Tuesday: We had transfers in the morning and surprisingly it wasn’t too hectic! I was with Elder Pearce and Passeraub since Elder Gehrett became the Assistant to the President and was with them starting on Sunday night. I ended up moving apartments within our stake boundaries and we now live with the Bates in the Willow Grove ward. While we were moving stuff into the new apartment Elder Mayberry showed up and we ended up loading all his stuff into the apartment as well. We have a bunch of things to get done in the first week of the transfer as zone leaders and we had to sit down with all our district leaders and go over some expectations with them regarding their responsibilities. We also had to worry about getting everyone their bikes and make sure they are functioning. At night we had to plan for our multi district meeting for Wednesday. Elder Mayberry wasn’t in the MLC (Mission leadership council) but we were able to talk about the things discussed in the meeting and pray and counsel about it and received the revelation we needed to plan the meeting.
Wednesday: We had our multi district meeting in the morning. It was a little hectic at the beginning since we showed up to the building to find out that it was closed for cleaning! Luckily we had all the district leaders coming early to help us set up for the meeting. We just drove over and had the meeting in the bordering stake. Our meeting had two main focus points. The first was to help develop the junior companion. So the mission is structured that every missionary has a companion and within the companionship there is a senior and junior. The senior is mainly the one responsible for what happens in their area. The junior companion is mainly responsible for unity and assistant the senior companion with the work. Junior companion has this taboo about it and if you’re a junior companion you aren’t a good missionary. It is actually the most underrated role in the mission and our mission president wants us to focus on letting the junior companions have more of the spotlight. The other focus was on helping our investigators feel and identify the spirit. We know that the message we share sounds good in all and we may be convincing when we share our beliefs, but we aren’t salesmen trying to sell religion, we are simply inviting others to come unto Christ and they will know and act on the message we have to share only when they receive a witness from the Holy Ghost. It is by far the most important thing we can do to help our investigators in their investigation of the church. We didn’t really get to work in our area before dinner since we had a lot of bike things to do. After dinner I told Elder Mayberry how great one of our apartment complex’s are (Willowcove) and I told him how we can literally walk around and talk to people and they will be willing to listen to our message. Shortly after walking around we ran into a man named Gabe he said he was going to General Conference (Where we hear addresses from our prophet and apostles on TV) with his mom who is investigating the church in Oregon and she was down for the weekend and got tickets to go to the conference center in Salt Lake City. He said he would go to Conference with and open mind and heart and will let us come by next week.
Thursday: We went to go give a missionary companionship a priesthood blessing in the morning and comfort one of them in a trial they were going through. In our mission we are given so many tickets to General Conference and our Mission President prays about how needs to go to which session and Elder Mayberry had the lucky opportunity to be a group leader and take a group of 10-12 missionaries down to General Conference for the Sunday am session. So he had to make all the calls to them and to give them specific details about where to meet up. After that we went to pick up some Elders and take them to a bike shop so they could buy a new tube and tire for their bike while we bought a tube for another missionary. After we got them the things from the bike shop we got a call from the assistants to the President (which was my last companion) We sat down with Elder Pineda and Elder Gehrett and they set some expectations for us for the transfer and some things they wanted to see us do with the missionaries in the zone. We came to the conclusion that there is “strength in counsel” so we will be in more communication with them and counsel on things we can do to help the zone see the most success it can. At night we went out with a ward mission leader and had some good visits. The first visit was with family that just moved in from Europe and we talked a little bit about the Jordan River Temple open house. The one we talked to at the door was super excited to go to the temple as most people would be. After that we visited with the Demke family which so happened to be my next door neighbors when I grew up in Utah. Their daughter invited one of her friends to the youth night where only the youth toured the temple and she loved it and Lauren talked about repentance and baptism and how that’s how we can feel the weight lifted off her shoulders from our mistakes. We will hopefully be meeting with her friend soon so she can have that feeling.
Friday: We had a zone expectation meeting with all the missionaries in the West Jordan Kingdom. We laid out some expectations we had for them and in reality what the Lord expects of them. The expectations were our missionary purpose which is, “Invite others to come unto Christ, by helping them receive the restored gospel, through faith in Jesus Christ and his atonement, repentance, baptism, receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost, and enduring to the end.” We drew up a triangle diagram on the board and it has God and Jesus Christ, us and our investigators. We see that the only things we as missionaries do is Invite and Help. All our purpose really is to help others receive the gospel into their lives. There isn’t anything in our missionary purpose that focuses on our well being, but rather to reach out to others. We don’t come out on our missions for ourselves. We come out on our missions to focus on helping others receive their answer from God about this gospel.
Saturday: General Conference is a time for our living prophet on the earth and his called apostles to speak to us in a whole about the revelations he received from God in all of our behalf. It is broken up into two hour sessions that happen two times on Saturday and Sunday. This conference we had an extra two hour block for just the men and addressing some of the things that will impact the priesthood holders. We watched the Saturday morning session at the Demke’s house and had breakfast with them. There was a talk given by Lynn G. Robbins of the quorum of the 70 He talked about how the savior said to Peter forgive 70 x 7 but that doesn’t mean that we only forgive someone 490 times. We don’t only have 490 times to repent and be forgiven by God and man I am glad that, that isn’t the case! Jesus Christ suffered for us and has paid the price for us and he always has his arms stretched outwards to us, calling us to come unto him. Afterwards we went out to eat at a place called Tiki and talked to a lot of cool Polynesian people who were in from all places in the US coming up for conference. After that we went back to the Demke’s to watch the afternoon session. At night we went to the priesthood session of General Conference at the stake center. It was a great meeting and there were some changes in the organization. It was little scary at the end of the meeting because there was a young man named Saia Lapale (who we usually take out on visits with us) who had seizure. He has epilepsy and he didn’t take his medicine at the time he needed to which caused the seizure. We were with him the whole time with his family and we eventually got him back home and gave him a priesthood blessing.
Sunday: Elder Mayberry dropped me off at the Stauffer’s house (Childhood buddies family) while he went down with other missionaries to go to Conference. I watched the morning session with them and I really enjoyed it because there was a big emphasis on receiving personal revelation for our personal issues and things to help us in our lives. Elder Mayberry came back after Conference and then we ended up going to the Demke’s house again since the Stauffer's had family coming over for Easter. We had a cool night talking to people in the Willowcove apartments we ran into some men named Gilbert and Jose and they have definitely been prepared by God. We didn’t invite them to be baptized at the beginning since they were in a hurry to get the project they were working on done before the sun went down. Luckily the Lord gave us a second opportunity to reach out to Gilbert and he was willing to be baptized. It was a testimony builder that the lord is preparing people for His restored gospel. This Easter season I want to bear my testimony that Jesus Christ lives, he is a resurrected being. He lives and leads and guides this church and I know the Lord leads this church through a prophet and President Russell M. Nelson is God’s called prophet here on the earth. This is the Lords Church and he invites all to come and listen to the message we have to share which is the same message he would share with you.
Hope you all have a wonderful week!
Love,
Elder Aaron Ashby
Pictures: Elder Garcia (AP), West Jordan Zone, Sunrise in WJ
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