October 16, 2013

Hey Ya'll!!

Sorry for the 2 day delay. On Monday the library was closed due to it being Columbus day. So I wasn't able to email then. Then on Tuesday, we got to go up to Fort Worth to listen to a member of the Seventy, Elder Pino, speak to us. And we got back too late to email too. So here I am today and let me tell ya'll, I thought it was a pretty stressful past week for us, at least for me. It ended up being a good week though.

Last week we had to help the Senior couple pack up their appartment so they could go back home. I was able to invest a Temporpedic mat for my bed, and it works like a charm. After helping the Smith's move out, we then went to another service for moving our an investigators funiture to a storage unit. They were so not prepared for us to come over because they didn't even have boxes packed yet. So you can imagine the frustration. It took 5 hours to move them out when it really should've take 2. So we were were only able to prosilite for 3 hours that day. So not much success.

The reason why I thought it was going to be stressful is because we planned to go on 2 exchanges this week. I was going to be running the area. I've done this once in the past with a zone leader who was pretty experienced especially with teaching. But the reason why I was stressed was because I was going with 2 brand new missionaries. The first one I went on was the easier one. Even though he was new, he has a strong testimony and he worked off that. So he was prepared. The second one was harder. He wasn't really comfortable teaching yet, and he is shy. Perfect. It was on a Saturday too, so we needed to have a good day today because everyone is now working, army people, and we usually have success on Saturdays. And we did. I was praying really hard for him all day so that he would feel comfortable teaching and we were able to teach 7 lessons that day. I extended the invitation of baptism to 2 people, they accepted, but they don't have a date yet. So we are pretty excited for that. Keva and Kim are the people that are ready.

So the point of the whole story is that I realized how well I know my investigators. No that is not being prideful, but I have been pretty hard on myself thinking that I don't have that confidence to lead lessons and find new investigators. Vaoga has been telling me the whole time I do have that skill and stuff, and it took awhile to realize that I can run an area and be the senior companion too. So some personal revelation I guess you could say.

I was able to give a blessing to one of the recent converts of the ward. He got in a really bad car accident this week and got a pretty nasty concusion. It was weird because as I was giving the blessing, I can remember talking about how this is trial that he can over come. But I can remember just talking about how he can manage stress and work. Also how his boss will understand things and watch out for him too. Once I closed, you could tell just in his eyes that he had answers from his prayers. He told us after that he had been scared to communicate with his boss and he had been stressed about his family and stuff. So that was a really cool experience!!

The Elder Pino conference was awesome!! He talked about how sacred our calling is as a missionary and how we need to realize that we only have to much time to be representatives of not only the Church, but for Jesus Christ as well. He talked about the importance of the Spirit being apart of our lives and part of the lessons that we teach. Without the Spirit, we cannot push the work forward.

Thank you so much for you emails this week!!! Hopefully next week we will have dates for baptisms. October 30th is our transfer day. I really can't say whether I will be staying or not, so we will have to wait and see. I hope everyone has a blessed week! I have to say, I did smile when I heard about my mom getting her first ticket. That just goes to show that bubbles are not made of steal. Can't wait to hear from ya'll next week!

Elder O'Brien