This week was busy and full of great things! First off the weather was in the
60s and 70s all week - at our mission conference they told us we can take off
suit coats. Best day of each year :)
Cesar and Sarah were baptized on Saturday! We did their baptism at 7:30 in
the morning because of their work schedules being weird, so a lot of blessings
are in store for our stake mission leader Elliot Smith for getting up at 4:30am
to get the font filled. And since that moment we had a TON of miracles
happen.
C&S were our only two people that had a baptismal date left, so I knew
we needed to refill our teaching pool so we wouldn't have to go through the mess
of spending no time teaching. That meant a lot of time on knees trying to figure
out where to be and who to see. The ultimate goal was to achieve standard of
excellence - our mission vision for weekly key indicators. I've never achieved
it before (and not very many missionaries do - it's very high...). But we ended
up finally putting a mom and her son that we had known about for a while but
never gotten very far with on date for baptism. More still needed to be found
apparently though. A ward mission process referral we had gotten last week but
hadn't been home when our appointment was scheduled ended up coming to church
with her 10 year old unbaptized daughter!! We pulled them aside and set a
baptismal date with both of them as well, making a grand tally of enough people
to achieve the standard of excellence. Lunch at Cheesecake Factory on President
Moffat!!!! (yes we're bribed to hit it haha)
i picked up a new shirt at walmart today thats bright and spring and stuff
too :) why do i like buying new tshirts so much... i dunno. at least they're
only $7.50
--Elder Chandler
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thought: missionary work and the Atonement (Easter)
I gave talks in two different wards this week... both wards ended up
leaving me 20 minutes, so I had a pretty open gap to speak in. I ended up adding
a section about the Atonement to my regular talk.
The central focus of the tie between missionary work and the Atonement
was:
When Jesus Christ performed the Atonement, he did all of the "work" of
missionary work.
All of the work of saving, of resurrecting, of "bring[ing] to pass the
immortality and eternal life of man" was done in those tender moments in
Gethsemane, the suffering on Golgotha, and the glory of the garden tomb. With
that perspective, we need not look further than the examples of the only three
examples of mortal men asked to directly assist in the infinite atoning
sacrifice.
1) Peter, James, and John in the Garden of Gethsemane: from them we learn
the importance of staying awake through the Atonement, "staying awake through
the Restoration", staying awake through the Hastening of the Work of Salvation.
The Lord simply asks us to stay aware of His workings around us in order to
supplement the missionary work that Jesus and only Jesus can do for ourselves
and others.
2) Simon of Cyrene on the way to Golgotha: How would you like to be the one
man that, just for a moment, gets to carry the cross of the Savior? We are asked
at times to "bear crosses" that each of us must carry, and as we do we help the
Savior do his Atonement and missionary work.
3) Joseph of Arimethea and the garden tomb: Talmage states that if Christ
weren't given the garden tomb, he likely would have been cast into a common
grave of thieves. So from Joseph we learn that we must give place for miracles
to happen. We need to create situations in which we give others the opportunity
to be reborn.
Let the Atonement do it's saving work. Let it do it's enabling work. All we
do is a subset to what the Atonement enables us to do, but we have duties to
assist in Christ's divine mission which will bring joy to both ourselves and all
those we share it with.
