There's a lot of words that I could use to describe a week
like this one. Exciting, stressful, busy, difficult, humbling, tough, joyful,
you get the idea. At the start of the week, our zone leaders committed us to hit
what our mission calls "the standards of excellent". I'll explain how this works
simply and clearly:
In order to hit these standards, you must have the following
by the end of the week:
-4 New investigators
-2 investigators at church
-8 lessons taught with a member present
-140 conversations about the gospel (20 is the daily
standard)
These are used to set a bar that will make us stretch, and
for the past 8-9 weeks before this one, my companions and I have been unable to
hit it. I can't go over all the events that got us to the point of meeting these standards this past week but I will share what's
been important.
We taught Jignest the word of wisdom, which he is
practically living already anyway. He says that his parents drink tea daily but
he's never known why people "have to do it." As an add
on, we taught him the 10 commandments which he also fully agrees on. We
asked him about baptism and we got a usual response, he's "thinking
about it."
Saturday was a wild one indeed. at 12:00 pm we had an
investigator that we had found the day before which was looking really solid fall through on us. The member who was with us, Roque was
kind enough to take us to another place to teach someone else if we could.
Elder Okamoto decided to call Jignesh to meet right away and he agreed even
though he was in the public library in Port Moody. We had to call the zone
leaders for permission to go there since it was out of our area and
they allowed us. We read 2 Nephi 31 with him to build his faith further in
baptism and assigned him to read 32 before our next meeting.
That evening, we taught Jessie for the first time
in 2 months. We were figuring that it's time to give her another try. She and
her husband were taught by us and a wonderful couple named the Woodwords
who seemed to teach a lot of the lesson for us. It was great! Jessie
even got pretty emotional, but for whatever the reason they didn't
come to church...
The great news is, Rocky came and so did Jignesh that
Sunday. With the need of a couple more member present lessons left for the week
at that point, we decided to do something bold. I took Roque and Jignesh
while I left Elder Okamoto with Rocky and we taught mini lessons. I decided during this short lesson to ask Jignesh how he had been feeling
about the idea of being baptized. He said that he feels like he's getting
close, very close! I explained to him that if he were to be baptized, there
wouldn't be a need to rush him. We could work towards December 5th and as that date got closer we could see how prepared he felt. His answer was Yes! My tense worry was replaced
with relief and joy! How amazing can the results be when you do something
the Lord knows you're uncomfortable with!
So it was we hit the standards of excellence. It wasn't
easy. We had to deal with a number of cancelled appointments, a
huge number of unanswered phone calls, rushing everywhere, and other
obstacles. Our work payed off and I'm grateful the Lord allowed it
to be so. As much as this week made me feel like coal under pressure,
I'm glad to say that this week has helped me become a little shinier. God is
good and so is the work! Please pray that Jignesh will be able to make his
baptism date! Have a great week all!
Elder Maclean Samis
Elder Samis with Downtown Port Coquitlam in the background
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