Monday, May 19, 2008

Great Missionary Quotes

*After a long hard day with no success I felt the Lord was trying my patience or punishing me for something! However, right after making a comment of such to my companion, we met an amazing man. He was waiting for someone, but allowed us to bear our testimonies of the Book of Mormon and gladly gave us his phone number. We called the next day and set up an appointment to teach. He soaked it up and accepted a return appointment. Then he told us the reason he was willing to meet with us – when he was in middle school one of his friends brought him to our church one time and the thing he remembered most was the missionaries and how clean and sharp they looked. From then on he wondered about our church and was deeply grateful to meet with us and learn. I wonder what other kids are impressed by our appearance and will one day want to learn about the church because of a small and simple thing!

*We have been working hard on reaching our 140 contacts a week and I feel like as we set these mini goals, our eye is really more single to the glory of God. The thought to find the next person to talk to puts aside any other thought or distraction there may possibly be. Every person I talk to all of a sudden becomes of great importance, not because that person represents a number, but because that number represents a person. Every number we write down and record represents one person. Adding the numbers up really helps me realize how many people we influence in a day/month/or transfer. As a result we have been blessed to have been able to find many new investigators this week.

*This week we had a lot of success “teaching when you find and finding when you teach”. As long as we kept our focus on finding people to teach instead of finding people to count as contacts, we were teaching more lessons. I firmly believe that if we as missionaries keep a focused mind on why we are proselyting, which is to find and teach, rather than just finding to find, we will experience much more success!

*My gospel study has been great! It is one of the best hours out of the other awesome hours we have. My plan for the upcoming week in order to boost the quality of my prayers is to focus more on praying for the Spirit to guide my prayers and to set aside stable time that I can use to sit and think and calm my mind down before prayer and listen afterwards. I think if there is scheduled time like that I won’t have the problem of rushing my communication with Heavenly Father.

*I feel like I finally have a missionary story like the ones I heard growing up. Stories where miracles happen and people are converted. It’s amazing how simple the process is. It’s nothing I did or said. She was converted by the words of ancient prophets contained in the Book of Mormon. I’m just grateful I could witness it!

3 comments:

Callie said...

Thank you for sharing these heartfelt testimonies.

Cristie said...

Two weeks ago yesterday we took our son, Elder Nathaniel Gardner, into the MTC as he began his mission. In three months he will join you in Korea. I have linked our family blog to yours so that we can all watch the wonderful experiences unfold for the elders and sisters serving in the Korea Daejeon Mission. Thank you for providing this terrific blog! Blessings, Sister Cristie Gardner

Mary Perriton said...

You are very welcome! Thanks for writing! We will be getting 11 new missionaries in that July group. I think that is a record! We are so excited.