Two things: Goals, plans. That is how baptisms are obtained. This past week was an amazing week. I think the best way someone could prepare for a mission is to learn how to plan to achieve a goal. It's not enough to write down a goal and hope that it will happen. The plans are where the rubber meets to road. Goals and plans are of divine nature. Our Heavenly Father has a goal and he has a plan. His goal is found in Moses 1:39. He desires that all of His children receive eternal life and immortality. What a goal. His plan to achieve this goal is called the Plan of Happiness. If we desire to achieve anything in life, whether it be in work, church, repentance, or our hobbies, we ought to have a meaningful goal that will make a difference and a sound plan.
President Leavitt hammered us during MLC considering the gold and silver standards-what is expected key indicator wise from President Leavitt each week. He has trained extensively on using the area book, the wall maps, the member book, and our planners to achieve the gold and silver standards. To be honest I am the only leader in the whole mission that hasn't hit the standard ever. That's not something to be proud of. After some serious pondering and studying and training, this past week we had a sound plan that actually helped us achieve our goals. The result-we were one on-date investigator from reaching the silver standard. I don't thing many of you know how big this is because this is huge. Reaching it every week I am still getting there, but we were so close this week. Ridiculously close.
In MLC President Leavitt trained about weekly planning. If we want to achieve something we have to have a plan. We can't just go out and say "Well Lord bless me with achieving my goals." It doesn't work that way. The Lord is logical. He has a plan, he remembers his plan, and he follows his plan. President Leavitt gave the training that the key indicator goals we have must only be 20% of the names we actually must have to achieve our goals. This meant that the standard for each companionship for finding new investigators each week is 2. To be honest, I have been in Cole Harbour for 4 months and I have only taught about 5 people. That is certainly not 2 new people a week. So we wrote down ten people who we thought had potential to become new investigators.
From that point, Elder Ray and I went to our wall map and identified the former investigators around these selected individuals and we wrote them down to follow-up on. We also identified the less-active members to follow up on and the active members to follow-up on. This ensured that if we had appointments around the people that could potentially become new investigators that we could save time by being in the same area. With this large list of people to follow up on we knew that if we didn't have more names to work on we would never achieve our goals.
We began to whittle down the list until we found those who would become new investigators. The first man we had identified to become a new investigator was Dustin who wanted to change his life and get off drugs. We had an appointment set up and everything with a member coming, but unfortunately Dustin backed out right before we got there because he doesn't like the church's stance on gay marriage. So close. Not to worry, we had 9 other people that could potentially investigate the church. The next two people was Richard and Madhu-referrals from a less-active couple we are working on reactivating to get sealed. Sadly Richard only wanted to bash, but hey we got in the door and testified about the Book of Mormon. Now we had 7 people left to follow-up on. The next one was Mark. Mark was about to be baptized 3 years ago but backed out at the last minute. We phoned him and set up an appointment. Had a member coming. Unfortunately his parents called us very upset that we were coming by. His baptist mum and dad totally ripped into us and the church. That was not a fun phone call. It seemed like all of our potential investigators were falling through and there was no way that we were going to get one new investigator or even two new investigators.
We continued contacting the rest of the people on our list. After some member visits and less-active lessons we had eventually gotten through some more names who weren't interested. We only had three people left to follow-up on and it was Saturday afternoon. They weren't picking up the phone (so they are still on our list right now to track down) and we were feeling discouraged especially after the phone call from Mark's parents. We decided to take a break for the night and do some tracting. After talking to about 40 uninterested people we had an hour left in the night and so we did some updating in the area book.
Then come Sunday I knew we hadn't found anyone and we had followed up on even more formers around those whom we thought would investigate. Feeling pretty depressed the night before I couldn't sleep and just sat there at my desk crying. I had no clue how we were going to accomplish the simple silver standard that President Leavitt had said only 5 days earlier that it was the easiest thing to accomplish. It's the strangest thing on a mission. You are so stressed out all the time and you talk to a lot of angry people each day that you just get used to it.
In tears, I got on my knees and was so upset with my Heavenly Father. That he had put me in a cold and boring place where the people's hearts were so hard. The same feelings before my mission about feeling inadequate because of my call began to creep in and I felt as though I understood nothing about God, His gospel, or even the atonement. I expressed that I knew nothing of how works and grace or mercy and justice even worked and that it was impossible for me to find anyone. Nothing is more frustrating than obeying a commandment (this training on planning) and not seeing blessings. But that's not how God works. After an angry prayer I went to bed. We keep God's commandments because we love him. Certainly blessings can and do come. God is logical.
 |
| No worries. Canada in April. Spring is not as bad as winter I will say that much |
After a pretty depressing Sunday we had three hours left in the week and I felt like God had abandoned Cole Harbour. I could deal in the previous weeks not finding anyone to teach and just getting used to it. But this time was different. I had followed training as best as I could. I had seen success (Appointments and getting into doors). But we were still short. We were a new investigator, a member present lesson, an investigator at church, and an on-date investigator away from hitting "the easiest standard of them all." I knew I had failed. I had done my very best and had fallen short.
We are all like this. We strive to do our best. Even when we have done our absolute best, we fall short. How is this even fair? Why keep the commandments at all if the world and the devil are just going to throw them back at our face?
We had one more appointment that night with a less-active sister and I felt that I couldn't make an impact in anyone's life. The beautiful thing about the atonement is that it makes up for the rest of our efforts. You will fall short. You will feel as though you have failed. You may feel like you don't even have a testimony that this is just all made up by people that want to govern our lives because that's the nature of people.
Grace is the greatest blessing the atonement granted for us. I had done all I could. We do all we can. Then grace comes into our lives and we wonder why we had even doubted in the first place.
I saw the hand of God last night with one hour to go before the proselyting week ended. In our lesson with this less-active sister, her cousin from Labrador had just moved in to stay with her family. Steven is from the North Shore of Labrador close to Greenland. He came downstairs to listen to our lesson and then relayed the greatest miracle I have ever heard. Steven went to the YSA branch that Sunday morning. He had loved every second of it and he said he wants to be a member. He began reading the first book of Nephi all afternoon and was so happy to see us when we stopped by. We taught Steven with this less-active sister there. He wants to meet three times a week and he wants to join. The only reason why he wasn't put on date was because he doesn't know if he'll get called back to Labrador and if he does there would be no point to being a member out there (There's only 4 members in Labrador and 3 of them need to be excommunicated). But Steven is the real deal. Prepared by the Lord.
I know that the atonement and grace are real.
HURRAH FOR ISRAEL!
Love,
Elder McGuire
 |
| Our apartment has a pool table! This was last P day |
No comments:
Post a Comment