Hey! You're alive! ; )
Actually I knew you'd been mentioning girls camp and stadium of fire, so I
assumed you'd had some other time constraints. Don't worry about me, I'm just as
happy as a clam. :) I wonder where that expression came from... now that I think
about it, clams probably aren't all that happy in comparison with
missionaries.... hmm.
Well! Let me give you a brief update of my week. Our bishop put us to work
finding members on our records that we just don't know much about, which
generally means lots of angry people, lots of people who have moved, and lots of
time. Those were all true. But! In the process of our people finding activities,
we happened across a family, who I immediately fell in love with. The Alward
family. Brother Alward was raised in the church, but was inactive when he met
his wife. Sister Alward was baptized shortly thereafter, and they were active in
the church fo several years. When the ward in the area went through a boundary
changed and meshed with a nearby branch, the members stopped spending time
together outside of church, and the "family" sense of the ward sort of
disappeared, and the family shortly went inactive. We talked with them for a
good twenty minutes when we knocked on their door, and I got the feeling we were
the first members of the church, missionary or not, that had taken the time to
actually try and get to know them instead of just asking why they hadn't been at
church. So. I have a commitment for EVERYONE reading this this week. Your
commitment is to LOVE people! But not with words. Anyone can say they love
someone, but you don't believe it until you feel it. So go out of your way to
talk with people you don't know as well, spend a bit of extra time (even if you
don't have any extra time) with someone that you don't know very well. Show the
people in your ward that you love them, and that you really are a kind of family
for them. I maintain that if every member of the church would make it a point to
DEMONSTRATE their love for the people in their wards (and not just your friends
in the ward, ALL of the members of the ward), the rate of church members falling
into states of inactivity would decrease dramatically. So. Try and put that
thought into practice this week, and who knows. You might even change some
lives. :)
ALso! This week we had REVELATION via the INSPIRED leaders of the Lord's
church! Our district leader wrote up a survey that we have started asking people
to take when we talk to them at the door or in the stret, and the difference
it's made has been huge! I've only had one person turn us down since we started
doing this. It's literally a night and day difference between knocking on their
door to talk about the gospel, or knocking on their door to ask for their
thoughts on religion. So! Any of you who are writing other missionaries, pass
the idea along. :)
This week was pretty fantastic. Elder Odle and I are two pea's in a pod, we
just have fun. All the time. With everything we do. :)
The reason I didn't write yesterday, was because we had a special training
given by our mission president instead! That was super neat. He had all of the
missionaries who are going home in the next three transfers stand up and talk
about what they wished they had known at the start of their missions. It was
incredible. I learned. So. Much. It made me think about myself in the MTC, only
a few months ago, and how much I've ALREADY learned here, and it really opened
my eyes to how much I have left to learn. Serving out here is teaching me a lot
about my own inadequecies, which would be pretty tough on it's own, but it's
also teaching me about how Christ can help me overcome them! Once again, I'm so
glad to be out here, and I'm so grateful to everyone who's helped me along the
way to get here. I know I wouldn't be here without every one I've spent any time
with (Granted, some moreso than others. *wink*), so thank you. To all of you.
:)
Well, I've got to go see Parliament, so I'll talk to you next week!
I love all of you! Try hard and pray harder!
Love,
-Elder Christensen
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