This week was a very very unique time for us, everything is changing here so I'll do my best to explain.
This week, was Halloween and there was tons and tons of meetings for us. With District Meeting, Zone Conferences, Interviews and MLC it was a battle to work! But all these meetings lead to an understanding that we need a change.
Halloween in The Long Beach CA mission means from 6 to 9 you stay in and deep, deep clean your apartment. Kind of of a joy-kill but always a need. The whole day of Halloween we had MLC, which is where all the Zone Leaders and the STLs and the APs and President and his wife all get together and discuss what the mission needs. It's a meeting that lasts from 10am to 5pm. A long time of pure spiritual awesomeness. Usually when we go to those meetings its a lot of trainings that are given or we give to others. Stuff that we think we need to have worked on in the mission.
This time was totally different.
It started out normal with the usual training. Right after the first training, it was time to make and set goals for the mission. We usually push up the number of certain key indicators that we focus on, but this time...none of us were feeling it. There was no spirit behind it...we all knew that there was some things that really really needed to change in the mission. None of us were having it with the goals that we have set and we wanted a new start. A blank page you could say. So President being the amazing man that he is, took the whole agenda of the MLC and threw it away and for the whole day we discussed and came up with the fact that the mission is lacking faith, and we need to bring it back up. But how? That's what we talked about. After all was said and discussed, with so many true firm testimonies shared and tears cried and ideas on the table. We knew we could change the mission, together. We came up with 3 main things that the whole mission will together.
1. We will all read the Book of Mormon all together by Dec 31st. The whole mission, how cool is that???
2. We are going to pray every single missionary at 6:30am and 10:00pm for a specific purpose to have out eyes opened to the miracles around us.
3. We are going to write down EVERY NIGHT the miracles that we saw in a journal.
How cool is all this? The whole mission will grow so much faith. Along with that, there are things that we are needed to do as the Zone Leaders. President wants all us of to talk to all the Elders in our Zone one on one. To get to know them and help them establish visions they have individually to help the whole mission grow. It's an ingenious way of approach. We individually work together to grow the Work of the Lord. We are now focusing completely on new goals, usually we were focusing on finding and member present lessons, now that's not a focus, we know now that importance of it. We are now shooting high for investigators with a baptism date, investigators at church and progressing investigators. These 3 key indicators are what really shows if someone is truly ready and wanting to be baptized. We also set an AWESOME new goal for how many baptisms we need to have for the end of the year. 60 days.
President did not want this new revelation for the mission to wait to be heard. So he did emergency Zone Meetings, from 6-8pm we would clean the apartments but from 8-9pm we would get the zone together and announce the new Culture of the Mission. Before we got the whole zone together we went and bought little journals for all the missionaries in our zone so they could have an official miracle journal. We called them up and told them to meet at the church at 8. Everyone was freaking out and wondering what was going on. Everyone thought it was iPads. HA! Yeah right. So at 8pm we started the meeting. The same feeling that was there in the MLC was there in that emergency meeting on Halloween night at 8pm. The Elders in the zone are just awesome. I love them all so much and I loved to see their faith just increase so fast. They are all pumped! We got to sit down with them and really help them out!
I wish y'all could have seen all the elders at church this week ready the Book of Mormon so much. It was great.
Overall this mission is going to change so much. Elder Calle and I really wanted to be an example since Friday the Lord blessed and we got to find 5 new investigators and set baptismal dates with 6 people! How cool! We had a bunch of people come to church too!
I love you all so much and i hope that y'all have a great week!
Elder Schooff
No comments:
Post a Comment