This week was pretty good. Missionary work in our area slightly got wrecked due to us having trade-offs with the other Elders and a multi-zone conference at the end of the week.
Zone conference was interesting. We had missionaries coming in from the Kalamazoo zone as well as the Lansing zone. The mission isn't reimbursing miles for zone conferences so they kind of got wrecked pretty hard.
Overall it was a really good conference, we were able to participate in a bunch of really good training by various mission leaders. The one that impacted me the most was when the zones split off and were trained by the our Zone and Sister training leaders. We talked about when Peter walks on water, which interestingly only shows up in one of the gospels.
The leaders took it another way but what really hit me and what I spent the whole time thinking about was the effect of Peters focus on that story. Jesus asked Peter to come to him and that's what Peter did. He had the faith to act and because of that he literally walked on water as it says, "to come to Jesus." When we focus our lives on that process of coming to Christ we can do those things that we assumed we couldn't, we just have to have that faith to start. It wasn't until he looked away from Christ and noticed everything going on around him that he sank but the second he called out for help Jesus immediately grabbed him. That last part reminds me of a really good scripture in 3 Nephi 10:4-6
Tuesday we had a really good trade off. I went with Elder Barrows. We had two lessons that day. The first one was with a contact they made which fell through. Sadly they didn't open the door. It's no fun when you know they are hiding inside. It's not like we bite or anything. After that we actually had a pretty good time knocking. It's always super awkward when you walk up to the door and the person pulls out of their house in their car, but when it happened we were able to flip it around. This lady called out to us saying that was her house and that she was leaving. We ran over and asked if we could give her our card. That's an easy way to get a conversation going because you just take a good moment to write your info on the card and your companion can start talking with the whoever you are with. We shared something small with her and got a return appointment.
Later that day we had another lesson. We had planned to visit with this lady and drop her due to lack of progression. We walked in with the Westons and started talking with her. Elder Barrows and I both felt like the lesson we planned was not what we were supposed to do. So while Elder Weston talked with the lady about either Bees (avejas) or Sheep (ovejas), both sound very similar in Spanish, we found a chapter and then began to read with her. I really had no idea what we were going to do after we were done reading. We picked a chapter to read with her and without knowing exactly what we were doing just kept going with it. We would pause and talk a little about particular verses but nothing really focused on a specific point we wanted to cover. We were coming to the end of the chapter and the whole time I was just praying for some kind of guidance to steer the lesson in. God answers prayers and in the last verse of the chapter the testimony I have in that principle was reconfirmed and strengthened. I was still way nervous but in that moment I felt like I needed to ask a question about faith. After that we really had a good lesson.
I'm not really sure what we are going to do with the Aguilars. We had our best lesson ever with them. We watched a video from what I think is called the "Because of Him" series. It's a series of videos the church put out about Jesus that are pretty good. We talked about Jesus Christ and bore testimony on the power of repentance and the spirit there was just so strong. It was really awesome and in my testimony I learned something really interesting. As I was sharing my thoughts the idea came to mind and I shared that we get answers to our prayers in the same degree we plan on acting on them. There are other factors but that's what I shared in that moment. Natividad and Aldo are ready. They have testimonies of what we've shown them and are doing what they should such as reading and studying the scriptures daily, the problem is if Gilda won't. I doubt Natividad will take any more steps without the companionship of his family in everything that follows. If we can't put them on a date, I'm not sure what we are supposed to do with them. It's evident that Gilda is holding something back but we haven't been able to find what's going on, and if she won't share we can't help.
Omni 1:26
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