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.