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| Elder and Sister Harrison!! Their mission in the office has come to a close, but their impact on the mission will not be forgotten. Elder Harrison is the one that baptized the grandpa of the missionary that passed away recently. He served as bishop twice, in the stake presidency, and as patriarch. Sister Harrison is a convert of 17 years. They are from South Carolina and will be dearly missed. |
First of all, HAPPY BIRTHDAY EMILY!! Your next one will be
celebrated in Alabama with lots of good southern food!!
So this nonstop craziness that has been these last 2.5
months finally came to an end this weekend. It has been stressful and tiring,
but at the same time it’s been absolutely filled with many spiritual and sacred
moments that neither one of us (me and Elder Santos) will ever forget. The best
part about being done with all that is we’ll have a lot more time to work here
in our sector Los Olivos. On Saturday we decided to invite everyone to go to
church with us and we ended up inviting 50 people. Yesterday we did an
interchange with the zone leaders from Renca and I stayed her with Elder
Sanchez from Argentina. We decided to invite everyone to be baptized and we
invited 30 or so people. It’s exciting to have time to work and we’re trying to
take advantage of every second we have here to do just that. We’re also going
to try to do lots of interchanges with Zone leaders as well.
So the highlights of this week. On Wednesday and Thursday,
we had our Zone conferences with Elder Teixeira of the Seventy. By the time the
conference finished, he had left a huge mark on the way we think about doing
missionary work. The gist of his message: “If we talk to more people, we will
teach more people. If we teach more people, we will baptize more people. We
need to talk to a lot more people in this mission.”
After just a few days, the mission is already going crazy
(in a good way) and finding more success. This really is an answer to our
prayers because I have always felt like there was just so much more that we
could do with the 8ish hours of proselyting that the Lord gives us. In fact,
after a lot of prayer we submitted that very idea to president as the main
weakness in the mission and he told that to Elder Teixeira before the
conference. The interesting part of the conference is that it was done in two
halves: half of the mission in one conference and the other half in the other
conference. The two conferences had very little in common. I think I liked the
teaching a little bit more in the first one, but the cool part of the second
one is that he taught us and then we all went out on the street for 30 minutes
to put in practice what we had just learned. President Meservy said that will
now be a staple of our Zone conferences.
One story that Elder Teixeira shared: So his son was called
to the NYNY South mission and at that time Elder Teixeira was working in the
missionary department of the church and had access to the key indicators of the
mission. He found out the average lessons taught per week in the mission was 6,
so he decided to have a talk with his son before he left on the mission. He
told his son that he just wanted him to promise him one thing. For about an
hour, he shared scriptures with his son until finally his son had had enough
and just wanted to know what the promise was. Elder Teixiera asked his son what
a reasonable number of lessons taught in one night would be. He thought a
little and said 3. “Perfect, so if we multiply that number by 7 (days in the
week) we get a total of 21. Will you promise me that in your first week in the
mission field you’ll teach 21 lessons?” “yes dad I’ll do it, I promise.”
President Teixeira never told his son anything about the average of 6 because
he felt it wasn’t relevant.
So the first area he was assigned to was Staten Island,
where the missionary work was pretty much dead. He told his trainer about the
promise he had made with his dad and his trainer, of course, looked at him kind
of funny and told him that it simply wasn’t possible. “It’s a promise though,
and it’s just for one week, I’ll bet we can find a way.” For the next 3 hours
they analyzed everything that they could possibly do in order for him to keep
his promise to his dad. They realized they could not do the same thing that
missionaries had always done and expect a different result, so they decided to
do the unthinkable: not use the car (even though they had one) but rather
travel on foot. They also realized that if they got on the ferry early in the
day, they could stay on all day talking to people without having to get off
until the night. They did that and talked to every person they possibly could,
at the very least inviting them to go to church. By the end of the week, they
had taught 22 lessons, but even though the promise had been kept and was over,
they kept working like that and that transfer they had 14 people go to church
and had various people with baptismal dates, but Elder Teixeira’s son was
transferred unexpectedly. At first he was pretty upset and to make it worse he
would have to go to another place where missionary work was dead and start from
scratch. As they began contacting on his first day in the new area, the first
door they knocked opened up – “Elders come on in,” the man said. The two missionaries
figured he was a member. They then sat down with the family and soon learned
that they actually were not members, but were almost baptized in San Diego, but
then moved to NY for reasons of work/military. The family said they had just
been talking and that the whole family wanted to be baptized. Some weeks later
they were all baptized.
Some quotes from the conference I really like:
“If we want more faith, we must do the thing that requires
faith” – Sister Teixeira
“It is better to be respected, than to be loved” – Elder Teixeira
There’s a lot more I could share, but maybe another day. On Friday
we had the Mission Leadership Council (I don’t know what it is called exactly
in English) and it was cool because it really was a council. We started with a
list of question that Elder Santos and I compiled when President Meservy first
got here and as a council we changed a lot of things in the mission. Everything
was done with a Mission Handbook and Preach my Gospel in hand and a complete
focus on our missionary objective. The mission is pretty excited.
If you want to know what our sector’s like, just google
Patronato Santiago and that’ll tell you. There’s not really any houses so we
generally contact a lot in the streets which is fun. There’s not a lot of
Chileans in our sector haha.
Have a great week!
Love,
Elder Birrell
