Miracles from working with members

Here's the new blog update:

Elder Christiansen (our district leader, who goes home in ten days) has been focusing a lot on how weekly planning should go, particularly how we can use weekly planning to help align the keys between the missionaries and the members. Yesterday we felt prompted to call our ward mission leader - Brother Johnson - in the afternoon to check in with him about our plans for the day. We did not have any set appointments for Sunday, which is unusual for us. We let him know that we hoped to see Nicki G and Matthew H, as well as Sister Robertson. We asked him if there was anyone else he thought we should see.

Calling him was an act of faith. We were pretty confident in our plans, but we have learned enough about Brother Johnson to know that he wants to feel included. And he should be! He's the ward mission leader! We were not sure if he was going to give us any feedback that would change our course of action, but we wanted to be more like the missionaries in the Preach My Gospel DVDs (who called their ward mission leader every day to report on their work).

Brother Johnson said that he would LOVE to go see Nicki and Matthew with us. We were humbled by his willingness to give up his Sunday afternoon to go teaching with us. We arranged to knock on his door at 4 PM so that he could follow us to Nicki and Matthew's home.

Because of the prompting (from the Holy Ghost) to call Brother Johnson, we were able to:

1.Show Brother Johnson that we cared about him and wanted to involve him.
2. Invite the Spirit into three different homes because of the powerful, real testimony of a non-missionary.
3. Get the mother of one of our investigators to open up to us and share her concerns.
4. Find a new investigator.
5. Invite said new investigator to be baptized in the first lesson.
6. Have a positive, genuine interaction with the non-member husband of one of our returning members.
7. Help Brother Johnson make contact with a man who might hire him to do some remodeling work (which would help the Johnson family financially).
8. Teach two lessons to investigators with an active member present.
9. End the week with 19 lessons taught.

I know that working with ward leaders (instead of above them) is the will of God. I know that I need to do a better job in the future of communicating with and seeking guidance from my local leaders. I know that the principle of repentance allows me to assess my life on a continuing basis and make changes where I need to.

New Apartment in Natchitoches

Well, we finally got to move into our new apartment.  My new address is:

Sister Ryan Palmer
810 Woodyard Dr
Apartment 2
Natchitoches, LA 71457

 

It is a two-story, one-bedroom, one-bath apartment that has its own little dock along the Cane River Lake.  Two weeks ago, our mission president came up to Natchitoches for a Specialized Training/District Council and he checked out our apartment to make sure it was kosher.  He told us that we should have district meeting out on the dock some time!  Sister Hartshorn thinks he was joking, but I don't know why he would joke about something like that. 

We spent a fair amount of time cleaning our new apartment, since the previous tenants didn't clean it very well before leaving, and the landlord lives 90 minutes away, in Alexandria.  Our refrigerator and freezer were keeping things warmer than room temperature, so we called our landlord and got a new refrigerator delivered on Saturday.  It doesn't smell at all, unlike the old one, which had formerly frozen corn and green beans developing some pretty cool bacterial and fungal colonies.

 

We helped a less-active convert to our church move on Friday.  Her trailer park was closing down because the cess pool was getting out of hand.  She moved a quarter of a mile up the road into a much nicer trailer.  What kills me is that we went over every other day for a week before her move and helped her clean and pack, but she apparently didn't do any packing on her own.  Admittedly, she didn't have any boxes to move her stuff, so there wasn't much she could do.  The elder's quorum and young men helped her move, along with one of the counselors in the bishopric.  Brother Clark was pretty frustrated by how much work still remained to be done.  The cool thing was that when I was in Metairie, one of our recent converts - Claudia M- asked us to help her good friend (a non-member) move from her family's house to a one bedroom apartment.  Claudia's friend was a hardcore hoarder.  She refused to throw away moldy potatos.  Her clothes stank.  She didn't have enough room in her old bedroom to hang them up or fold them, so they just got thrown on the floor and on top of each other.  However, this friend was the daughter of professional movers, and so she taught us a "mover's trick" for moving unorganized stuff.  (It's not really that fancy of a trick...you just lay a bedsheet on the ground and fill it with stuff.  Then you tie non-adjacent corners to each other and make the sort of bag a hobo would use.)

Helping Claudia's friend in Metairie meant that I was prepared for Nicole's trailer on Friday.  I knew exactly what to do.  We put all of her bedsheets in a pile so that we could fill each bedsheet, one by one, with clothing, shoes, DVDs, books, and dolls.  When the men were transporting her big stuff (e.g. washing machine, dining room table, etc), we sisters did what women do best: we cleaned and organized.  By the time they came back, we had about 9 bedsheets worth of stuff ready to be loaded in the back of Brother Clark's horse/mule trailer. 

President Rasmussen (our Elder's Quorum President) was really appreciative.  It kinda surprised me.  I mean, all we did was put clothes in bedsheets. 

After about 2 hours, the move was completed and President Rasmussen, his son Wyatt, and the young men left for a camping trip.  We were concerned that leaving at 5 PM was not going to be enough time for them to make it to camp and set up their tents before sunset, but I guess they did alright.  They walked 20 miles the following day (Saturday)! 

Yesterday, I told Brother Martin (one of the Young Men's leaders) that I would have paid $20 to hike 20 miles, and he told me, "Well, you give me the money, and we'll get you set up!  Anything to make a buck!"