Chapter 48: New Leads

 

5/26/2021

Today we had lessons all day. It felt good to be busy, and made it easier to feel the Spirit since we were constantly teaching which I was very grateful for.  

5/27/2021

Today was a fun day. We got to help out at a few service projects, one was the food bank that we go to and they were very grateful for our help since they were especially short-staffed today. We didn’t even notice a difference in our efficiency, though. Elder Aguirre and I managed very well ourselves what normally took many other workers to do. We also got to help Sister Dearmond paint her concrete today. She was very grateful for our help, although we were expecting to have a lesson with her so we went over in our normal clothes instead of service clothes. We must have been a sight to behold: Painting in white shirts and ties, fortunately no accidents with clothing happened.

5/28/2021

Today was a good day. We tripled the recommended number of Facebook contacting that our Mission suggests, which was not a great thing to try because those numbers are supposed to help keep us from getting banned by Facebook. This isn’t the first time I’ve done something like this though, I used to do the same thing and did get banned, but we’re generating a lot more traction on group pages now than we used to, and Facebook is becoming much more lenient with us as a result since we’re obviously not robots.

5/29/2021

Today we picked someone up and the lesson was amazing! Oh my goodness, the person who we met up with was a nonmember with a lengthy teaching record, and on their record was recorded several times that this person was doing well with reading The Book of Mormon. Elder Aguirre and I prayed about our lesson and felt that for some reason we needed to only focus on The Book of Mormon, instead of talking about the Gospel of Jesus Christ or Plan of Salvation with her which would have been the logical next steps. When we sat down for our lesson we said that we would briefly summarize the information she likely already knew about The Book of Mormon, but she urged us to go on. We found out that she had never read from the Book of Mormon before, and so we asked her if we could read through a section with her. She agreed and we read through 3rd Nephi 11 with her and she loved it. She solidly committed to reading through The Book of Mormon, and now we’re going to be regularly studying it with her. We’re very excited.

5/30/2021

Our Sacrament meeting today was awesome! We had some really good speakers and I really enjoyed getting to hear from those people. We had been working with the speakers for the last several weeks through some of their difficulties and getting to hear their messages today and ways that they had been overcoming their difficulties and achieving their goals was incredible. I was so proud of them. Elder Aguirre and I also got to teach for our fifth Sunday combined lesson. We talked about missionary work and how we could better participate in it, and the presentation went really well. There was more excitement about missionary work afterwards than I’d ever seen before.

Today for a spiritual thought I wanted to share a verse that I was very impressed by this week from Job 13:15

"Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him."

A willingness to be faithful even in the face of immense persecution and trials is exactly the kind of faith that I want to have, faith to be faithful though the entire world should conspire against me and though I feel abandoned even by God. That is the type of faith that Christ had, that great faith that has been immortalized through Job's words. A complete willingness to humbly submit to Heavenly Father's will is the only way that we can develop that kind of immense faith.