Monday, March 9, 2015

march 9, 2015 letter

This week was super good, the only bad thing was that on Saturday, we had 7 member presents set up, which has to be some kind of record for this mission. but sadly almost all of them fell through.  We ended up losing 2 of them due to sickness and more due to members not being able to go at the last minute, but it was still super good none the less!

Some exciting news is that we put a man and his wife on date to be baptized the first Sunday of April!!(: We had given them 3 nephi 11 which talks about how we need to be baptized, and when we asked him this last lesson how his reading was, he said that he really liked it and realized that he needed to be baptized. We are only ever able to see him once a week, so keep us in your prayers that we will be able to teach him everything in 4 more lessons before his baptism and that they will be ready for it! We are super excited for them (:

We had a meeting on Sunday after church where the District leaders and Zone leaders and STL's got together and discussed the needs of the zone. We had graphs and everything printed off of the last year and this year and everything. I was looking at the numbers and pointed out that all of the things are completely backwards.  When we had the most member presents in the month, we had the least baptisms, when we had the least at church we had the most baptisms, and that was so dumbfounding because that went against absolutely everything that we had been taught as missionaries.  We went back and forth with a bunch of ideas as to why the numbers were this way. It was a huge roller coaster back and forth, back and forth of what we could do. and we finally figured it out. The baptisms shot up when we had gone back to the basics. When we made a push for the basics and didn't try to create some crazy plan or idea to fix things, everything improved. It was when we went back to the basics of missionary work that our numbers skyrocketed. So we will be making a huge surge in the next few district meetings and zone meetings on going to the basics, which is in the 12 week training book. (which you probably don't know what that is, but its basically what we use to train the greenies). 

I was thinking about it and wondered why the Lord let us go through that crazy roller coaster ride just to realize that it was the basics that are important? I realized that it was Heavenly Father showing us that it really is the basics that we need to come back to. There doesn't need to be some crazy plan. One thing that I have learned on my mission is that God is a God of simplicity. That's it. He doesn't try to trick us or make things complicated or anything like that. It's straight forward and to the point. I've also learned that God is all powerful and that he literally just wants to give us blessings. He wants to pour blessings out on us. It doesn't take away from his power or drain some "energy source" by giving us blessings. So literally he just wants to bless us all the time, and we are just too blind to realize it sometimes. Whenever we give up something for Him, He will give you something sooo much more than what you had given him because he loves us, and he can. I love it! the Lord has blessed me so much and I love being out on my mission more than anything and I love coming so close to my Savior!
 I love you all! 
Love, Elder Romney (:

Eating (:

At a service project making a "tree house" for a member(: 
We are making cement in this picture!

We went and played Frisbee golf today (:

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