With that being said, it’s been a wonderful week! They all have been and I know they all will continue to be wonderful, I’m doing my absolute best each day and we see the success and miracles from our obedience. I do apologize in advance, I do not plan on writing too much today.
A lot has happened this week just as you’ve seen in the last handful of weeks but I’ll just write about a couple highlights.
Last Wednesday night we experienced a wonderful miracle. We had been doing some look ups around the area by our church. When leaving a building Elder Stokes said, “Who’s H W”? I explained that he’s a member we’ve been trying to get in touch with since Elder Davis came to the area and prior to our efforts Elder Richards had been trying since early April of 2017. We hadn’t had any success trying to find him, but we decided to try anyway. We got to his building and stood outside, we waited for someone to let us in. In the past we’ve usually waited for about 2 minutes or so until someone either walked in or out and we could then get in. So we waited and maybe it was just over 2 minutes but before we decided to leave I said “we will give it another 30 seconds” (I don’t know why I said that, but I did) Elder Stokes actually started to count aloud, “30, 29, 28, 27 ... 10...” then he stopped at 10... in the moment we weren’t sure why, but looking back we felt that we were both stopped in time, we didn’t leave, we stopped counting, we just waited. And what might actually have been a couple minutes later, felt like 10 seconds. But all of a sudden, someone came waking up the street and into this building, without hesitation we followed in behind. We knocked Hubert’s door and found very quickly that he was home! He opened the door and said, “come in” as if he was expecting us. We walked into his living room and sat on the couch. He sat with us and we had just the best time with him. We learned so much about him. He got so excited to talk about when he served a mission in Manchester England. He went to find his mission photo album. He sat between us on the couch and just went through and talked about nearly every photo. It was so cool to watch his excitement about his experiences.
We’ve had a handful of meetings this week. On Friday last week we had MLC and met as the mission leadership. We met in the Scarsdale chapel and discussed the needs of our zones and what we could do to help the missionaries and the areas we are serving.
Saturday morning we went to the church for the baptism of B. He’s a guy our roommates have been working with for about 8 weeks. He is so awesome!
Sunday was great! Other than the fact that our chapel was 25°! The heater in the chapel broke but everywhere else it was working.
Monday was great as well! We had district meeting in the morning and then Elder Clark and I went on a split and went up to Scarsdale for our “What’s Next Meeting”. As we sat around the living room of the mission home President leaned over to me and asked if I would conduct this meeting. He left and came back a few minutes later. In that time I picked someone to play the piano, a hymn to sing, and a prayer to be given and I conducted the meeting. It was pretty sweet! Not too many people came with questions to ask. So it wasn’t as focused in too many different topics but the first thing that was brought up was dating. Missionaries asked questions about dating. We came prepared by studying a talk called Meeting the Challenges of Today’s World and we focused on the future events of our lives; dating, career, schooling, marriage, finances, etc. it was pretty cool to be able to hear from President and Sister Smith about their experiences and what council we received from them as we discussed these nearing events in our lives.
After the meeting I went to the garage of the mission home to get my shoes, when I came back in President asked if I would conduct Zone Conference tomorrow.
Tuesday we had Zone Conference! It was a pretty great meeting and I can’t believe it was my last one. It was special to me, I felt more involved and willing to participate than usual. I wanted to make it a great one.
In the beginning I stood and welcomed the missionaries, recognized President Smith who was presiding in the meeting and Sister Smith’s presence. I informed everyone of the first few items of the agenda for this meeting and we went about it. It was such a great meeting, the Spirit was very recognizable and a lot was learned. Elder Stokes and I were asked on the spot by Elder Chaz, Davis and Elder Aurich to participate in doing a role-play with them during the conference. It was a pretty good role-play for having no preparation. I feel like this conference proved to me my growth since serving as a full time missionary. It was definitely a meeting I will remember.
We’ve been so blessed this week and I’ve recognized through practicing this and doing my best, “ALL blessings are predicated off of obedience.” As we strive our best to be obedient and as we are obedient, we are blessed. That’s inspired me to be obedient and continually strive to be more obedient.
I’m truly grateful for the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Grateful for the wonderful privilege it has been to serve in the Lord’s Vineyard. My time is coming quickly to an end as a full time missionary, so I will be doing ALL that I can to be my best.
Hope this was enough for you all to make it to next week! Ha ha love you all!
Patience.
Love. Faith
Much
love,
Elder
Newbold
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