November 16, 2015

Woow I wish I knew you were sending those emails to everyone. I'm going to write you an email then I'm going to write a weekly email to everyone. I have a box with the DVD. Sister Miller is super pushy so there was no way I was going to not end up sending you that disk. I don't care if you get it for me haha.

As for my emotional state I'm doing fine. I've quickly learned that I had a lot of emotional, spiritual, and social walls that i had built up in my brain that would keep me from being a successful missionary. SOOoo I've pretty much been spending these first two transfers having to tear down all these walls that I've built up. It's sufficing to say that it caused some stress. Some of those walls included talking to strangers; being attached to the same dude for every minute of every day for 3 months; holding conversations; being interested in what old people talk about; planning out every single day; getting over mass rejection. Plus all of the spiritual aspects such as; Deciphering my thoughts from the promptings of the Holy Ghost, and the ones from the adversary; finding personal meaning in the scriptures, as well as finding things that would help the people I teach; boldly following promptings I get from the Holy Ghost; listening to people with love and sincere care, and asking questions and teaching doctrine the Spirit gives to me. Those are only a few. The hardest thing about being a successful missionary is staying worthy of, and listening to the promptings and guidance from the Spirit, which comes from daily repentance, taking the sacrament, relying on the Lord and His Son's Atonement in everything that you do such as teaching, planning, and learning how to love everyone around you, which comes from sincere prayer and scripture study.

I sent you pictures of the baptism we had on Saturday. April's daughter Aleadra was baptized and then was confirmed yesterday. She apparently saw a spider in the font and tried to wan me before I baptized her so when she came up she darted out of the font. It was a great service though, everyone there could feel the Spirit.  It's been so awesome seeing the transformation that the gospel has brought in them. You can physically see how different they are and it has definitely been a testimony builder for me. I'm also going to send you another picture of a service event we did called Stop Hunger Now on the same day. We helped package 20,000 meals to send to people who are in need of food. It was a great event because everyone had something they could do, from the 4 year old to the 100 year old. The picture is of a box fort Elder Anderson and I, and another companionship made out of the food boxes. My standards for fun have dropped a lot since I've been out haha.

We had a member of the 70 come to our zone conference last Wednesday. His name was Elder Grow and he told us that we should also try to reactivate less active members and also teach the investigator's family instead of just the investigator. He was awesome, I got super pumped up from that conference. 

Love you guys!

Elder Sherwood