No effort is wasted

Family and friends,


We've been doing mostly finding and working with members. We’ve been teaching quite a few less active families and we had some of them come to church this past week.

Glad to hear you enjoyed the temple dedication! Good news for us is that our mission president changed the rules so now instead of going to the temple once every six months it’s once every three months or every other transfer! How exciting!

Food of the week! I went to the store and found three bread pans for 98 cents they were aluminum so I bought two packs and made 9 loaves of Cinnamon raisin bread. It was super good and I put some in the freezer and handed a couple out. We also ate dinner last night and had the best meatloaf I’ve ever had. Probably because it had chunks of bacon in it. It was really good.

This week we sat and listened to President and Sister Bubert and Sister and Elder Zwick for 7 hours. I’ll try and get the whole story in before I run out of time... so to start off, a week earlier we were all told to pick out a principle from Preach My Gospel and that we may be chosen to share with the mission. My companion and I chose one and after we studied and worked really hard on preparing a thirty minute lesson, I really felt like we were going to be asked to share our principle. However, I decided to tell my companion there's no way we would give it. I did this because he gets really nervous when he has to talk to groups of people larger than 3 and he can't think straight for the week. We weren't told how long it needed to be but we figured it wouldn't be more than thirty minutes. So we get there and Elder Zwick shakes all of our hands and talks to each person individually. Then Elder Zwick explains how we are going to teach it, which was different than what we had planned. I run back through the notes we made and pick out a couple points. He calls on three people to share there topics and yes, we were asked to share.

If you don't remember the name you'll remember the talk, in general conference a couple years back Elder Zwick gave a talk and in it he shared a story about a boy who asked, “Do I need to lower my standers to make more friends?” That part of the story he shared with us, but I’ll have to write to you about the rest and then maybe you could type it up and send it out as the rest of my e-mail. Thanks

Elder yeaman's quote of the week. "No effort is wasted"

Explanation: This is the topic we chose and were randomly selected to share at mission conference. It’s the last page of chapter nine in Preach My Gospel. There are two stories I have to go along with it. 1- The first week in my first area we handed out a pass-a-long card to this person and invited her to call it. FYI - pass-a-long cards normally end up in the garbage and we find a lot of the ones we hand out torn up and thrown in the street. However, my last week in my first area we got a referral from headquarters (the people who answer the phone when some one calls the number on the back of a pass-a-long card) we go and stop by the house. It was the same lady and house we had left the card at. That was six months later! 2- There was this person in my last area we found who was taught before by missionaries and because they taught him, we were able to find him in the formers file and he later was baptized and just received the aaronic priesthood a couple weeks ago. The effort the first missionaries made about I year before I ran into them was not wasted, they simply planted the seed. As members we have such an influence on those around us. It may not seem like it at the time, but no effort is wasted! Just make an effort to share the gospel with those around you and you will be blessed. It may not happen immediately or in 6 months or even a year. It is worth the effort.

Love,

Elder Yeaman