their lives on that day, and for all of those who serve our country!
I will always love America! Land of the free! Woo! Things were pretty
crazy this week for transfers! Elder Tippetts and I had to drive down
to Colorado to pick up another car, so that was pretty crazy driving
solo!! (We had permission don't worry:)) Everything eventually ran
smoothly, and we picked up our new companion Elder Masaniai! He is
from Oakland California, and he is part Samoan, Tongan, and Hawaiian.
For the first couple hours he was pretty quiet, but Elder Tippetts
and I could honestly break anyone out of their shell! Once we made
him laugh, he opened up, and we're all super good friends already! I
can just tell that this transfer is going to be so fun and we are
going to put in the work!
We had MLC this past Friday, and we talked about a lot of
interesting things! First off, our mission is getting Online
Proselyting (a.k.a Facebook) come October! We were all super
surprised about this change, but it should be good. Our next MLC is
going to be a ton of training on how to use it properly to further the
work, and we are going to receive 30 new District videos for our
training! It's going to be an exciting change! Another big change is
our p-days are being changed in October due to new missionaries coming
out later. The new missionaries are now coming in Tuesday afternoon
instead of in the mornings so they are changing transfer days to
Wednesday, so changing p-days to Tuesday just makes sense! We have
our temple trips on Tuesdays too so that works out well too! It is
going to be weird to change that on October 24th, but it will be all
good! One of the last big things we discussed was changing our
Standards of Excellence for our mission, which are our key indicator
goals for our mission. The previous standards were a bit out of
reach, so we were able to change them so more missionaries could work
to reach them! We feel it will help missionaries be more successful
and push us to work harder to reach them. Overall it was a good
meeting, fun to see President and Sister McMurray and all of my
mission buddies again!
We did some service for our non-members friends the Gregory's,
and we helped them fill up a dumpster full of old stuff from their
property. They gave us a couch and a nice desk to add to our new
apartment! Oh yeah! We are finally able to move into our new
apartment! We are moving over today, so we are going to be living
their now! We are so excited, living in WWII bunkers are great and
all, but it's going to be awesome to live in a nicer apartment! We
also have more room for exchanges, woohoo!
We were able to meet with Janet this week almost every day.
Over the course of this week, she hadn't been reading. There was
always something in her life that came up to interrupt her reading.
This was getting super frustrating, and we finally talked it over as a
companionship. We decided we were going to make our Saturday lesson
the "do or die" lesson! In preparation for this lesson we decided to
have a special fast on behalf of Janet. I can testify that fasting
works, because the lesson went very well! We watched President
Uchtdorf's Mormon Message "Shower of Heavenly Blessings" and talked
about how Heavenly Father is waiting to shower so many blessing upon
her as she took away the "fear and doubt umbrella" and attended
church! We talked with her about how every single time she planned to
read, something came up and interrupted her. We explained that this
was how Satan was trying to haunt her progress. Janet had told us
that she felt like she was feeling super peaceful while reading the
Book Of Mormon, and that she wanted to just feel that peace and not
have to worry about church. We told her this was Satan making her
feel comfortable where she was at, and knowing that she would find a
tremendous amount of peace and joy at church, he was magnifying her
fears of coming so that she would never experience that joy and peace
of partaking of the Sacrament and attending church! We testified to
her that as she trusted in the Lord and as she recognized the tactics
of Satan, she could overcome her fear and be able to make it to
church. It was a really good lesson, and Janet finally began to
understand that she could make it to church if she put forth her
faith! Janet set a goal for herself to read five chapters from the
Book Of Mormon each day in preparation to come to church next week!
We know Janet will attend church this upcoming Sunday, and it will be
so amazing! The Spirit was overwhelmingly strong throughout the
lesson, and Janet told us she felt it! On Sunday Janet called us and
said she had planned to come to church, had all of her clothes ready
after we left the night before, but she said something kept her awake
all night. We had a lesson yesterday, and talked about it. We told
her that was Satan trying to get her not to come, so we promised her
again that as she prepared throughout this whole week, and as we met
every single day she would be prepared to face that fear and doubt and
combat the tactics of Satan. We can't wait to see her at church next
week!
For MLC we had the chance to read a wonderful talk by Elder
Lynn G. Robbins from this past BYU Education Week. I would encourage
you all to read it! It gives such an amazing perspective on the
tactics of Satan, and how we can become more responsible in our lives.
This talk changed the way I looked at responsibility and Satan's
tactics, and really helped me apply it to missionary work! If you
have a chance, please read it, and ponder how you can become better
and become more like our Savior Jesus Christ! I promise that as you
do, you will be able to become a better more Christlike person! I
hope you all have a great week this week! I'm grateful for the chance
I have to be here on my mission, it has been the best decision of my
life! Love you all!
Love
Elder Bailey :)
Elder Robbins talk
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