Well
A lot of what i would say is in my letter to president, so I'll be inserting that in here somewhere.
Monday and Tuesday were busy and full of giving pictures and things to members before Elder Poppleton went to be DL in Sibu in my old area! He'll love it there. Wednesday morning he flew out before I drove down the road to Batu Kawa.
Here it is:
Dear President
Thank you so much for the opportunity to serve in the capacity as a zone leader with Elder O'Bryant. He is extremely methodical, intelligent, and efficient, and I have so much to learn from him. It's been so good so far that we've jokingly hoped to both stay in this area until we leave the mission field, but obviously you have the right to that revelation :-) Your questions should cover our week pretty well.
What am I doing to increase my faith?
Honestly, the transfer itself increased my faith. Batu Kawa is a much nicer area then Stampin and the member base is so much more founded. Elder O'Bryant and I spent a while doing nothing but getting all parts of our daily schedule to be the most efficient possible. It was an intensive process, but we maximized our nightly planning, weekly planning, reporting, lesson planning, scheduling, and basically everything else. Even how to make Sacrament a more holy experience.
Since we have been doing that, we have been finding potentials every day and all the formerly stagnating investigators have picked up in their progress. Elder O'Bryant put it best last night when he said that the biggest miracle is that we have literally been experiencing the Spirit in every part of our work. We even received a referral last night from a family, Bro. Ifan and Sister Mariana, that we have been teaching in the form of a relative that is living with them for work. His name was Anthony, and he has already read 3rd Ne. 11.
What ways am I encouraging the members to participate in missionary work?
We have been doing a lot.
-Nightly we sms our branch mission leader, telling him about our lessons and asking any questions.
We met with Bro. Govin and his family, long time members, and had a great discussion about the branch and its needs. He also had fellow shipped a man named Sultan before, and said he would invite him over to dinner the next week so we could meet him.
-Our new member lesson focus is to do family history work with them, as many of our members we attended the family history fireside recently. After discussing best how to do that, we prayed and felt simply to help them until the spirit of Elijah kicks in.
Needless to say, we are excited and very motivated. Already so many little miracles have been coming, we are very excited to see what this next transfer brings!
We ever pray for you!
-Elder Christensen
2 more cool miracles: We have an investigator named Katrina who is extremely intelligent, she reads the Kitab Mormon and understands it perfectly. Her father had passed away when she was young, but we promised she could meet him again through the plan of salvation. We have a member following to her next lesson, Paul, R.M., son of Govin, and it would be really funny if they got together.
We were biking to an appointment when Elder O'Bryant felt to go check out a neighborhood he'd never visited before. There was nobody there and we didn't feel impressed to go anywhere, so we continued. When we arrived we found a man from our potential sheet that we had called the day before but had no other information. He had only been there for a couple minutes already.
