11 Member-Present Lessons!

Dear family and friends,

This week was a miracle week! Let me tell ya! It was pretty amazing.  Elder Jencks and I worked hard and it all paid off for sure. The first few days of the week were kind of lame... Monday nothing happened and then P-day was over. Tuesday I went on exchanges with Elder Svedberg, our district leader. It was a pretty good day, but not a ton of exciting things happened. I was so excited to be on an exchange with him because exchanges usually bring miracles and plus I just love the guy! He's so funny and really is a great person to be around. He's good at showing that he loves everyone and cares a lot about the work. We also had five lessons set up at the beginning of the day. Well, guess how many of those we attended?  None... Not a single one. They all texted us and either rescheduled or cancelled their appointments. That was kind of lame. It gave me a good opportunity to find things to do, which was great. One miracle that did happen that day though is we found a new investigator! His name is Jeff. He is a really, really, shy guy and kind of awkward and weird. I like him! He let us into his home, and he didn't have any furniture. He said that he had gotten rid of it all to promote standing. Apparently sitting is the new smoking. I guess it's really bad for your health or something. So we sat on the ground crisscross applesauce.  Man, I don't think I've ever had such an awkward lesson in my entire life. It was sooooo awkward. He gave the strangest responses to questions.  I could tell he doesn't talk to people very often. I'm excited to be teaching him though! He's pretty interested in the church. The only potential issue I can see with him is he works a ton and only has every third Sunday off, so hopefully he can get it arranged to go to church.

Thursday was an awesome day too. We drove down to the valley to go to a mission conference. Elder Sitati of the seventy came and trained the mission. The biggest thing I got out of his visit was 'learn to love.' He brought pretty much everything back to love and the Atonement. It was really good. One thing that was pretty funny was that he laughed all the time! At one point he told us this:  (I'll put 'ha' in for the laughs.)  "You're doing the Lords work! Ha. This isn't your work, ha, it's the Lords work. Ha. Forget yourself , ha and stop fussing over your weaknesses okay? Ha. Rely on Him ha. It's His work! Ha! Stop fussing over your own weaknesses, put them away and use the Lords strength! Ha! Just do the work and you'll improve! Ha".   He wasn't even saying anything funny, but he had us all laughing, because his laugh was contagious.  It was so much fun to be in that conference with him.  He was a really good speaker.  He's from Africa, so it was somewhat difficult to understand him at first, but after the initial five minutes I had no trouble understanding him. I feel like my ears adapt pretty well to weird accents.

That night we got back to our area around 7 or 7:30.  We went out and tried to find someone to teach. We didn't get into a single door. It was kind of lame.. Oh well!  We finally went home and planned for the next day. We were determined to get our goal of 11 member present lessons. We went out and worked hard, and you know what happened Friday?  Miracles. So many miracles! It was incredible! We contacted Chelcee who we hadn't seen in quite some time…maybe two or three weeks?  When we walked in the door it seemed like everyone had been fighting just before we got there. There was a ton of tension in the room.  We could hardly feel the Spirit. We decided to teach them about faith, how to exercise it, and what we need to do to make our faith even stronger.  It quickly became obvious that the message was not at all what they needed. We tactfully transitioned the lesson into the Atonement and its healing and enabling power. We taught about it powerfully. The tension began to subside. We shared a very powerful Mormon Message with them as well. By the time we prayed and left it was incredible. I would relate the experience to getting home from a tough day of work or school being all stressed out.  You get into the hot tub.  After about 45 minutes in the hot tub your shoulders relax and you feel like plopping on the floor, because all tension in your body has disappeared. It was pretty powerful to see the Spirit working in that home. It was incredible!

That day we got five member present lessons!  We were that much closer to our goal. We now only needed six more lessons in two days. That wasn't nearly as impossible as I had felt like it would be in a mere three days! We continued to press forward on Saturday and we got four more lessons with a member present! We could almost taste our success in meeting our goal. We went out and tried our very hardest to get as many lessons as we could and we got four more! We even taught an investigator we've only met very briefly once and then never got back into contact with. We've been trying to catch her home for over a month; maybe even two. We felt inspired to go over there with Brother Haverland and teach her the Restoration.  She was totally there! The best part is that she had her friend over as well! So we got a new investigator out of that lesson as well. It was a good lesson. Selena seemed pretty interested, but her friend Tiffany seemed kind of hesitant. I think she's pretty active in her own church right now, but she accepted our invitation to read the Book of Mormon. We were at 9 member present lessons at the end of the day!

Sunday came and wow... Talk about a miraculous day. We were speaking in one of our wards, so that was pretty sweet. While we were up on the stand and we kept watching investigator after investigator walk into the chapel. I've never had so many non-members walk into church during my entire mission. We had 9 people there! Next week I'm sure we'll have at least that. We might even get into the double digits too! That would be soooo legit! It was exciting to have so many people there. Elder Jencks even said he'd never had that many investigators show up to church during his whole mission, and he's been out a week short of 24 months!  After church we taught a lesson to Dawn.  It was powerful and the spirit came very strongly. Our ward mission leader came with us to that lesson and he was just who we needed to have at that lesson. He was perfect there. Dawn opened up and expressed a lot of her concerns. We have finally figured out what a lot of them are. The only problem is that they aren't concerns where we can just tell her something or read a scripture to her and they're fixed. It's going to take a lot of prayer and pondering for her to find her answers.  Pray for her. She's a very sweet lady, but is going through a lot of rough stuff right now. At the end of the day we needed one last lesson. Then we remembered that the Haverlands have a kid who isn't a member but is over the age of 9. His mom just won't let him get baptized. We decided to go over and teach a short message to them. It may or may not be cheating, but it made a difference. The message we shared with the family was something that they enjoyed a lot. It was about not judging others. If you haven't seen it, you should watch the Mormon Message called 'Looking through Dirty Windows.' It's a good one. We also helped their daughter carve her jack-o-lantern. It was pretty awesome! I'll have to send a picture of it. It was one good looking pumpkin. It was super easy to carve, but it turned out well. It was so cute. When we were finished with it she said, "I'm going to have the cutest pumpkin I've ever seen now!" She was pretty excited and pleased with it.

We totally reached our goal of 11 member present lessons in three days though!  It was so awesome to see the Lord working in our area and us being able to facilitate miracles; especially so many of them! It was a week I don't think I'll forget easily. It was probably right up there in my top 70 or so weeks…maybe even 5. It was phenomenal. I really enjoyed it. I've never felt so joyous about the work. I've also never felt like I've been making such a difference in other’s lives as I have in this area. Globe is an exciting place to be. The work just keeps increasing. It is just about ready to bust at the seams. I can't wait to see who my new companion is.  Hopefully it's someone who either wants to work hard or wants to improve and get working hard.  Whoever it is, I'm sure it will be just who I need as a companion. I hope everyone has a great week!

Love,
Elder Mullins