Email Once - Room for Improvement

October 31, 2016

Howdy folks,

This week was challenging and fun. To be honest it doesn't feel like I've made much progress from last week. We weren't able to teach very much this week. In fact I remember at least three days this week where we didn't teach a single lesson. It's hard to feel like you've done your part at the end of the day when you haven't taught others what you actually believe in and know to be true during the course of the whole day.

One thing from McKay's letter that really hit me was that the Lord didn't call me here to plant seeds. He has already planted seeds in the heart of His elect. He called me here to harvest. It hasn't felt like I've been doing too much harvesting,  so I need to change something I'm doing wrong. The people who are prepared are here in Russellville, I'm just not finding them.

The Spanish zone leaders came to Russellville on Friday, and Friday night we went on finding splits just knocking doors. Having them visit was really good. We were able to get twice the amount of work done and find a bunch of potential investigators. Then they stayed the night with us. It was fun to just hang out with those Elders, they're pretty cool. Saturday morning, I got to meet one on one with one of our zone
leaders Elder Spencer. It was good, he just asked me everything I was worrying about and I went ahead and spoke everything on my mind and gave him an earful. It was therapeutic to have someone just sit and listen for a bit as selfish as that sounds. He was super cool about it, gave me some awesome advice, then the others got back from teaching a lesson and he and his companion Elder Jorgenson gave us some more advice. They pointed out to us a bunch of things we could improve on, and reminded us of things we were forgetting to do.

For whatever reason it feels like no matter how hard I try or how excited I am, I'm not giving my
best, so I always feel guilty. I guess that's because we suck at planning and it just feels like we're wasting time. Anyways so that's my shpeel about the challenging part, here's the good part:

Saturday was more productive than we have been in a while, we did a bunch of contacting, and taught three lessons: one with a less active, one with a member present, and the third lesson was with a man from El Salvador. At first it seemed like he wanted to Bible bash because he was super intense. But we used the Bible to build up what we were teaching about the restoration. In the middle of the lesson he stops and says "your church’s and my churches beliefs are very similar." He told us his church also believes in modern revelation and has their own prophets. He then brought up the scripture in Ephesians that talks about false prophets and I'm sure he was about to call our prophet a false prophet but just then Elder Anaya cut him off and said "I love that scripture! Especially the part that says by their fruits ye shall know them! This book right here is a fruit of the prophet Joseph Smith!" We then bore our testimony that if he read it he would know it was a good fruit. Good stuff, and a clutch move by Elder Anaya.

Anyways I had more stories but I'm out of time!