Week 6 Another week in Missionary Paradise

Dec. 15, 2014

Hope everyone's week has been wonderful and full of the many miracles that are in our lives. This Christmas Season was been pretty amazing... The "He is the Gift" video is so cool and brings the spirit so strongly.

This week has been overall good but it was a little rocky for a few days. We had SO MANY MEMBER PRESENT LESSONS THIS WEEK! (Member present lessons are where we have a member with us when we go and teach an investigator...) Those have been really hard to coordinate because our area is so big and there are so few members and everyone has busy schedules and... a life... weird... lol. We have been working really hard and we are not getting results right now but the Lord is blessing us for the hard work we do and that makes it worth it.

Investigators.: "J" had a baptism date set for the 27th of this month (the date we pushed it back to) and he knew that he had to come to church this week and next to make that happen but... he didn't come, he texted us and said he had to do laundry and Christmas shopping.... that guy... We went over and saw him after church and had a good conversation with him and we have 2 appointments set with him this week. He even shared with us that he had received the answer to his prayer to know if the church was true (cool story...). He prayed and asked God his question and then flipped open his scriptures and started reading. It was a story about how wicked people had come to attack the righteous and the wicked lost because they did not have the gospel/God on their side.... and he even said THIS IS THE TRUE CHURCH! Now he just needs to get himself to church so he can be baptized. He wants it so bad and Satan is working SOO hard on him.

This Sunday was super awesome and a great way to end this hard week. Sister Eschenbrenner and Sister R (an extremely talented sister in the ward) and I sang Silent Night with a descant that Sister E's grandpa wrote. It was beautiful! And the talks were awesome! Amy (a young women who is going to go on a mission and applying to the Provo BYU) gave a 20-min talk on missionary work. There are two things I wrote down from her talk: 1) Success is achieved by inviting people to come and learn of Christ, and 2) friends: you make friends through missionary work. Then Elder Dickert spoke on... what do you know... missionary work! He shared a really cool story that I'll share... He started by having everyone close their eyes and imagine that they were going to a lake to go cliff diving. There are two cliffs that you can jump off of, but there is one more cliff that is higher than both of the cliffs and no one is gutsy enough to go and jump off of that one. You decide that you are. You climb up to the top and are looking down at the water far below. You think about how long you will be in the air, how far you will have to go to clear the rocks, how fast you will have to run, etc. You end up just standing there and are about ready to turn around and go back down when you see someone (a friend of a friend, you don't know at all) in the water below struggling to keep their head above the water and the people on the shore are too far away to help. The only way to help them is to jump - you don't have time to climb down. What do you do? Did you jump? What if that person is your best friend? Would you jump then? This is what it's like to do missionary work. You are reaching out to people and saving them. Kind of a cool illustration of what missionary work is like.

Sunday night Sister E was having a really hard time and I spent a long time trying to comfort her. The phone rang and it was a member seeing if we could come over for dinner asap, so I just ended up on the drive over just saying things I was thankful for. It's amazing how turning to look at all your blessings brings the spirit and comforts all our hurts.

A cool Spiritual/Scriptural thought that I had about the prophets in the Book of Mormon: There are many that worked REALLY hard and never saw the effect that they had. For instance, Samuel the Lamanite. I was reading in Helaman about Samuel the Lamanite and how he was a missionary and was working so hard to call the Nephites unto repentance and how they would not listen. So when he was on his way home after he had been kicked out of the city, I could imagine that he was just thinking about all the people he had talked to and had tried to share with but had rejected him and Christ and how that probably weighed very heavily on his heart. I am sure he was also praying to Heavenly Father and telling about what he was thinking and the disappointment that he probably felt. Then God told him to turn around and go back, to say whatever came to his heart. When Samuel came to the city he was not allowed to enter by the gate (he had been kicked out and the guard undoubtedly remembered him) so he did the only thing he could think of - climb the city wall. (Imagine yourself there, on top of a 7-8 foot wall watching the people you had tried to teach, that you loved because as a missionary you love the people you teach and care about them). There was probably a lot of noise as a city of people move around, but Samuel opened his mouth and started speaking, (that is the hardest part, starting when you have nothing to say) and God gave him amazing things to say to the people. I assume the city became silent and listened to Samuel, until people began to scorn and yell back at him. Some even thought that they would throw stones and shoot arrows to get him off the wall and to stop the prophecies that he was sharing. Once Samuel was done prophesying I am sure that the Spirit told him to LEAVE-and fast-so he did. He could not stay to see the good that had come from him following and sharing the gospel. He never came back to that people, we went back to do other things that the Lord wanted him to do. Sometimes we may feel like we are not being successful because people are not following through and are not listening. But we are doing the will of the Lord and we ARE blessing the lives of others and are helping them come closer to Christ. :)

Anyway I am running out of time :) I love you all and think of you more often than I should.

Love,

Sister Megan Brimley

Scripture for the week:

3 Nephi 11-26 but specifically chapter 18:24-25 

-from 3 Nephi 17:17 "and no man can conceive of the joy which filled our souls at the time we heard him pray for us unto the Father"

and for Christmas time... Alma 7:10-13 and why is it so important for us to celebrate the birth of Christ when it was his suffering and death that we can receive a remission of our sins and eternal life from?