Time just keeps on flying by... This coming week is the last week of the transfer which means that a week from today, we will find out if there is a transfer in the Basud companionship. I could be moving to my next area this week. I feel like I just got to Basud...
This week was pretty great. We basically just crank out the finding all day every day here. It is pretty great. We have been really focusing on getting specific return appointments and it has been really good for us. We still aren't quite teaching quite as much as we'd like to be, but I feel like we are doing pretty well.
I want to tell the story of one of the families we are now teaching. We were tracting through one part of our area while looking for a less active member whose name we found on the mls. No one seemed to know him or be interested in what we had to share. Most of the people we talked to there didn't even listen to us long enough to hear our names... It was pretty dang discouraging, especially because of how nice people usually are to us. We finally came to one woman who told us to ask someone else because she wasn't from there. She ended up pointing us to a really old looking lola who is probably from around there. We went and said hello to the nice lola. She told us that her name and has a child that is a missionary like us (It turns out he is a Catholic missionary, but that is still ok, because she said she has a daughter or granddaughter who is a member of our church.) She didn't know the person we were looking for, but she invited us to dinner for one of the next days and said that we could share with her then. She is super super nice. We ended up having a delicious dinner and an awesome lesson. We taught her along with a group of her great-grandchildren. There is a picture of us with them in the Skydrive, I think it is the 4th to the last.
There is also some good news for Basud. Bishop has been thinking a lot about the unit and, as it turns out, is on the same page as us. He was thinking about how helpful it would be for Basud to have its own meeting house. He said that he is going to try to talk the Stake President into putting in an application for Basud to become a group first. We have a requirement in the Philippines (I think) that you have to have 50 members to become a branch. I also had an interview with President this week and he recommended the group first philosophy too. Hopefully things will all go through with that.
My interview with President Reeder was really great. I really appreciate his inspired leadership of our mission. I felt like the theme of my interview was just basically to not get discouraged because the Lord is pleased with our work in Basud. It was really good to hear that from him. I don't feel super discouraged with the work, and I don't feel like I get discouraged very easily.
To end on a higher note, I really have high hopes for Basud. I really love it here and will be sad to leave if my time comes this week, but I think it will be ok as well.
Thank you so much for your continued support. I really appreciate your advice and everything. I really liked the email that Craig Gillespie sent me. It was about how no one likes trials, but they are really a blessing and we wouldn't grow without them. I know that this is true, even though as Craig said in his letter, sometimes we “look through a glass darkly” (1Cor13:12)...
I love you tons!
Have a wonderful week!
Elder Benjamin Merrill
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