Week 6 - Liberty Jail

October 19, 2009

Hello everyone!

Well, another letter from the land of Zion. This week has been good! Full of lessons I have learned and good experiences to remember. Well, let's see. Oh, someone asked a little about the jail and how I spend my time. We spend about 6 hours a day on shift at the jail (except for our P-day and full proselyting day) either in the morning or in the evening and just take turns doing tours for the people that come in. It is actually pretty cool because you do it by yourself, not with your companion. Not that I don't love my companion, I do. But then we spend the rest of the day in our normal missionary work. It's pretty cool because we are expected to keep the same standards as the rest of the full pros (full proselyting) missionaries, such as teaching 20 lessons a week, baptizing monthly, etc. Even though we have half the time we are still expected to be awesome! And we actually do pretty well.

Oh, on Thursday we had Zone Conference! So good. ZC is basically just where your whole zone gets together and we have a bunch of training from the president, the APs, etc. But it was awesome. President and Sister Van Komen are so awesome, and everytime they talk I learn something and make goals to do something better. This particular ZC we combined with another zone, and I met Elder Rogers! He is a missionary that lives in my home ward but I don't know him at all. But we chatted for a bit and took a picture. One great thing we talked about at ZC was getting the members more involved in our work. So important! Even if I were to go home right now I know that I would never look at member missionary work the same way again. It is so important for the members to be involved! I think too many members just have the attitude that missionaries are there to do all the work, I know I had that attitude before I came here. But seriously, how great would it be if they members had all these people for us to teach, and we couldn't keep up with all the referrals? Amazing. Our time would be so much better spent.

This is called creative tracting ;-)

Anyway. Our investigators...the ones I wrote about last week were Paul and Cindy? Well, Cindy (who we committed for baptism last week) actually went out of town and she told us she won't be back until the end of the MONTH. Ah. Frustrating, but what do you do? But hopefully we will be able to talk to her soon and see what is going on. Paul is still good, he is super busy right now working 12 hour days every day. The funny thing is, he thinks he doesn't have any faith, but really, if you didn't have any faith at all would you take valuable sleeping hours out of your day to meet with missionaries? I think not! He will get it though. His crazy job will be done this week and we are going to work on getting him to church. Have I talked about BB? BB is this older man who is married to Betty, who just recently joined the church. They are so funny. Since the sisters have been teaching them, BB gave up drinking completely and has gone from multiple pack of cigarettes a day to just a couple of cigarettes a day, sometimes none. He knows the church is true, he comes to church, he even wants to go to the temple one day- but he is still struggling a little on kicking that habit and procrastinating on really praying for a testimony of Joseph Smith. Yesterday we fasted for him that he will be able to see the importance of putting the Lord first, and not letting these things get in his way! So we are hoping that he will do that and be baptized pretty soon. Some new investigators we have right now- Denise is a single mom and has 12 kids! Some are older and not living with her, but she also just had a baby. We taught her lesson 1 and are going back tonight to teach about the plan of salvation, which I think she will love. She is so prepared! Just doesn't realize it. Haha, we also just started to teach a 16 year old kid named John. We just knocked on his door the other day and we able to go back this week and teach him lesson one. His little sister and brother also listened, and they were totally understanding everything! Honestly I don't think John really thought we would come back, but he seemed interested. His sister, she is 9, was really interested. On our way out, my companion (we were on exchanges that day so it wasn't Sis. Blunt) felt impressed to give her a Book of Mormon, so she did. Pretty cool. So hopefully something comes of that, we will see!

But anyway, I also learned a good lesson this week about discouragement. On Wednesday we had forgotten that we didn't have district meeting because of zone conference on Thursday, so Wednesday morning we ended up having about 2 hours of time that we hadn't planned for. So we decided we would go see some of our referrals and less-actives. Well of course, none of the people were home or if they were they didn't want to talk to us, so we just started tracting around the area. At the beginning of the day we had all these grand expectations of what was going to happen in the day, and they didn't happen. We started to get discouraged. But I realized (after going to the jail, giving a tour, and gaining some perspective back) that not only do we have to put in the work and have faith things will happen, we have to realize that it is up to the Lord. President Lehnardt (our stake president) said at ZC that if we are becoming discouraged it is because we are doing something our way and not the Lord's way, and that is so true! But anyway, now I always ask in my prayers to make my will the Lord's will because I know that is where the success lies.

Well friends, for next week I will have a funny story ready to tell you because I am starting to sound like a boring missionary. That is ok though, but know I am still having fun! Sister Blunt and I like to laugh a lot and it really does help when you are dealing with potentially discouraging things all day. Seriously, people are crazy.

Know I love you all and I thank my Heavenly Father every day that I have such amazing and supportive family and friends in my life.

-Sister Hafen