conceded that "Mormon" was a nickname that the church was known by and she told us, "I knew it! I can spot you Mormons a mile away!" My companion and I looked at each other, dressed in white shirts, ties, and dress slacks, complete with black nametags, wondering what in our appearance could have given away the fact that we were missionaries.

For a Spiritual thought I want to share a verse that we find in the book of 2nd Nephi, as well as Isaiah:

9 Awake, awake! Put on strength, O arm of the Lord; awake as in the ancient days. Art thou not he that hath cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon?

10 Art thou not he who hath dried the sea, the waters of the great deep; that hath made the depths of the sea a away for the ransomed to pass over?

The strength that Isaiah and Jacob were talking about here was the strength of the Lord, His power: Compassion, mercy, longsuffering, and patience. This power is what gives us the ability to conquer dragons and move the sea, this power is the power that ransoms you and me.

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Chapter 45: Building Up Zion

 5/4/2021

Today was a good day. We had our District Council today, and a man wandered in thinking that we were members of another church. He walked into a church that was full of missionaries, and we found out about him because one Elder went off to use the bathroom at the same moment that he walked in, so we could hear them talking in the hall, and as soon as we realized he was a nonmember our District Leader signalled to Elder Eden and his companion to go talk to him and set up a time to meet. Both Elder Eden and his companion immediately stood up as soon as the DL motioned to them. It looked like our DL was running a small mafia or gang who were going to deal with the situation, but resulted in the man leaving feeling uplifted, so I suppose that’s the opposite of a mafia/gang interaction.

5/5/2021

Today we had a lot of lessons, we were very busy running back and forth all night, and once again ended up pushing our curfew a bit. We got back six minutes before our curfew, which was much tighter than we originally expected, but it felt good to be busy. We met a new family today, and they were very excited to get to help us out with missionary work, which is everything we could hope for as missionaries. We also got to do a roleplay in front of our whole mission today, aren’t the wonders of Zoom just amazing? It went well enough, and everyone seemed to think it was a pretty good example, so Elder Aguirre and I were grateful for the opportunity to help out.

5/6/2021

Today we also had a lot of lessons, two of which were with new families. Today was officially six weeks since Elder Aguirre and I got to Cedaredge, which was shocking and made meeting two new families a much bigger deal. We realized we needed to pick up the pace a little more if we wanted to really engage everyone since we weren’t even able to meet everyone in the last transfer we were here for. We’re really counting on our Zoom classes to pick up speed a bit, because otherwise we won’t have a way to engage the ward like we need to.

5/8/2021

Today we had a conversation with Brother Woolsey about Cybele’s baptism. We looked at the requirements for baptism and showed how Cybele met them, but Brother Woolsey wasn’t happy about it. His argument started off as, “She’s not ready”, then as we discussed it shifted to, “She and I aren’t ready”, until finally he confided, “I’m not ready”. We then gave him a plan of action moving forward and he seemed really happy about it. He had started off rather angry but by the end of our meeting he told Elder Aguirre and I, “You gentlemen are welcome here anytime,” which was a huge compliment. He had given us permission to baptize Cybele, but told us that he wouldn’t attend or help out, we told him that this wasn’t just about Cybele, it was about helping him to know that the Lord loves and trusts him as well. We could have compelled him to have Cybele baptized right then and undoubtedly would have walked away with the numbers our mission wanted. We were glad, though, for the opportunity to show that we weren’t as invested in the numbers as we were the lives of those we were serving.

5/9/2021

Today was Mother’s day. The highlight of my day was getting to call my mom for a few minutes. We spent the majority of our day running from lesson to lesson and delivering flowers to some of our widows on behalf of our Ward for Mother’s day. All of the recipients were very thankful, and we were glad to get to do some nice things for them. All of our lessons went really well today, they were all object lessons, and all of them were very engaging. My favorite one was one where we had a family construct a human table by having one person lay their back on another’s knees who was laying their back on another’s knees and so on. When they did it we asked them, “now, why are you doing this?” In a belittling tone, and they shouted back, “because you told us to!” We then read the Moses 5 account of Adam offering up sacrifices and not knowing why he was doing it and told everyone that they were on a good track.

Today I want to share a couple of verses from John that are really important for all of us:

John 4:37 And herein is that saying true, One soweth, and another reapeth. 38 I sent you to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labour: other men laboured, and ye are entered into their labours.

A lot of times as missionaries it feels like all we do is plant seeds and we get no success, but this is a beautiful thing that shows us all how needed we are in the kingdom of God. Is the reaper greater than the planter? What good does a planter do if there is no harvester? Likewise we are all needed in the kingdom of God. God knows how to use our specific talents the best, and we can be assure that we will always find success as we do.

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Chapter 44: Ward Activities

This picture made me laugh. The light gray strap is the strap of Elder Anderson's missionary bag. The nice crisp black strap is from the bag of a missionary who is just beginning his mission!

Elder Anderson and his companion were blessed to be able to make their own pens at a Church member's home on a Pday. Elder Anderson made a beautiful olive wood pen.

4/27/2021

Today was a good day. After five weeks of having been here we finally made it through our entire member list, which means that we’ve contacted every member of our ward. Not having to split an area is really nice, usually we would go through our entire list in a couple of weeks, it’s just refreshing to be able to talk to so many people and to feel like we have such a large area to work with.

4/28/2021

Today I got to go on exchanges with my District Leader, Elder Edwards. Our day was pretty much a massive study session. All of the appointments that we had other than digging holes for planting trees in a riverbed (which means that our holes were like, 60% rock and the worst place ever to dig), all of our other appointments fell through and so Elder Edwards and I had a study session for like, two hours where we talked about Christ’s Atonement. Elder Edwards is a really smart guy and I really benefited from our studies.

4/29/2021

Today we had combined district council and swapped back companions. After our council Elder Aguirre and I headed back to Cedaredge and tried to make do with the small remaining amount of time that we had to teach an absurd number of lessons. Fortunately it all worked out and we were able to get back, but we were a lot closer to breaking curfew than we would have liked.

4/30/2021

Today was an amazing day, we watched the Book of Mormon video on 1 Nephi 8, talking about the tree of life, and Cybele understood it perfectly. We talked to her about how the path that the people walked that led to the tree was the covenant path, and that baptism would help her receive that fruit that brings joy. She was very excited about it, and we were very happy that she enjoyed it so much. We also got to do a lot of service today, one of the service projects we did was at an animal shelter, and the workers were amazed that the animals who seemed scared of other humans or males would be friendly to Elder Aguirre and I, and want to interact with us.

5/1/2021

Today was a great day! Brother Taylor found someone for us to teach, and led us to the house of a woman who cleans other houses. She’s a hispanic woman and was very excited to see us, and even more excited that I would speak Spanish with her. My Spanish isn’t very good, my ability to speak comes solely from the Book of Mormon and so while I struggle to speak normal words certain phrases like, “Repent ye, or an awful hell awaits you, yea, even a lake of anguish and inextinguishable suffering” those phrases come much more naturally to me, but fortunately I was able to get by with what little Spanish I know and avoided calling her to repentance in the first twenty seconds of having known her.

5/2/2021

Today was a lot of fun, our Ward had an early Cinco de Maio activity that we got to attend, and we were very grateful for it. We were able to get a lot of food, but we were also able to meet a lot of people in a very short amount of time, which was very useful, we lamented, because the end of the transfer is this week and we still have yet to meet some families that are considered to be “active members”. We met a few nonmembers at the Ward activity, which is why we were really excited to go, and Elder Aguirre destroyed the pinata, which withstood all of the blows of the children, so he instantly won a place in their heart. It was a very fun activity.

Today for a spiritual thought I wanted to share the definition of "Atonement" as it's given in the Bible dictionary:

The word describes the setting “at one” of those who have been estranged and denotes the reconciliation of man to God. Sin is the cause of the estrangement, and therefore the purpose of atonement is to correct or overcome the consequences of sin.

The purpose of the Atonement is to allow us to be at one with God, even as Christ is one with the Father. It was His love for each one of us and this ultimate goal that gave Him the strength to make the greatest sacrifice ever made.