Elder Nissinen: Sowing and Harvesting

Dear family and friends,

This week was a nice payoff!

The kids are so lovable.
They climb all over us and rub out hair and pet our arms.
I will miss the kids!

As you can tell, for several weeks now our proselyting strategy is less-actives. We've been hitting the LA's (less actives) in the ward HARD, and we've gotten to know a majority of our ward's members. within just 5 weeks.

In doing this, we know it is successful and a better use of our time, yet up to last week our seeds hadn't been blossoming yet. (As experienced missionaries, we know most of our work in the Garden of the Gospel is planting seeds with a little bit of harvesting.) This week was a great payoff in our LA efforts! We found two families that aren't the most active. One hadn't been to church in years, and was formerly in the Bishopric. We had a lovely visit with them, and learned that their daughter is well old enough to be baptized, but is not! We plan to baptize her next month. The other family is the same situation. Both families have been to church two weeks in a row. We feel that their child's baptism might be the thing that will bring them both back to the gospel. Exciting!

For future missionaries:

See why merely street or door-to-door contacting is such a waste of time? Working around members is so much more effective. Visit the members (less-active and active) and soon you'll gather in more referrals than you can manage - as you discover their friends, neighbors, and even non-member family members of the same house. The best part about this type of contacting is that you'll have a member to attach to the non-member, someone to encourage them to pray, read, and attend church meetings. Simply knocking on doors gets you no member friend or family member to support that person. Get it? Remember it! It took me too long to realize that truth. This week alone we found 10 new investigators, and not one single instance were we "street contacting".

Well, that's about it for our week. We had a decent rain storm Saturday evening, so that was all it took for our investigators to excuse themselves out of church Sunday. But we'll get 'em this week!

In a lesson with Rhoda, she shared that she felt she would be more prepared for her baptism if she had a little more time, so together we bumped her date up to next month (which will be with some others, I hope).

We also had the opportunity last week to do two service projects, and that was really fun. We cut tree branches into firewood for a member, and taught English at a library. It's really nice to catch a break from normal missionary work and help others in the community.