Full-Time Servant of the Lord

Dear Everyone,

 

     This week has been pretty awesome. It's so wonderful to get to be a full time (and not the 40hr./week kind--the 24/7 kind) servant of the Lord. I'm learning so much. Missionary work is hard in so many ways but it's also amazing how many miracles there are every day that go largely unnoticed because it's just normal for them to occur.

 

     There are a lot of them but here's one:  We were headed down to City Centre to do some street contacting becasue our plans had fallen through for a teaching appointment in the evening. I had earlier noticed that we have four less-active members who are shown (the records aren't very accurate sometimes) as living on our (very long) street. I asked Elder Maligon to pick one out to stop by on the way down. We stopped at this guy's house without much hope really that he would be in or anything. The man came to the door and recognized us. He hadn't been to church in forty years and didn't really want us to come over to share a message with him. He felt like he was too far distant or too far gone. We talked to him a bit more about the history of the street (from when all the houses were built in the 60s and full of English people to now when it's basically the most diverse and non-English area in Coventry) and his 45 (cm?) records (I had no idea... but he's intense about them). As we were about to leave, he basically invited us to come over and have a chat. It was awesome. We've decided we're going to reactivate the man and then he can baptise his non-member wife.

   Another one: It hasn't rained on me in Coventry yet! The downside is that it's just going to be that much harder to adjust when it does start raining 24/7.

 

     We've been working on a lot of things recently. One of the major ones is building up our teaching pool. This is much harder said than done. Really, the difference between a good teaching pool and a struggling one can be as little as one or two solid investigators. The other difference though is that a good teaching pool is fluid and there are people constantly moving in and out of it. Unfortunately, we right now have a lot of people who could easily or are moving out (and not the good way out) and not many new ones coming in. It's always interesting how on the one hand, the Lord is in charge and gives us the people he has prepared but also how we have to put forth our own effort and work to show him that we want and are able to teach by the spirit those that he gives us (so he will give us more people to teach and baptize). Elder Maligon and I are learning a lot though and slowly but surely figuring things out. It's frustratingly slow sometimes but I'm learning patience which must be good for me right?

 

     We're also going to start working more with less-active members. My previous experience with them had been that we had a pool of less-active members who we visited and taught once a week. However, there's no point in teaching with no purpose (logic, right?). So, we're going to work on contacting less-active members so we can teach them, make a plan to return them to activity, and then use them as sources for referrals so we can find investigators to teach. It's going to be great!

 

     Some Pictures:

I don't know if you can see but the black pin is where we live. It's called Paradise. There are some area names that people know but no one uses Paradise. It was nice being able to tell some other missionaries in Coventry that we live in the P of Paradise as they set up their map of the city though.

 

Elder Maligon and I showing off our PMGs and BoMs. I did wear a tie that day. We gave up on the daily picture idea after forgetting for three days so now it's going to be weekly and we're doing one every Sunday night.

 

This is the back of my "Preach My Gospel". My amazing sister Tess made this cool card for me and I put it there so I can always see it. Other missionaries have noticed and asked me to put in a request because they want cool Dare to be a Mormon cards. I think five would be good (Tess). They were really impressed that my sister made something so awesome at home too.

 

 
I love and miss you all a tonne. I wish I could be there for all the adventures and fun. England is great. Missionary work is hard. I guess it's supposed to be that way, right?.

 

Elder HoughtonFull