Our Preach My Gospel book is wonderful. We were reading a section a few weeks ago that said that as missionaries, we will be blessed for being obedient. We might not always understand the reasons for all the missionary policies, but we will be blessed if we are obedient.
When our new Mission President came to town soon after that, he talked to us about the fact that the elders should do a couple of hours of proselyting on P-day. The missionary handbook states that on P-day (which is now on Mondays world wide), P-day ends at 6:00 and the missionaries go out proselyting. However, in our mission, the Elders aren't to take any appointments after 6:00, for security reasons. When it gets dark, there are not hardly any lights in the city. Therefore, to comply with the handbook, our Presdient wants the elders to take 2-3 hours every Monday to work, and then they can come to our house and play on Monday nights. P-days are already very busy... They usually start with early morning basketball (or Tennis).
It is the only time during the week they play sports. They do their studying. They have to do their laundry
and clean their houses. They do their shopping for their food for the week.
That is a major thing here, because there isn't one big supermarket that carries everything. Here we have to go to a couple of markets for drygoods, and then several places to buy produce, and a separate butcher shop, and another stop for eggs, housewares, etc This is the only day they communicate with home, so they used to go to the internet for 2 hours. However, the new president is encouraging them to cut it back to an hour.
As we looked at our Monday schedules, the elders sadly announced they would have to forego basketball to get it all done. Because I had just read the promise in Preach My Gospel, I reminded the boys that we have been promised that if we are obedient, we will be blessed. The first week everything, but basketball, got done. The next 2 weeks they said they wanted to try to hustle, and still get to play basketball... and try to get everything done. They did it! And then they came to our house to play.
We are so very proud of them! We have 2 baptism days a month. We usually have between 2 and 5 baptisms. Well...... this was our blessing for being obedient! Yesterday we had 13 baptisms and they are great strong new members.
We love our obedient Elders!!!
I just got your blog address and was thrilled to see this entry. Obedience doesn't come easy a lot of the time, but what a blessing you received for following Preach My Gospel and making the extra effort. It's indeed a tender mercy from the Lord to so openly and immediately reward all of you for your desire and willingness to do all you can to "hug a mountain." We love you all.
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