Cole Harbour will be New Utah you can mark my words. Thank you so much for your prayers in my behalf and for praying for missionary experiences on your own. When you ask, Heavenly Father will give. So, we are moving to the valley, eh? That's exciting. It's funny, when I was being trained, my trainer's family moved to New York from Utah and now when I'm training my family is moving from Flagstaff to Phoenix. That is great. Way to follow the Holy Ghost. Revelation means salvation. It was an excellent week. We had disappointments, triumphs, and much learning. That's what's great about this church, you will always be learning.
I had a huge epiphany about Lehi's dream this past week in my scripture study. It's unique about revelation and understanding spiritual things. We can look right at the answer to our questions for years. We may see in the scriptures that we can only receive mercy until we repent for decades but never really get what that means until one day. Such is what happened as I studied through 1 Nephi 8 and 11. Before I explain that I would like to point out how real the Spirit and pray are. If we sincerely pray and ask Heavenly Father for specifics then the answer will come to us. What I have also learnt about prayer is taking several minutes after we have prayed to just ponder and think about the words we have offered to our Heavenly Father we have a greater possibility of receiving revelation. You can find this principle in Doctrine and Covenants 138. So anyways, there I was pondering over what my role was as a missionary in helping others enjoy the blessings of the gospel. Reading over the chapters and then offering a pray to understand the words. The next part was key, writing down the thoughts that came to my mind in response to the question. After writing about two paragraphs I paused again and then repeated what I had just done, praying, reading, and writing. The Spirit then filled my mind as I realized what I needed to do. The iron rod. The iron rod is the only thing that will take us to the tree of life. I must invite people to read their scriptures, to live the scriptures. It is like I have rediscovered the scriptures. I know spend all of my meal breaks studying and I take additional time to study before personal study. I am so happy with the words of life.
Another thing that I did this past week was take some serious thought with the Nova Scotia North Zone. For the majority of the time, my zone has struggled. Struggled to meet standards and struggled to find people to teach. This was really stressful for me. I have served as a zone leader the longest out of everyone in the mission and my zone wasn't performing too great. We were just about dead last in the mission for results. So I took some serious time to fix things last P-day. I sat down with each of the district leaders. We went over each companionship who wasn't reaching certain standards such as obedience, member unity, and contacting standards. We talked about why certain things weren't being met and then I asked each district leader to set a goal for that companionship for the week. Whether it be reaching the obedience standard, talking to the standard amount of people we are supposed to talk to in a week (140-Elder Ray and I personally did about 300 this past week) or contacting each member of the ward council. I then asked the district leader to create some plans to accomplish that goal. After reviewing their plans I told them that I would be monitoring the progress of their plans throughout the week. The Nova Scotia North Zone knocked it out of the park this week with results. We had about a 70 percent increase in results. Careful goal setting, planning, and holding ourselves accountable produced real growth. We are still not as good as we could be, but I am confident that we will get there.
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| Take my fish oil seriously in Nova Scotia. You would be proud mum |
Unfortunately we had to drop Sandy. She kept on cancelling our appointments and only called us when she needed help with shoveling. I really understand that people need help and that we need to offer help. People are in hard circumstances. Sometimes being on welfare is a generational thing and there's a certain mindset that accompanies that circumstance. We showed up on Friday for our appointment, mind you the three previous she had all cancelled. She explained that her landlord needed her to widen her driveway so that he could get up it in his truck. Mind you she lives in a house, not an apartment and she didn't have a good reason for why her landlord needed to get up the driveway. I told her that she could call us when she actually could meet on a frequent basis without interruption. She then got out one of her shovels and tried to shovel while we were walking away to make it look like we were abandoning her in her time of need. I didn't buy it. We then got up with Brother Moses who had just gotten there for the lesson. Told him we were dropping her and then invited him to our lesson with Alex the next day. He's a great guy who doesn't get offended when things don't work out. We were then sitting in our car filling out the drop status (This is what I wrote "Wouldn't keep return appointments or commitments, only wanted us around so that we could shovel her driveway. We got used like a napkin. Try in a few months if you're looking for some service") when we see Sandy walking down the path we dug to get in a red car with someone. That car drove off and we decided to follow. The red car then pulled in to a Wendy's drive-thru while we drove by. Yes, we got stood up for Wendy's after digging a trench through 5 feet of ice. Not too happy about that, but I'm still glad we helped her out.
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| Elder Ray ferociously filling out his planner at the request of his favourite trainer |
Alex is coming along. We read the Book of Mormon with him on Saturday and he made some really good comments. I told him a baptismal date could motivate him to find out if it was all true and he declined. It was a great lesson, but things will be slow until he graduates school and can meet with us more. We found two more people to teach this past week. Justin is in the Navy and lives right by Bishop, which is really convenient. We are meeting with them tonight to teach the restoration. And we also picked up Rob who loves going to the gym and just moved in from Dartmouth. We will be having a church tour with him tomorrow. Getting members out to lessons is a bit of a struggle and I don't want to keep relying on Brother Moses. Our ward council is getting there. I'm a little stressed out because I'm the only leader in the mission who hasn't hit the standard of excellence for key indicators. I will be fasting tomorrow to achieve that. It will be a good week.
Ether 12
HURRAH FOR ISRAEL!
Love,
Elder McGuire
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