June 24, 2013

It has been a good week, started slow but picked up. We did a lot of tracting at the beginning of the week because we couldn't get people to meet with us or they would just fall through on their appointments at the last minute. When this happens we knock doors.. so there was a lot of that this week but we were able to start meeting with more people near the end of the week and had missionary meetings that took away from tracting time.  There was a worldwide missionary broadcast last night by a bunch of the apostles and the prophet talking about changes to missionary work. We are now going to use computers more. Facebook, ipads, i'm not sure on all the details but things are changing. They also focused again heavily on getting away from tracting and having the members responsible for finding the people to teach with the missionaries forcusing on being the primary teachers. I gave a talk in church yesterday! Guess who showed up two minutes before the meeting started... President Weston and his wife(mission president)! So they were sitting right behind me while I spoke. The bishop had asked me to get up and talk about myself and why I was on a mission and stuff, I spent about 30 seconds on me. then I spend nine and a half minutes on charity. We have a real problem in this ward with getting the members to do thier callings. Home teaching is at almost nothing, the elders quorum presidency was not represented at church for like three consecutive weeks, and we ask the ward council for things expecting not to get much. So I sorta took my chance to address most of the ward and spoke on what I felt they needed to hear. Introducing myself was not as important as getting a message to this ward. I started with charity and tried to keep love as the central message. I spoke about the two great commandments that Jesus gives in I think mattew 22, love thy God and love thy neighbor. I tried not to preach to them too heavily and offend anyone because they would simply reject me and my words. My goal was to change thier idea of home and visiting teaching. I think I said at noe point that the numbers don't matter, it is about lovng those people. I don't really know what  else I said no recording to listen to this time but I did my classic talk giving method - read a whole bunch of stuff about a topic (turned into a number of topics I read up on this time.. laziness, idleness, home teaching, visiting teaching, ministering, charity, love) sorta started to piece the concept together in my mind and then got up there without a single word written. First thirty seconds were a little rough with the mission president right behind me but I gained stream. Nobody seemed offended which was actually more important to me than getting a strong message to everyone, I need to get inside before I can really make any changes to the core of the ward. Mission president told me good job at the end of the meeting and was much friendlier than the first time I met him when he did not talk much so maybe I did a good job. Thats about all I have hope to hear from you soon,

Elder Robert Wesley Rogers