Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Letter 01-07-2014

Things are still going well out here in the 801! The snow and ice keeps our adventures exciting whilst riding bikes. (ha i just used whilst)

Sadly tomorrow is transfer day. Elder Mintey is heading over to be with Elder Fussell again (he was with him before he was with me) in my first area, the Midvale Union Fort stake. He's excited, they get along well. I'll have Elder Ross as my companion and still be the district leader. He's an experienced missionary and super optimistic. It should be an exciting six weeks here in Bennion East! Most of the rest of the district is staying the same.

Chris Senn was baptized!!!!!!!!!!! He's come such a long ways! This kid is awesome. It might have taken his parents 3 years and Elder Mintey and I our whole four months to get him ready, but he made it and was so excited and happy! With all the finding we have had we also have people in the wings coming up. Jenneica and her family are all really fun. Elder Reed and I actually tracted into her in a whole different apartment complex when I first got into the area while we were on exchanges. We randomly ran into her a couple weeks ago. She has accepted a baptism date for Feb 5.

So things are good!
Elder Chandler
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thought: more finding stuffs

This kind of goes with networking. It's an expansion of the idea. District meeting last week was focused on effective finding. We used an analogy to demonstrate the principles.

A glass bowl full of M&Ms were placed on a table. I had counted it out so there was 1 "gold"/yellow M&M for every 19 other colors, representing the amount of non members needed to sift through in order to get our one "golden" investigator. We demonstrated tracting by blindly picking one M&M at a time, street contacting by throwing a blindly-picked M&M at someone, etc. ha.

We concluded that there's two ways to make finding more effective:
1) sifting through M&Ms faster
- this is done through standard effectiveness training methods, including talking with everyone, making sure you're always interacting with someone, using MLS lists, asking for referrals in all situations, etc. They are changes in -what we do-.
2) changing how many yellow M&Ms there are
- done by changing your perspective on the whole bowl, including seeing others as children of God, defining them by their divine potential, coming up with better approaches to people, getting copies of the Book of Mormon in as many hands as possible, etc. In general, these are changes in -who we are-.

In conclusion, we decided there was a third mode that combined our previous two ideas. God has a perfect view of the whole bowl, and is always preparing people so that different and more M&Ms are gold. So if we can see the bowl as God does, we'd be finding in by-far the most productive way. We have an emissary in the Spirit to help us get on that level, but in the mean time we focused on three things to help us find better.
1) asking for referrals from everyone (sift faster)
2) handing out at least 2 copies of the BoM every day (changing people to gold)
3) praying always (seeing things like God does)


So anyways we'll see how it works but I thought it was an interesting discussion worth sharing. How can you all as member missionaries apply the principles of effective finding to better fulfill your role as finders and let the missionaries be teachers?

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