Last week we went down to Lodi early Tuesday morning and interviewed the missionaries in that zone and then headed to Stockton to do the Stockton Zone interviews in the afternoon. We got done around 6, grabbed some dinner and went to the hotel we stayed in for the night. The first time we stayed down there I had found a hotel online that looked decent, but since I didn't feel comfortable taking off my shoes until I hopped into bed, we decided that would be our last stay in that one. Luckily we found a great little hotel down there and made friends with the manager and so we will be staying there every time we have to go down for interviews or Zone Conferences. Monday morning we got up and headed out to do the Manteca Zone Interviews. They took most of the day and then we headed back home. Friday we were with the North Sacramento Missionaries for their interviews.
Thursday we had a day to prepare some things for transfers that are coming up. I also ran to the Folsom Zone's District Counsel Meeting. While I was gone Scott did their interviews and forgot to take their cookies that I had ready in the freezer for them. I heard about it from several of the missionaries so I ran cookies to them for their District Counsel Meeting. Meanwhile, Scott was working with Elder Gunnell. We got 40 new missionaries with the addition of the three new zones, and we are getting a lot of new missionaries over the course of the next three transfers. That means we need to open about 5 new areas every transfer for the next three transfers. Before our mission I wouldn't have thought much about that, but opening 15 new areas in the space of 3 months also means finding housing for 15 new companionships that will go to those new areas. Elder Gunnell does an incredible job of finding good places for our missionaries to live but it is not an easy task, so he came over Thursday morning to try to understand where we are going to need more housing over the next three months and so he can get a head start on securing lodging for all of these missionaries. I had no idea what goes on behind the scenes of running a mission, but I am ever grateful and humbled by our Senior missionaries and all they do to help things run smoothly with the soon to be 185 missionaries under our care.
We were blessed to get together with all of them on Labor Day at President and Sister Bitnoff's lovely home up in the mountains of Pollack Pines. It was fun to just get together to socialize and have fun and relieve some of the stress of our day, and night jobs. It was also a nice night to honor our dear Sister Skank who will be leaving us at the end of the month. She has been such a joy to work with and has brought such a happy, positive feeling to the office. We have loved having her here and she will be sorely missed. We will have to say goodbye to the Bitnoffs. President Bitnoff has been Scott's counselor in the Mission Presidency and we could not have asked for a better counselor, friend, advisor and missionary. And Jenni has become a dear friend of mine. They have just received a calling to serve in the Sacramento Temple Presidency and so he will have to be released at the end of October in order for them to begin their new assignment. We are grateful they aren't going far and we will still see them, but we will really miss President Bitnoff and his wisdom and willingness to serve in any way he could to ease the burden on Scott. The missionaries are going to miss him as well.
The whole crew
The Elders
The Sisters
The Nivens arrived about a month ago but we failed to get a picture with them. They are serving in the Cordova Stake as MLS missionaries and are already working miracles
This is Brother and Sister Bird. Sister Bird is one of our mission nurses, helping out in Stockton, Lodi and Manteca. We are so grateful for her and they are a joy to work with.
We've also been able to get out and work with our missionaries a few times this past week. Last Saturday we went out with the Sacramento Zone on a blitz to help the Hermanas in the Spanish Branch. It was a really great afternoon because not only missionaries, but members showed up to help. A blitz is when everyone in the zone works in one specific area for a couple of hours to help find new friends for the set of missionaries in whose area they are working. Since the Hermanas cover a large area it was great to have so many people helping. They spilt up the missionaries and sent one or two with either a Spanish Speaking missionary or one of their members. Scott went with Hermana Sutherland and Sister Vang and I got to got with Hermana Quizon and Sister Workman. I was reminded of a few things while I was out this time. The first is that this is HARD work. And it was hot. And the Sisters never get discouraged when people either aren't home, won't answer their door or tell them they aren't interested. They are tenacious about continuing the conversations and even when someone isn't interested they still always ask if they can share a scripture about Jesus Christ. We did get a few referrals for the Elders who cover the area we were working in, and we found two pretty solid friends for the Hermanas to teach. Not bad for a few hours of work. And we had a lot of fun together. We always tell our missionaries that if they aren't having fun and finding joy in the work, they aren't doing it right. We tried to have some fun and I think we succeeded.
All of these people were out finding new friends for two hours on Saturday. #strengthinnumbers
Having a little fun along the way
Our new friend Olga and her cute little granddaughter who speaks three languages: Spanish, English and Lao. Impressive!
I also got to go out finding on Wednesday with Sister Ellsworth. She and Sister Kacksaetter are training Sister Stephens and they asked if I would go out with one of them so they could get twice the work done by splitting up. Smart girls.
Sister Ellsworth and I went out together and again, it was hard, hot and fun and we met so many nice people and even had a few miracles along the way. One of them was finding a friend named Gabriel. We had gone to an apartment complex looking for a potential and she wasn't home. So we decided if she wasn't home we would knock the door above, we heard a huge dog on the other side of the door, and a man telling the dog to be quiet, but as many times as we knocked, he didn't want to answer. So, just as we were leaving, Sister Ellsworth said "Let's knock one more door, that one (pointing to a door smack in the middle of the complex.)" But first she said, "Let's say a prayer". So we stopped right in front of the door and said a prayer, knocked, knocked again, and to our surprise Gabriel answered the door and even invited us in. We couldn't go in because he was home alone, but he was so nice. He had gone to Boy Scouts as a kid with some 'mormons' and so he knew a little bit about the Book of Mormon. He set up a time to meet with the sisters for them to teach him. That in and of itself is a miracle, but he also told us that between his work and his school schedule, he is home for about an hour a week, on Wednesday afternoons, and it happened to be a Wednesday afternoon that Sister Ellsworth was inspired to go check on a potential, who wasn't home, but Gabriel was!
We have been blessed as a mission to see a lot of people brought into the church the past few weeks. As much as we'd love to make it to every baptism, it's just not possible (which is a good problem to have). We were able to go to the baptisms of two great families this past week.
The baptism of this amazing family was one of the most tender, spiritual baptisms I have been to. I was moved to tears to see an entire family come into the church. And what was really tender was to see the bond between the family and Brother Hansen(the gentleman on the far right), who invited them to start listening to the missionaries in the first place. He was definitely as happy as they were. He is the Cub Scout leader in the ward/community and the son was in Cub Scouts with him. He got to know them and one night he was going out with the missionaries and he said "I'll go with you, but I want to visit someone I know" (music to any missionary's ears). He called this family and asked if he could bring some of his friends over to meet them. They said yes and the story began. He is an inspiration, he told me he has about 40 cub scouts and only 3 of them are members of the church. At Christmas time he has a night where they all come with their families and share their Christmas traditions and then he shares his and gives them all a bag with a Book of Mormon in it. I love that he is so missionary minded and willing to invite others to come unto Christ. As the mom of this family was bearing her testimony after her baptism, she looked at Brother Hansen and just sobbed. She just kept saying Thank you over and over to him, through her tears. There weren't many dry eyes in the congregation. It made me realize once again, what a gift we have, what a gift baptism into Christ's restored church is, and how we should be more willing to share this gift with others because it brings unspeakable joy to them, and to those sharing it.
We also got to see the baptism for this great family of four as well. I don't know as much of their story as I do the other family, but anytime you bring an entire family into the church it is a day of much joy. Look at their happy faces!
I wrote about the Tovar family a few months ago when the mom, Pilar had Scott announce her baptism to her daughters at a member/missionary fireside. We saw them at the North Sacramento cultural festival and they invited us to dinner last Sunday, along with two sets of Elders. It was a lovely Venezuelan dinner and they even helped Elder Shafer celebrate his birthday. They are such a lovely family. They are going to Utah for General Conference. The Elders invited them to read along with our Book of Mormon reading as a mission and they said they were already reading the entire Book of Mormon before they go to conference.
We have transfers next week, but when we get a Hmong speaking missionary they always come in one week before transfers because of the timing of their language training in the MTC. On Monday we got to welcome Elder Everett to the mission.
His companions are Elder Kemp and Elder Obray. We call our investigators 'friends'. We took the picture of Elder Everett and his companions and they posted it on their facebook messenger chat. Their caption was "We found a new friend, and we are going to keep him"
We have spent a good amount of time this week working on the transfer board. It is always an exciting time when we anticipate new missionaries arriving. Thursday is the day Scott calls the new trainers and calls them to be trainers. It is apparently a day of much anticipation on the missionary end. When they see a call coming in from President, there is much excitement. I've always said I would love to be on the other end of that phone call just once. Thursday we kind of got a taste of what it's like on the other end. We had a missionary who had to have his appendix out and so he was in the hospital. We were there visiting him and his companion and two other elders in their zone were there as well. One of those Elders is going to be a new trainer. The Elder who had his appendix out (who is one of our zone leaders) said, jokingly "president, did you come to tell me I am training?' And Scott said, "no, but Elder Coleman is". The look on Elder Coleman's face was priceless and it was fun to see his big smile and in essence, be on the other end of the call just this once.
And finally, I sound like a broken record, but we LOVE being so close to where so many of our returned missionaries live so that when they come to visit, we get to see them again. We had a really special day last Saturday as we were able to go to the temple and meet 2 of our former Sister Missionaries; Jessica Brown and Aly Moffett (now Buhler) who were there with one of their recent converts who went to the temple to receive his endowment.
As I was reading that morning in 1 Nephi 14 I was struck again by the magnitude of the work and the tremendous blessing it is to be part of this Latter Day Gathering of Israel. In verse 7 the Savior is quoted talking about the restoration, calling it a great and marvelous work. Great means significant or meaningful, marvelous is something wonderful or incomprehensible, and work is an act or an accomplishment that is everlasting. Think of the blessing we have to be part of this significant, incomprehensible, everlasting work.
Seeing the joy of Jessica and Aly at the temple with this man and his wife was a great example of the scope of this work we are involved in. They were filled with so much joy as they were able to witness him making more covenants with our Heavenly Father. As we were talking to them, we saw three of our current sister missionaries approaching the temple with one of their recent converts and some of their ward members. They were bringing him to participate in baptisms for the dead in the temple for the first time. It was a wonderful opportunity for us to be there to see the everlasting impact the temple has on new members of the church. Baptism isn’t the end. We are involved in a significant, incomprehensible and everlasting work.
On Labor Day Morning we got to go to breakfast with Aly and meet her husband Dave and her parents. It was a delightful morning, what a great missionary she was and we were so happy that she married so well. Dave was wonderful, as were her parents.
Today we got to meet up with our dear Hermana Barrera (Jessy) who came into town with her parents for the weekend. We had a lovely brunch downtown with them and it was so great to see her again and catch up, and to meet her wonderful parents. Truly a blessing to see so many of the people we love this past week.
And finally, just had to post this picture of Sister Gunnell and I. I walked into the office one afternoon and we were color coordinated so we had to snap a picture of us twinning.
No comments:
Post a Comment