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| American Thanksgiving in Canada. Yes we can cook |
Thanksgiving. A digital picture can only go so far, until you box up
the leftovers and send them to me I won't be able to appreciate all of
the food you made. I'm glad that you had a great Thanksgiving.
Gratitude is the tool we have to work on our humility. Through
humility we are able to increase in knowledge, love, faith, hope, and
obedience. President Eyering admonishes us to write down every night
15 things we are grateful for from the day. The Lord blesses us every
day. I've been studying a lot about hope this past week.
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| Isn't a meal without Sweet Baby Ray's |
Hope as defined in Preach My Gospel is the expectation that the Lord
will fulfill His promises to us. If we keep the commandments we will
prosper. It is the law of the harvest. What we reap is what we sow. If
we do all that we can to live the Doctrine of Christ. Exercising faith
unto repentance then the promise is clear in 2 Nephi 31:20: "Ye shall
have eternal life." I expect the Lord to bless me for working to find
people to teach. The Lord has to bless us. It's in His character. I
know that when we are obedient we can expect the Lord to bless us.
This week was a solid week. We began the evening by picking up a new
investigator, Emma. Emma is from PEI but going to school in Moncton. A
member who was a recent convert invited her over for our visit. That
is how member missionary work is done. It's not easy. but it's the
most effective way to find people to teach for the missionaries; when
the member does the inviting. That was a great tender mercy to begin
the week with. Later that night we taught our investigators Joey and
Kayla. Joey is so solid. He plays the guitar in a rock band and
already believes the church is true. It'll now be just a matter of
having them live the law of chastity (getting separate apartments or
getting married) and then they can get baptized. We taught them the
Plan of Salvation and it was such an easy lesson. I think it's harder
for me to teach interested people than it is to teach uninterested
people. Nevertheless, they are making great steps towards being
baptized. The Plan of Salvation invites a lot of questions. The
Restoration is our foundational message, but the Plan of Salvation
sparks the most questions.
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| Hard hard work every day. My new record for people I've talked to in a day |
missionaries across Maine, New Brunswick, and PEI. Most of the meeting
was focused on improving our follow-up and a special initiative
President Pratt cooked up. Le Tour de Fois (Faith). For this current
week we will be doing a blitz week. No meetings, no extra studies,
just good old-fashioned hard work. The goal is to talk to 300 people
and work for 30 hours. The current mission standard is 140 people and
10 hours. I normally talk to about 350 people and work for 20 hours.
It'll be good for the mission. There's special prizes every day for
who can hand out the most Book of Mormons, teach the most shorts (10
minutes restoration lessons), church invites, member present lessons,
and baptismal invites. We've never done a competition before in the
mission, but I think it's needed because last year around this time
the mission just died with no motivation. The grand prize is yet to be
announced. The zone leaders and APs are going to see who can get 1000
contacts. Numbers, numbers, numbers, I know. We had a big discussion
about it at zone conference and the mission just needs to do this to
help keep the motivation through the winter. I'm pumped.
The next day we had to do an emergency visit to Beresford at the
request of President Pratt. I won't go into details, but there's just
been some disobedience in the zone that only a surprise drop in visit
could fix. We got up at 5 and drove three hours to the north end of
the province near Quebec. For the rest of the day we made a transfer
plan, a weekly plan, and a daily plan, cleaned the apartment, did
studies, and then hit the streets looking for people to teach. We were
in the heart of Acadie so the people only spoke French, but we just
needed to be there so that the missionaries would work. It was an odd
day trying to speak French to people, but we found Jean-marc to teach
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| The members in Grand Falls got me a moose mug :D |
and was interested in the Book of Mormon. The French work gets a bad
rap for being difficult, but it really wasn't that hard. We got two
referrals from a less-active and taught two lessons. Amazing things
happen when you have a plan and work hard.
Once back in Moncton we found a new investigator, Kathy. We had met
Kathy about a week ago street contacting. I think I may have written
about her before, but she's the one whose sister is a member in
Ontario. She's had a lot of death in her family so we taught a short
restoration and then used the Book of Mormon to answer her questions
about the Plan of Salvation. Just a solid first lesson. She doesn't
know if she wants to be baptized just yet with her Catholic
background. It was a very spiritual lesson. She cried when she heard
the First Vision. One of the more solid lessons I've had with a new
investigator.
Sunday was just a solid day. We found Donat (Doh-nay, it's French).
Donat is the real deal. He was an active Catholic until a few weeks
ago he just couldn't get real answers from his priest so for a whole
week he did a ton of reading on the internet about religion.
Incredibly he didn't find any anti-mormon material and once he found
mormon.org he just was engulfed in the website. He requested a Book of
Mormon and we were stoked when we realized that someone wanted to have
us in on a cold New Brunswick night. We had a solid first lesson, he
gave us two referrals, and asked to be baptized. He'll be baptized the
23rd of January!!!!! He's the most solid Acadian I've ever met. Vive
L'Acadie!
It was a great week in Moncton. This next week is going to be eventful
with the blitz we're doing. Elder Tincher and I stocked up on protein
so we don't have to take meal breaks (relax it's only for one week).
It'll be a stretch, but I'll be happy to report to you next week about
what happens.
HURRAH FOR ISRAEL!
Love,
Elder McGuire
D&C 82:10
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