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| Mission Leaders Conference |
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| And Breakfast |
We had a crazy busy week with MLC and Zone meeting and exchanges, we really only had one full day to proselyte, but we still managed to have the same numbers for the week somehow. It’s crazy how much the Lord blesses us for all the time we spend helping out our zone, but it was super good and we saw a lot of miracles like always!
Our new investigator, R--- is really solid and we had an
awesome first lesson with her reading Alma 32.
She related to the seed of faith perfectly because she works at a
nonprofit farming organization and really appreciated the analogy of faith and
the seed. She is totally a Mormon already, just doesn’t know it yet. :)
She seriously is so prepared. We had an amazing lesson with M---, as well, one
of the best of my mission. One of our goals is to have the Holy Ghost as our
senior companion, and I know that the whole lesson was definitely guided
entirely by the Spirit. We got right
down to what her real need was and were able to teach and testify to her about
the atonement. We even shared with her
the poem, "The Race" that Pres. Felix read in transfer meeting a few
weeks ago about a boy who keeps falling down but gets up every time and
finishes the race. It was really powerful and she finally just got it. Something
clicked at the end, and she just had that ah-hah moment where she realized how
much God loves her and how her relationship with her earthly father does not
represent her relationship with her Heavenly Father and that she doesn’t need
to be perfect before she can go to him and say sorry and ask for forgiveness. She
learned that repentance is an everyday-all the time means to an end, not merely
the end alone. It was really powerful. She will be baptized soon.
I know that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, that his atonement was truly infinite, that He is the master potter and we need to turn our lives over to him to be refined, refined and refined again. I know that he isn’t concerned with why the lost sheep left the ninety and nine, but only concerned with bringing him back. I know that the key to our progression in this life is getting up one more time than we fall. Through him we can be changed permanently.
I think I’ve said this before, but Elder Bryson really is a never ending fountain of knowledge. We have a lot of really cool gospel discussions and I learn so much from him. He gets the Gospel. He understands that it is simple and we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We just need to follow the Spirit. I really love and respect that. We have been talking a lot about the needs of our missionaries in the zone, and trying to come up with a zone activity to help us all use the atonement to get out of our complacency.
We offered 2 hours of service at FoodShare again this week and it was a lot of fun. They were having an event of some sort, so we found out we were going to get to help set up tables and chairs.... we just looked at each other and smiled, because we knew that these people were about to learn how incredibly fast and efficient Mormons happen to be at setting up tables and chairs. :)
I got to go on exchanges with Elder Juan Bautista, who I was comps with for a couple weeks back in Fillmore, and randomly we ran into one of our old investigators from Fillmore here in Oxnard! It was way cool and way funny how we were both together for it.
Love, Elder Parrish******
