Grinding with President Part 2

Okay, so I'm combining what I missed last week with what happened this week. 

Sooooooo.....God is great all the time. I've seen his hand in my life so abundantly these last few weeks. 

This is why you Trust in the Lord, y'all. Last week we had just finished doing all of our studies and had around 3.5 hours of finding to do before dinner that night. Then, however, we got a text from an inactive member inviting us to have dinner with them in Yorktown, 30 min away. Now usually, this would be a great opportunity to try to get them to become active and a great use of time, howeverrrr they wanted to eat at 5, and if we moved our dinner hour to then, then we'd have an hour and a half of time to do basically nothing. Because we don't have a lot of contacts for people because the area was opened up recently and it's too dark to go out finding. So we had 1.5 hours of time to fill, and would be very ineffective use of time. But we decided to pray and knew that the potential of getting these members to church was something we couldn't ignore. We put our trust in the lord to find something to do. 

Then right before we got there, we get a phone call. And its this guy whose number isn't in our records. He was talking really fast about how he has been feeling guilty for weeks about how he lied to us! And we were like, "Who is this guy?" And we were trying to ask him questions to figure it out, but he just kept saying sorry and rambling about how he said he was busy, so he didn't have to talk to us, but really wasn't busy at all. He said we knocked on his door 3 WEEKS AGO!! And he told us that he can't read, but he looked at the pictures in the pamphlet that we had given him and didn't know where our church was because it looks like so many people go there. We told him our church is a bittttt smaller than that, but it's the same idea. But yeah, he just kept saying sorry and that he was really guilty of lying to us. And suddenly I was like, I should ask if he'd be free tonight to use our ineffective time! So we asked if he was free tonight for us to swing by and share a message, and he was like, yes! Please come! 

We then proceeded to have a great lesson. We didn't realize how much we rely on people being able to read because we used a diagram to explain something at one point, and after the lesson, we realized it probably didn't make much sense cause we used lots of words in the diagram, haha. But we invited him to church and had to show him what buttons to press to use Google maps to get to church because he's never used it before. Apparently, he just stops at gas stations and asks the people there to get directions to places! Isn't that WILD?! He's also a master electrician somehow too, which doesn't make sense but somehow is true. AND THEN HE CAME TO CHURCH. Which is a prettyyyy big deal in our area, haha. Anyway, that's why you always Trust in the Lord!!

Then we had a day with President Fitzgerald, our mission president. And lemme tell you, it was AWESOME!!! Soooo cool, we had a super solid impromptu lesson with a stop-by and a few great member lessons. Lastly, we had a lesson with our friend Glenn, and President was inspired to offer a priesthood blessing to help him with his health and get to church; it was just way cool. He's also a doctrinal TANK. Our area is HUGE, so we had tons of time to just talk and ask questions. And I've learned so much and learned a lot about how I can be a better missionary. 

One takeaway from what we talked about was our mission goal to get 175 people to church collectively. And he talked about how he thinks we aren't reaching our goal because of disobedience and lack of faith. That many missionaries don't follow the standards like they should and that they need to have more faith to get people to church rather than say that some other missionary can get a lot and step up for them. He said there is a fog of disobedience that is covering our mission rn, and it's effecting all of the work. Even the work of the obedient missionaries!! Because obedience to all of God's commandments brings blessings. That's how it's always been and always will be. With the mission standards, those are commandments given to prophets FROM GOD for our mission labors. Not that you're a sinner or evil for breaking those standards, however, there are REAL blessings from keeping them! We just need to live a higher standard out here, and if we do, we will see blessings. Imagine how great it would be for a friend to have a really big spiritual experience with the Book of Mormon, but the Holy Ghost is held back because of our disobedience (or the disobedience of my mission) and/or the lack of faith. 

Anyways remember to always have faith, be obedient, and put your trust in the Lord, y'all!! Take care, and have a great week. I really love y'all a lot. Hurrah for Israel!!

Elder Higginson

-Drivin 

-District council with president!

-Birthday party for one of the Sisters

-Huge murals done by one of our friends at this rich lady's ranch. He's seriously a pro, and those are hugeee silos. It's painted all the way around. 

-Oil field baby!