Magandang Umaga, Hapon, o Gabi lahat na pamilya ko at mga kaibigan ko!
Kumusta kayo lahat?
This week was pretty fantastic :)
We had exchanges this week with the Zone Leaders and my companion and I learned a lot on our exchanges on how to do better finding. Our Zone goal this transfer is to increase our findings and baptismal dates. Our Zone Leaders taught Elder Anuat and I how to find more investigators and how to extend the baptismal invitation more effectively and naturally in the first or second lesson. We applied their teachings and found... 33 New Investigators!!!!! This is pretty impressive considering in our mission we only count people as "new investigators" if they give us a return appointment. Our teaching pool gained a HUGE boost from this week, and we're going to continue to apply these teachings to bring the gospel to as many people as possible! Also, we now have 7 investigators with a baptismal date, and we will be doing everything we can to help them progress and enter the gate on the pathway of salvation that is baptism.
We continue to have progress with Novelyn. She seriously loves the gospel and is always so happy to learn from us and come to church! She's always so excited to come and let us know that she was able to read her assignment and explain what she learned. We're going to be finishing up her lessons this week and preparing her for the baptismal interview.
One of our new investigators this week was also very receptive. Her name is Rena, and she's 14 years old. We found her while teaching another one of our investigators Rena happened to be visiting. We taught Rena a majority of the first lesson and then taught our other investigator (Stephanie) the first part of the Plan of Salvation. Stephanie was participating in the lesson, but Rena really became interested about what we were teaching Stephanie and started asking questions of her own. We took down her address and gave her a Restoration pamphlet, Plan of Salvation pamphlet, and a Book of Mormon. She was super excited to have us come visit her and told us exactly how to get to her house. I have a seriously good feeling about her!
That was our week. Overall I'd say it was pretty successful.
Now for a spiritual thought. I was studying Preach My Gospel, Chapter 6 (You missionaries know what I'm talking about), and was reading about humility. I had a sudden thought come into my head that I wrote in the 'notes' section of Preach My Gospel. It said, essentially, "Pride is one of the greatest tools the adversary has in his arsenal to catch us into the habits of the natural man. Therefore, if we want to avoid the natural man, we must strengthen our strongest weapon against pride: humility. As we are gracious in accepting instruction, recognize God's will more than our own, and be quick to apologize when pride does inevitably creep into our lives, we will have that much more strength to resist the lure of the adversary that we fall for all too often." Let us all strive to be humble and avoid pride in all our doings. I know that as we do so, we will gain so much more strength against the adversary than we can imagine!
I love you all and I thank you for your prayers and support!
-Elder Anderson
