Good morning everybody! It is snowing here in Chichester. Snow
always brings good things! The last time it snowed on my mission, four
investigators defied all odds and trekked out to sacrament meeting. We
shall see what this day has in store! We are going to the Isle of Wight
for our PDay today, so I'm REALLY excited. We are taking a hovercraft
there. Look it up and check out what that is. There are no roads to the
Isle of Wight, so the only way there is by water. We are meeting up with
the Isle of Wight sisters and the Elders from Hamble River and
Portsmouth.
The work is moving forward at an unprecedented pace here in
Chichester. I absolutely love serving here. We have committed another
one of our investigators to be baptized on the second and are working
closely with about five others and hopefully will be committing them
this week to be baptized around that time.
Those who know me well know that I love numbers. No, not math...
those who know me well also know that I HATE math and am absolutely
terrible at it. BUT when I watch sports, I care about the numbers almost
as much as I do about the game itself. I LOVE keeping track of stats
and seeing how many wins a certain team is on pace for, things like
that. When I played NBA 2K12, it got to the point where I didn't even
care if I won (I knew I would win anyways) but I would play just to see
how ridiculously high I could get John Wall's stats. If I won by 40, and
John Wall didn't have 40 points and 20 assists, I would be legitimately
disappointed. Anyways, the point I'm trying to make is that I sometimes
focus on numbers too much, when the results of the numbers is what I
should ACTUALLY be caring about. The same principle applies to
missionary work. Now, in Trowbridge, we were baptizing enough that I
didn't really care about high numbers in the rest of our key indicators.
I did a good job not striving for high numbers. Things changed a bit
when I got here. I starting obsessing over how many teaches we would
have a week. It got a bit ridiculous. Since we were REALLY struggling to
find people to baptize and since we were out finding all day, the way I
motivated myself was to try and teach as many lessons as possible. When
I got like this, I got over-competitive and was NOT receptive to the
Holy Ghost. The last few weeks, however, I learned a lesson. If I take a
step back, forget about the numbers, and just focus on people,
individuals and their corresponding needs, we would achieve MUCH more
succes. Sure, we might have taught way less the few weeks, but when it
comes to the things that ACTUALLY matter (people coming to church,
progressing towards baptism) we were able to push the work forward with
power. Sometimes, we all need to take a step back, chill the heck
out, and just do our best. This principle reminds me of President
Uchtdorf's talk "Lift Where You Stand". If we just do what we need to
do, and do it obediently, then the Lord will fill in the blanks.
Love you all, hope this week is simply wonderful!
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