Dear Family and Friends,
I just got a knock on the door while starting this email and guess what came? My Hump Day package from my Family!! It was so wonderful!! I love them all so much!!
This week was such a wonderful week!! It was one of the craziest and most spiritual weeks, but I feel like next week will be just as crazy for me! So I hope that y'all with love some of the things I learned in this week!!
To start off I wanted to share a scriptures that I found while studying the Book of Mormon this morning! 1 Nephi 13:24, 26, 29, 32, 35, and 40! This is the reason we have the Book of Mormon, and i want to share it with everyone!! I know that the Book of Mormon is true with all my heart!
Here is how my week went!
Week May 30-June 5 2016
Monday:
Today was a wonderful day!
We were finally able to go and relax for pday at a nice fiesta at Hno. Carias' house where we had the most wonderful Tacos in the world!! I Have come to the conclusion that I am in love with Sausage tacos! After the fun fiesta we went to the church on 8 th Avenue and played ultimate frisbee for a while and then went inside to cool off and finish up some emails!! And then as we were sitting there, elder Broberg, the other zone leader, and one of my best of mission friends, asked if I wanted to go and play the piano and help him out. So we went in and made our own version of "Come to Zion" and the other song was Nearer my God to thee, and he we mixed them together, and made a beautiful song that still needs work, but sounds wonderful!! I had a wonderful time and then we were able to get back to work and find and teach a less active family tonight by the name of De la Cruz. They were vey sweet and they don't come to work, because the Hno. Works on Sundays. So we taught a small lesson and they are the driest mor,one ever. They do everything by come to church!! And I really love them!! He wife cried as we taught and she bore her testimony and said she wants to come back, just with a little time!! Then as we went home we got home and Facetimed the other Zone Leaders in Fort Worth North and planned a few things coming up, and it was amazing to know we could do it over FaceTime!! What a blessing we have!! Today was wonderful!!
Tuesday:
What a wonderful and wet day it has been today!! So today we went for a run for our workout and it was wonderful being in the fresh air and feeling the humidity kick in!! I wasn't even running and I was already just wet and sweaty feeling!! But the crazy thing is right when we got inside, a huge storm hit and there was crazy lightning and thunder and a lot of rain!! It lasted most of the day and I was the designated driver for the day, and I love driving in the rain! So today after our studies, we were able to go and give service at the Tarrant County Food Bank again and today we were sorting cans and grocery items that were donated and it was a never ending process, but lots of fun!! Come to find out, they have enough donated to stuff to sort through for at least 4 months and so that is what we will be doing for a while! After Service we headed to the house to change where I got my package from my parents and I am so grateful for the things they sent and for them just caring for me!! As we got dressed we went and had dinner at the Viera families home and just had the original Pizza from Little Caesars and then went to another home where we taught the recently converted Trujillo family and they also fed us Tostadas! I was so stuffed and our lessons was so wonderful! We talked about the Priesthood and Hermilo Trujillo just looked at us and said, "nothing you say to me that is from the scriptures will I deny, because I have a testimony of them, so I am ready to learn as much as I can and then to act." When he said that, I knew he was converted!! And he is so ready to be sealed to his wife Bianca!! Also when we left his house we realized that he is a big hugger and won't let you leave without a hug!! So this evening has been very crazy. Usually we just plan, but tonight we are collecting SMC reports for the zone and collecting Monthly mile reports and a few other things and the rest of the week will be just as packed!! I love it so much!
Wednesday:
Holy cow it has been a very crazy day for us! So today we had a huge amount of things to do! We had to go to the church and send our monthly zone miles to the mission office, and we had District Meeting along with our SMC reports (Stake Missionary Coordination Report) and then we had a wonderful night finding people and teaching people! Today with all this stuff going on I could not keep myself awake and kept falling asleep, and there was a really sad thing that happened to us today while typing our report!! We were about 2 hours into our report when the computer shut down and when it came back up, everything didn't save and was lost!! So we were starting from scratch and now have to plan time out of our day tomorrow to finish it!! Then to add onto that, we were checking our car when we found a nail sticking out of the tire, so that is one more thing to put on our schedule for the next few days!! Really it was a wonderful day and we actually were eating dinner tonight when we were at a members house and we found a new investigator!! It was the members son in law, and he had so many questions and wanted to know what we believed and why!! It was a crazy cool experience!! I hope that we get some sleep to be able to go about our even crazier week tomorrow!! And I never said, but this week is called Spirit Week because of how many meeting and busy things we have going on!!
Thursday:
Well today was quite the rough day for us! I feel like we didn't get a lot done, because as missionaries you always measure success on the people you find and teach or the Books of Mormon that you hand out, but sadly today we didn't get any handed out and no one wanted to listen to us?
Today we went to the church after our studies to really finish up the SMC report and it took us roughly 3 hours to complete, but we did it!! And it looked really good!! As we were doing it, the other zone leaders from the north zone came in and talked with us about making a different report that doesn't take as long, and it was a brilliant idea and it would be something that the stake could use to the best of their ability instead of just looking at these and throwing them away! However, after finishing that we had dinner and started our weekly planning for about an hour, but had to stop to go and get our tire fixed as well and it was a long process!! But as we finished we went out for the evening to find people to teach and no one was interested in listening, so it was a huge struggle, but we won't give up!!!
Friday:
Wow today was an amazingly powerful day! We started off our day in Hurst at 9 o'clock at MLC with President Ames, which is the mission leadership Council, where we talked about the needs of the mission, how we could better ourselves and those around us, and I would say it was one of the most uplifting and most exhausting days in the mission, because it was so spiritual! I can say it was just below being in the temple, because you could just feel God helping you with the plans of ye mission and he things that he wanted you to do to better those in your stewardship!! These were just a few notes from a early meeting!
Zone Leadership Training:
Fake Work:
There is an administrative side in the church and a ministering side.
Never focusing on administering.
* Looking busy and not getting anything done. Fake work.
This is destructive!
Administration:
- Collecting Numbers
- Have numbers in at 9 o'clock from district leaders and 10 for the Zone leaders.
- Call district leaders Sunday Morning to remind them about numbers. Don't let them fail.
- Name Sheet needs to be neat and clean.
- Use the numbers to be a minister. (Discuss it often with your companion.)
* Loose yourselves in the service of others and it will come back to you!
Exchanges:
- They go best when you set expectations and then goals at the end! Have a full purpose day!
How to be a good leaders:
- train your leaders, especially district leaders! Help them catch your vision!
- We need to make our area like Camelot! So that everyone can want that same area!
My calling and how it came about:
He reason that you are a zone leaders is because you are ready. There is not a ladder in the mission! President felt, was inspired and was impressed that I be a leader. And I am here for God to develop me!
- You don't have to be a zone leader to have an experiences. We are inspired by our covenants, not our leaders!
Leadership in the church:
Why do we do it to ourselves by letting us think we might be a leader!?
- the spirit is telling us we could
- We think that the calling we have makes us good with God!
- remember how Satan wanted to rule! One step at a time!!
Parables of the lost sheep:
- I wish I would lost so he would come for me too!
If you have that thought, you are not one of the 99, because they would shout with the angels of Heaven!
We are establishing a foundation to help president Whitney!!
- show the Whitneys what a glorious place this is!
Love God and do all, not parts , because that is fake work!
Best way of Setting Goals:
- Share everything with our wards so that they become connected to our goals.
- set goals in the apartment and then in zone councils discuss how you are going to achieve that!
How to go about correcting:
- be careful that you don't correct someone because you are irritated. (Not feeling love joy and peace)
- Don't correct them until you have a relationship with them. (5 positive experiences before you correct them!)
- Build trust through love.
- Be clear and direct with them, honest. So that they know you believe.
- Show forth an increase of love
Being the one with less experience,
- be bold
- It is okay to correct
- Be careful, because they are the senior.
A lot of random, but it really touched me!! And the MLC lasted all day with a lunch I between!! Also something I love that our mission does is that after someone brings in food from a ward for the missionaries, because we have the relief societies that make us food for our meetings, we sing them 2 songs!! The first on is, Because I have been given much and lead right into Called to serve and switching out the second to last sentence of the song to say, "Forward, Texas Fort Worth, as the triumph song we sing!" And it brings so much tears to my eyes and makes me want to shout Hurrah for Israel!!! I love the mission!! And our meetings didn't get out until around 4! They we amazing!!!
Saturday:
I learned something very profound today! A hard heart is not easily softened! So today was a very crazy and wonderful day for us! We had our first DLC together, where we as zone leaders teach the district leaders, in a meeting, what president Ames taught us!! It was a lot longer than expected, but very necessary to make they share they understood exactly what president Ames had received from the leaders over him and also what the lord said to him through the Holy Ghost! So one of the things that I loved the most about what we were teaching was a topic called the tree. This is how we taught it. "Draw a tree please." Then everyone draws their trees, and then we said, " now show us your trees, why are they all different!??" Because there was no detail given or questions asked!! And that really helped me and the missionaries understand how important a leader is in this mission and how important it is that they relay the message perfectly from President all the way down!! I love my District leaders and I love my Zone!! Also this evening I received an email from my mom telling me that my good cousin Jaden Stone just opened his mission call and is going to Honduras on August 24th!!! I am so excited and emotional for him and the journey he will have in learning Spanish and going foreign!! I already have planned to go visit his mission with him after his mission because we will both speak Spanish!!!! I love him and so grateful for the example he is to me!! And really just all my cousins have been for me, no matter where they are at right now in their lives!!
Sunday:
Today was such a wonderful day for the both of us!! It has just been wonderful to work with my companion and I have just felt so blessed to have him as my companion! So today we had wonderful meetings at church and then I was really able to get to know the members a lot more and really understand them better as I listened to their testimonies!! We have wonderful members and I love all of them so much!! Today we also had a lot of the unsustainable less active members show up and it was such a wonderful time to have them come!! So about half way through church we had to leave to go to our SMC meeting in the stake center, and it was so wonderful to be in a meeting with the Stake President Rhodes and also his leaders and President Petersen!! I felt like I was very blessed to be apart and be able to serve my missionaries even more by discussing their needs in this meeting!! After church we went to a few people to visit them and we actually got into a man we have been trying with for a long time, and he finally let us in and we shared the Book of Mormon and also found out that he has liver cancer and is sick, but it was amazing that as we were telling him we had to leave he looked at us and said, "when are you coming back? And I don't have your number!!" It was a wonderful feeling!! Really I am so grateful to be in Texico!! I love it with all my heart even when it is hard!
Con Amor,
Elder Spendlove
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