Hey all! This week was altogether great, except for a real rough point that I hit mid-week, which I'll talk about! Right now I'm doing great though, and I'm super excited for the weeks and months ahead.
Entering the world of leadership! It's a weird world, full of meetings where we sit in a circle say that we have problems and we're not really sure what to do about it. Welcome to the world of adults! It actually has been fun though, I like being able to think very personally about a group of missionaries and be able to receive revelation in order to help them in any way I can. I appreciate how small the districts are, it really helps me focus in. I also enjoyed coming up with goals for the whole district and teaching the class Wednesday. It forces me to study better! Though it is difficult. The missionaries in the district are spectacular, and all great friends of mine, so I'm pretty dang excited. The only negative thing is the added pressure, which comes with just about every responsibility, especially in the mission. A leader obviously has to be the example, and that pressure is usually good for me, but the way I am sometimes I plunge into feelings of incapability and then get real stressed out because people's success rides on my performance... But I get better!
So Friday Elder Heap (he replaced Elder Cook in the house this change) and I went to Rancagua to go to a training for new leaders in the mission house. It was a fantastic meeting, and I learned a ton. It's also always fun to see my old friend from Santa Cruz, Elder Crane, who's now an assistant. We passed through the hardest transfer of our missions together, and we bonded a ton through it all. So it's always nice to get to talk to him! We got talking about the mission however, and that was the start of the stress. We talked about how nearly half the missionaries are leaving in the next three changes and how the mission is losing it's backbone. Almost all the leaders in the mission are from these groups, and suddenly when they leave the mission is going to be ridiculously young. Since I came here the success of the mission has essentially been on these missionaries shoulders, and I realized that the missionaries my age are reeeeeally going to have to step it up. And for whatever reason, that started getting me stressed. I already felt a lot of pressure to step it up in the week, and it put even more pressure to do so. On top of that, all of our appointments with our investigators fell through, aaaaaaaall of them, including Eugenio and María José, the new awesome ones. As a result, none of our investigators were at church this Sunday, and the baptismal dates of three investigators fell because they weren't at church. And there were a few other things too that I can't go too into because they have to do with the house and the district and the branch and other things. But there were a lot of things! And I got extreeeemely stressed out. Probably more stressed than I've ever been.
But then I remembered something! When we're true disciples of Christ, and we have the assurance that we're trying, it just doesn't matter. I told my comp about how I felt too and he said something super wise ''When we spend our missions trying to acquire the attributes of Christ, we'll find that little else really matters. Ever other statistic falls into unimportance.'' And I loved that! Faith, virtue, knowledge, obedience, diligence, charity and love, and patience basically consist of everything that we're trying to become in this world, and on our missions, and if we're trying to develop those things, everything just naturally falls into place. The visible fruits of our efforts fall into unimportance when compared with the effects we don't see when we try to follow Jesus Christ. And that's the important thing! And I bore my testimony of that very principle that day in Sacrament meeting.
I love you all! Have a great week!
Love
Elder Fox
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