Busiest Week of the Mission! A lot of the time when you're
doing missionary work, you don't really feel like you accomplish too much.
Sometimes it seems as though everyone that you talk to and try to help seems to
look at you in disgust and disdain. The minutes feel like hours and the hours
like days. You try a lot of different ideas that you feel will be sure fire
ways to move the work forward, only to see each one falter and fail. This past
week was not one of those weeks.
We were extremely blessed this week. The APs came down for
an exchange, and I was with Elder Guyman. I'll start listing the miracles.
1) The first person we talked to, who was sitting on a
bench, told us to sit down with him, and tell him what we're doing here. We
were able to have a lesson with him.
2) The next person we talked to was a guy who made fun of us
and was pretty rude to us the first time that we met him. Seeing him this time,
he seemed much more humble. We sat down with him and told him about God's love
for all of us and the hope that it gives us. He explained to us the family
problems that he's been having, and how alone he feels. At the end of the
lesson, he was tearing up with joy. Awesome moment.
3) We started teaching English course this week, and a guy
showed up that seems a lot more interested in the church than learning English.
So we happily indulged in his request!
4) We were starting contacting again after lunch. We walked
by some cars. When we walked by one of them, a man got out and chased us down,
asking to know what we do here and , later, whether it would be ok if he came
to our church service. We told him no. (Just kidding, we were being good
missionaries.)
5) We had 11 first lessons with people. That's by far the
most I've ever had in any week, and we had a total of 20 lessons by the end of
the week. Elder Chingas and I are now the record holders for most lessons in
one week in Macedonia since it's been opened! And that was the most in the zone
for as long as we have records for. Everybody just seemed to nice to us and
everything worked out perfectly. Almost too perfectly. Also as a zone, we got
pretty close to doubling our lesson this week, almost getting 100 lessons with
9 companionships. That's ridiculously good!
One of the biggest miracles for sure was that we've been
trying to hike Vodno for about 1 1/2 months now, but it's been raining EVERY
MONDAY. But finally, after all that patience training, we got to hike it in
some perfect weather today!
The missionary life is a very good life. You get to help so
many people come closer to Christ, and make huge changes in their life for the
better. One of those this week was in Sunday School, where Sister Waterman was
teaching us about the Word of Wisdom. Frosina shared her personal testimony of
it, and then citing me as helping her to discover her ability to choose to quit
with the coffee. It was a very feel good, humbling moment. There are so many
awesome people here.
Elder Rigby
