Email from Elder Lofthouse 3/24/14 God is Good

Good news:  This week was better.  I know that as we keep diligently working to improve, the blessings of the Lord come.

In our district meeting on Tuesday, we talked about leaving commitments and following up effectively.  Preach My Gospel says we should have daily contact with every one of our investigators.  Most of us have always just kind of ignored that part because it seems so impossible.  We role-played doing a two minute visit with someone to follow up with a commitment and made a gameplan in our companionships for how we were going to improve our leaving of commitments.  We've suddenly become very busy trying to follow up with every commitment every day.

Then, on Thursday we had Zone Conference.  It was one of the best we've had.  We talked about some statistcs:  In order to get one baptism, we have to find 48 new investigators through our own efforts.  In order to get one baptism, we only need 5 member referrals.  And for investigators found that are referred through members, if they are taught in the members' homes, 2 out of 3 of them will get baptized.  He had 48 of us stand up and form a line around the chapel to illustrate just how much more effective finding through the members is.

The next day in weekly planning we really focused on helping investigators come to church. We determined who would be good fellowship for each investigator and planned to have a member present at every single lesson. We haven't had a ton of success so far, but we're sure that we're going to be getting a lot more member present lessons over the next couple weeks. 

Then, on Saturday I had one of the best exchanges of my mission with Elder Orndorff. We found 2 new investigators, set 2 new baptismal dates (one of which is really solid) and taught 7 quality lessons.  Our exchange went fromSaturday morning to Sunday morning, so we went out together with a member before church to invite people to church and give rides. We had 8 people who we were expecting to be there! And we woke up one investigator, Michael, waited for him to get ready, and he came to church for the first time in a very, very long time! We only had 3 of those 8 at church, but 3 is a lot more than the 0 we've had the last 4 weeks.

Right now we have 5 solid baptisms set up for April. 4 of those are the Q family. M is still recovering, and was planning on coming to church on Sunday but right before she came she started feeling really sick and didn't make it. but in one week she should be back to 100% and then the family will be well on their way to baptism on the 6th of April!  The other one is R.  I'll tell you more about him next week.

I'm looking forward to this week. I feel busier than I've ever been on my mission but it's a productive kind of busy. We had 5 progressing investigators this week and part of that is because of our attempts to follow up daily on every commitment. Our ward is getting more excited about missionary work and the ward council is really trying harder to actively visit both investigators and less-actives and make game plans to help this ward progress. It's good to be a missionary in Madera! I would really like to spend the rest of my mission here.

I love you all so much!  And I just want to say that if you're every struggling or feel like you carrying a heavy burden, for any reason, don't be afraid to turn to your Priesthood leaders.  They can help!  I probably had a 10 minute meeting with President Gelwix after Zone Conference and felt so, so much lighter afterward.  If you need it, go get help!  Don't struggle on your own.

Anyway, I hope you all have a great week!

Elder Lofthouse