Well, Elder Dolenar’s first crazy week as an assistant has
come and gone and I have to say it was a pretty good one. The new way of doing
transfers went well on Monday, the 16 new missionaries are all super prepared
and excited to get to work.
On Wednesday we had a council with the 30 Zone
Leaders/Sister Training Leaders plus the two of us and President Merservy and
it was easily the best council I’ve ever been a part of. On Thursday we set
goals as companionships, districts, zones and as a mission. On Friday, we
trained the trainers and new missionaries one the First 12 Week program. On
Saturday and Sunday, we had general conference and yesterday we planned for the
zone conferences and on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday we will have the zone
conferences. All the while we’ve been trying to give our own sector the most
time possible. It hasn’t been easy.
It was interesting to see the goals that the missionaries
set because it teaches us a universal truth about goal setting. The
missionaries were asked to set goals for the next 6 weeks with regards to the 5
key indicators of the Investigators conversion. The missionaries set number
goals for each of these indicators and the results were interesting to say the
least. The first thing we learned is that the missionaries really are encouraged
by President Meservy’s vision of the mission that we can do more and the goals
show faith that this change (transfer) we will see some of that vision take
place in our mission.
So what do we learn? We must re-evaluate our goals and
understand the connections that our daily obedience and diligence have with our
more important and significant goals and desires. This applies to any kind of
goals that we set in this life, whether they be physical, emotional, financial,
temporal or spiritual. For many of the goals, it is harder to quantify the
relationship between our day to day diligence and the ultimate results, but I
know that through faith, prayer, scripture study, fasting and similar actions,
God will help us know how we are doing and what we may need to adjust. Like
Elder Teixaira taught us- “If we always do what we’ve always done, we’ll always
get what we’ve always got.” These next three days we will be sharing these
principles with the missionaries to help show that nothing will happen by
magic; we need to be better every single day.
I’m not sure which of the General Conference talks was my
favorite, but I do remember being impressed by Pres. Nelson and Pres. Eyring
for their consistent and inspiring obedience to the prophets of God, both
ancient and modern. I loved how Pres. Eyring took to heart Pres. Monson’s
challenge to study the Book of Mormon every day. He could have thought that
didn’t apply to him, since he had been reading the book daily for 50 years, but
he still figured out a way it applied to him. Pres. Nelson similarly took to
heart the prophet’s words and completely changed the way he studied the Book of
Mormon. Years ago he accepted the prophet’s invitation to learn Mandarin
Chinese. This is the kind of day to day obedience that results in men such as
Russell M. Nelson and Henry B. Eyring. They are examples to follow.
Talk to you next week.
Love,
Elder Birrell
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