Oh, boy! Am I glad for the chance to Email, finally. This morning we had some crazy stuff to deal with -- emergency transfers and car logistics and fixing the TMR entry process, and sheesh! Nothing like working on your day off haha. Not complaining though, glad to let the Lord pull me in all different directions and allow me to see how much I can do with His help.
I have found that life is like a violin in several ways. First, life is like the strings on a violin. They make their best sounds and chords when the strings are stretched to the limit...that is where miracles happen. Always makes me think of that talk by President Eyring when he talks about President Hinckley and how he had grown accustomed to pushing himself past his physical limits when he was reviewing a document at the end of a long, hard day. Missionary life, and life in general, is sweetest when I am being stretched and tried and pushed beyond what I think my limit may be.
Second, life is like a violin in that sometimes one of our strings breaks and we are forced to improvise while still making the sweet music that can come if we put our mind to it and don't ever give up. Great musicians will compose on the fly, if need be, after a broken string and no one will ever know. To be the great musicians of the strings that compose our lives we must: one improvise, and two do it with a smile on our faces. God knows our string has broken...in fact, often times He broke it, but the real test of our talent as a musician is the ability to take that broken string and carry on in spite of it...Just food for thought to start off my Email today.
What a week! It was actually one of the best weeks of my mission because it was the busiest days of my mission/life hands down. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday we worked from waking up at 5 am to 10:40 at night with about 20 minutes for each meal...Nothing like an 18 hour work day on 5 hours of sleep! They were honestly the greatest days though because I got to see what I am capable of...Now I am not saying that I did a terrific job at everything I did during those 18 hours, but just on paper I never would have thought I could do that! I would have laughed and said you were crazy if you would have told me that I would work for 18 hours straight on little sleep, but we did it and it felt great. At the time it was absolutely exhausting, but looking back we can see how much the Lord helped us to accomplish everything we needed to do.
It was really weird dropping Elder H. off at the airport (he finished his mission), but Elder M. and I are doing great together. He is such a good companion, and we have been working hard to fix a lot of the patterns left by our predecessors that were creeping into office life. We have everything much more organized and efficient, and we are constantly doing something, never taking a break or stopping to just sit...We are talking diligent to the max...We have seen a large number of blessings as a result and have been able to spend a lot more time actually proselyting, which was the main goal. We want to be able to just go into Santa Monica and tear it up and find and teach and baptize like never before.
The area is amazing. It has had sisters in it for the last 3 years so Elders are a switch for the area. Just good to get new blood in there, I think. We are now in the Santa Monica First Ward, and our ward building is the second church building constructed in California and is only a few blocks from the beach. We met with our new ward mission leader on Thursday night and talked with him about the vision for the ward and what we can do to help lift it and stuff and he is the best ward mission leader I have had to date on my mission. He is so cool. His name is Brother W. and he is in his late 20's. He's way excited about missionary work, way excited to just help us in any way possible, and perhaps the greatest part is, he understands that we have been called as full time teachers and that it is the ward's job to be finding investigators for us. He is quarterbacking all of that effort and we text him nightly to update him on how things are progressing; he is the man.
Speaking of the man, there are actually two...Bishop M. is awesome, too. We met with he and Brother W. yesterday. Bishop M. is a young guy with young kids and definitely knows what he is doing, even though he is a fairly new bishop. He said the ward will take care of reactivation and retention and he wants us to baptize. That is like music to a missionary's ears! He is willing to help with whatever we need and is excited for missionary work in 2012. He said that 2012 is a great year for missionary work and to talk about the Church because it is so easy right now, which is so true.
It is a time to be out and vocal about the gospel because it is now that the Lord has given us to use the media, and the election, and Broadway and tons of stuff to our advantage, so we gotta do it! He has a great ward mission plan and we will be working more with him as the work progresses. We have met a few members from the ward and they are excited to have Elders and it just seems like everything is going our way right now. We are being very blessed.
Transfer day, like I said, was busy juggling between logistics and getting everyone where they needed to be and coordinating cars and rides and training, and new missionary orientation. Pretty much Wednesday morning we pushed the "go" button that we had been prepping for a week and there were no phone calls so that was good news. Crazy that we think up what everyone will do and then they just do it...It doesn't make sense to a lot of them, but as long as it makes sense in our minds (those who have been staring at maps and the transfer board for hours) then it goes well. Kinda like us and our lives. Sometimes we do not understand why something is happening or why we are asked to do something because we are in a forest and only a few feet from a tree right in front of us. It is important to remember that Heavenly Father created the forest and can see the whole thing and is guiding us where He needs us to be.
Had a great personal study this morning about the Plan of Salvation. I realized today that yes, God has one big plan of salvation for all of us combined, but at the same time, He has a plan of salvation for each of us individually. Each event that occurs in our lives is part of this plan of salvation He has made for each of us. Therefore, when we are prompted to talk with someone about the gospel, we are being led by the Spirit to do something that God has planned in that person's individual plan of salvation.
Don't make Heavenly Father use His backup plans because you, who are His primary plan, fail to act on a prompting. We must live in such a way that the Lord can trust us to do what we are prompted to do -- the first time He prompts us to do it.
This week we also had the opportunity to make what is called the "Mobile Area Book" which contains all the ward information and has our area broken down into more manageable sections to help with planning and make us more effective as we concentrate in one area rather than traveling all over creation trying to do something effective. I have attached a few of the pages if you wanna take a look...It was fun to come up with and we name every area something different. We named them after Book of Mormon Prophets!
Another perk of being in the office that we recently discovered is that in Microsoft Publisher you can put pass along cards through the printer and have names, numbers, church meeting times, locations and a mini map on there... It looks pretty cool, actually. We are just trying to use all of our resources and work our fingers to the bone and the Lord is blessing us so much for it.
I love you guys a ton and I am so grateful to have served the Lord for 20 months and can't wait to see what else He has in store for me!
Love,
Elder Molinaro
No comments:
Post a Comment