I am so pleased that you all enjoyed conference. Conference is like the Super Bowl for missionaries. This particular conference was very well done. I particularly enjoyed President Uchtdorf's talk about grace. That shattered my entire ideas about grace and repentance and obedience. So powerful. I have misinterpreted that scripture for years. After does not mean because. That statement brought tears to my eyes. We don't earn our way into heaven. We become converted in this life and perfected in the next. I don't really have too many thoughts about grace because I realize that I don't entirely understand that yet so I'll be studying that this week. I really liked Sister Burton's talk as well. I don't know about you, but her tone was just very powerful and commanding. Not that I don't enjoy a good talk by Sister Esplin, but Sister Burton laid it down. I don't usually watch or read from the women's session, but I wanted to start reading more of Sister Burton's talks. Conference is such a special time for the church. We hear all of these great talks and then we go home and keep doing what we've always been doing. How can we do that?
Conference is not some movie or distraction from our regular activities. If you were an accountant and you went to a workshop on how to be a better accountant wouldn't you apply what you learned in the work shop? I think too often it is said in prayers "Please bless us that we'll be able to take what we learned and apply it to our daily lives." The question is "How?" How are you going to apply Elder Nielson's talk about rescuing less-active members or Elder Holland's talk about the atonement and the fall? The bridge between theory and reality is goals. Elder Nielson tells us to go after less-active members. What could be a goal for us to accomplish that? A goal involves a number and a deadline. This isn't some business thing, but President Monson said that when performance is measured performance improves. Our goals have to be geared towards making a difference as President Uchtdorf put it. We could say that we want to rescue 2 less-active members by August 1st, 2015. Elder Nielson has given us instructions on how that is to be accomplished. The bridge between theory and reality is goals, plans, and holding ourselves accountable. I promise that as you prayerfully ponder a conference talk and set a real goal then you will make a difference and come closer to your Saviour.
Quote of the week:
*Contacting a referral (The member didn't know the exact address so he gave us the street to knock and we had to knock a few houses before finding these people)
Elder McGuire: Hey how are you doing today?
Contact: What's up?
Elder McGuire: We're missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Have you heard about that church before?
Contact: Yes, give me your address
*Elder Ray takes out a pass-along card and starts to write the address of the church on it
Contact: No I mean where you live
Elder McGuire (Joking): Well we live in Dartmouth, and I guess you could come over but we don't have too many chairs and we're making Kraft Dinner.
Contact (Unimpressed): I don't come knocking on your door and you shouldn't come knocking on mine! Please don't come back!
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| So where do we go from here? |
I need to work on my jokes. Most of my stories are tracting stories, but hey they are good tracting stories. We had a decent week. I'm a little frustrated with the zone, but things theoretically should improve. I went old school last night and collected district totals for key indicators and talked with the district leaders about what they'll be training on in district meeting. The zone only found one new investigator this past week. I can't really blame them because I didn't find anyone to teach this past week. I think it really just comes down to planning it out how we are going to get one.
I like the metro of Halifax because it forces me to do real work. In southern New Brunswick where I could find a lot of flaky people to teach I really wasn't learning anything. How to actually accomplish real work. We had an excellent leadership meeting about finding people to teach. President Leavitt is a genius when it comes to planning. He has devised this system where we have all of the members, less-actives, and formers on a large map of our area. Say when we have a dinner appointment or when we get a referral we just check the surrounding dots around that area and we are able to visit more people that we are supposed to each day. It really helps reduce travel time and we're able to speak with more people when we focus on just one area of Cole Harbour. Not driving all over the place looking for certain formers or less-actives. President Leavitt said that the head trainer for the missionary department said that chapter 8 of Preach My Gospel is the most important chapter out of the whole book. In the point 10 of weekly planning we are supposed to be setting goals and making plans to find people to teach. This includes identifying people with potential to actually investigate. Then we work around that area where that person lives so that we reduce travel time. You would be amazed how effective President Leavitt's system works. In the past I would look for all of these less-actives that needed information or a particular former I may have called and left a message for. Anyways, I was wasting a lot of time.
For example on Thursday night in two hours we contacted three less-actives, one member of the ward council, a part-member family that wants to feed us, and a former that wants to join the church but is facing a lot of opposition from her family. In addition to that we spoke with about 50 people for that day. Super effective. We have also gone through the ward and divided the members according to who would be better to work with them-elders or sisters. This ensures that all of our member records are up to date and we aren't wasting time copying records that we don't need. My next plan is to swap area books with the sisters and put eachother's formers on our maps so that we see even more people to visit. Similar to how we have split things up with the members. It's not like I'm not trying to find people to teach. I just don't think I did it in an effective way.
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| Yes, I can give myself a haircut |
I have also noticed that university students are way more open to meeting with missionaries. The key was to find when and where all of the students from Dalhousie were in Cole Harbour. Unfortunately we don't have a university in Cole Harbour, but we found that Cole Harbour Road is very busy between the hours of 4 to 6 because that's when all of the students are getting off the bus from Halifax and walking back to their apartments in Cole Harbour. I'm still determining effective uses for time in the early morning. Street contacting is decent at 10am but the other hours are a little slow. We were blessed this past week to receive 5 member referrals. One family that we were referred to was an east indian family that we contacted in between sessions yesterday. I love people from that part of the world. They just want to know all about your family and if you have food to eat. Richard and Madhu are actually from Bangladesh and they have been searching. They invited us right in. I was blown away. This was maybe the second time I have ever gotten in to a door on my mission. We are going back tomorrow to pick them up as new investigators. Elder Ray and I decided to fast for new investigators. I wanted to fast until we got one but I couldn't physically do it. Nevertheless, we were blessed with Richard and Madhu.
Go to the temple!
HURRAH FOR ISRAEL!
Love,
Elder McGuire
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