Lehi's Dream

March 25, 2013

Alright so this was a pretty good week.

Last Monday we had another lesson with the C family. We finished teaching them the Plan of Salvation using this graphic that President Calderwood made for all of the companionships. They weren't very impressed. Luckily we were able to recover the lesson because the wife told a story of about 25 years ago, when she was extremely sick and had one of those next-world experiences. She said most people describe it as a beautiful world that they don't want to come back from, but that was not what she experienced. She said everything was more or less covered with a mist of darkness. She described it as a cloud or smoke but mist works a little better. And all of the people she saw were really ugly and mean looking  and when she woke up she changed her life around. She started being kinder to people and just trying to be a better person. Then last week she was about to tell us that she wasn't interested anymore but then she had another dream in which her son died, and went to that world she remembers, and when she woke up she had a super strong feeling that she needed to keep learning from us. So then we changed the lesson to Lehi's dream and talked about how following the iron rod leads us out of those mists of darkness. So even though they weren't too impressed with the Plan of Salvation it ended up being a really good lesson. Then we taught them again on Wednesday planning on teaching faith from Alma 32. Then at the start of the lesson they started to talk about how they are struggling to understand what the Book of Mormon is talking about and about gaining a testimony of it, so we decided to teach to that out of Alma 32. Yay, flexibility of allegories.

On Thursday we had a mission conference in which two people from the missionary department in Salt Lake who work very closely with the prophets and help make all the missionary materials such as Preach My Gospel and all of the pamphlets came to give us training. It is amazing how much research the church does. They have so many statistics from all over the world about different techniques we can use and all sorts of stuff. So it was a really good training. I especially liked how they talked about the different pieces of Preach My Gospel and why it was included. They would say things like, "One morning we got a call from Pres. Packer who told us that we need to put this in that section." It is incredible how much hands on work the prophets put into that book.

Those were the most exciting things from this week.

The street sweeps are still going alright. Never any great successes but still worth the time.   And we are still trying very hard to get members to all of our lessons. It is just not always an easy thing.

And Happy Birthday Dad! I know how you feel about starting to feel old. Last Monday after I emailed I realized that it was my 6 months til fly-out mark.  That made me feel really old.

Well I think that's about it for this week.

Love you all,
Elder Pearce