Monday, December 14, 2015

December 14 letters

To Mom:

So they changed the plans with Christmas. They are flying us to Maputo on the 24th to return on the 26th. So I called and they gave us the option of either doing Skype there on Christmas day and doing it normally (30 minutes with lots of interruptions from impatient missionaries) or doing it when we get back here to Chimoio on the 26th. At which point Elder Brown and I would split the time up for each of us to get 2 and a half hours. He would take 4 to 6:30 our time and I would take 6:30 to 9 our time. So I'll let you guys choose which one you want.

We live about a 10 to 15 minute walk from the church. It wasn't really a formal request from the branch presidency haha they just asked the mission president for me in the branch presidency meeting that we had.  Yes we have several progressing families right now. Many of them have been having some frustrating document situations but we should finish the documents and have a marriage and baptism on my last week in Chimoio.

We've found a few new really nice families in the past two weeks. They are really interested and have real questions. That is a great sign here because a majority of families don't really bother to learn or be interested in the doctrine. Often times they are just looking for a church that will visit them and is fun to go to. It's really frustrating because there are a lot of members like that. It's really pretty easy to baptize people like that but I always try to look for people that will become converted to the lord not the church. A few of these new families are looking like that could happen if we teach them properly.

To Dad:

In the form of spiritual experiences I can talk a little bit about a lesson we had last week. It was really great with a lady that we are really concentrating on to train to be a leader. Elder McAllister and I actually set her up to hopefully start dating our guard haha. But anyways, I think she has real potential to be a leader and we talked about it in some presidency meetings and decided to call her as 1st counselor in the relief society. We've been visiting her a lot to help train her and increase her testimony and stuff. We had a lesson the other week where I just shared a spiritual thought using my current favorite scripture in mosiah 14:12. She has historically had problems with accepting callings but this lesson was really powerful and I explained that God will bless her life if she becomes a dependable servant of him and it really struck her. She even started tearing up in her prayer. It was really powerful.

I'm doing a lot other things to help this lady and others. Elder Brown and I sat down and made a list of priority members to focus on and she was one of them. I have also been making a scripture study book for her. There are 40 chapters  of the book of Mormon represented in the book (my favorite 40 chapters). Every page has a chapter and then my favorite verse of the chapter. Her job is to fill out the book. She will read the chapter and then write her favorite verse on the other page. Also I wrote my thoughts on the chapter at the bottom and there is a spot for her to write her thoughts as well. I also put my testimony and stuff in the front so I think it will really help her dig into scriptural study.

We are focusing on other members as well and in the future weeks I'll try to send stories of them as well as our investigators. 

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