Tuesday, June 28, 2016

4.11.16

Well another week down I guess. Seemed to go a little quicker than most because it was a day short since our preparation day was moved to Tuesday last week. Everything went well this week as far as numbers go, but I definitely hit a valley mentally. I had a few of the Aggie fight songs or whatever in my head. Getting too excited I guess.

[Show me the Scotsman who doesn't love the thistle.
Show me an Englishman who doesn't love the rose.
Show me a true blooded Aggie from Utah, who doesn't love the spot where the sagebrush grows!]

I've never gotten so many referrals in my whole mission as I did this week. We got a total of 9 and we have contacted 4 of them and we're working on the rest.

Last night was tough, we had to drop one of investigators, Carolyne. She said she just wanted to stay baptist. I think there was some external pressure from family not to join.. She accepted a baptismal date without hesitation a few weeks ago, but has now decided to not continue to learn. We also talked to a guy named William last night. It's the second time we met him and he is the most genuine man I've ever met. He was touched when we offered to help him clean his house or take out his trash. He said he hasn't heard someone make an offer like that to him in a long time.

We had a mission wide fast yesterday. Starting Saturday night at 9:30 the whole mission was to pray all at once and ask Heavenly Father to open the hearts of the people of Illinois. The whole mission is struggling to find new investigators. We fasted yesterday and we also had stake conference for the Peoria stake. That's my third time having stake conference in Peoria. I got to see Jo and a lot of the members from Morton and Galesburg. I didn't get to see Margaret there, though, so I was pretty bummed about that. There was an elder from the second quorum of the seventy, Allen F. Packer. If I understood correctly he is president Packer's son, but I heard a few different things so I'm not sure. President and Sister Griffin also spoke. Sister Griffin invited the whole stake to join with us as we concluded our fast and pray at 9:30 again and plead for the doors to be opened. Something is going to happen if we have 180 missionaries plus a stake of Zion praying all at once!

I preached a sermon about obedience and honesty to myself last night. As a district leader you have to collect all the key indicator numbers from the members in the district every Sunday night and then report them to the zone leaders who then report to the assistants who report to president all the numbers. There's a few Missionaries counting numbers wrong this whole transfer. I don't want to judge them, but it seems like they're stretching the truth a little bit in order to count more numbers. We're trying to help them because they're struggling a lot, but we're struggling to help them. Anyways I got so fed up after weeks of this so I gave the phone to elder Williford and I went into the other room, grabbed my scriptures, and preached to the wall about obedience and honesty. I used for a text Articles of Faith 1:3, 13 among other scriptures. It was a fantastic sermon! I wish I had more of an audience.

Remember
"Sin is the result of deep and unmet needs." President Kimball


Elder Scherer

Weekly 6.27.16

It's crazy that is preparation day, again. Seems like every other day is preparation day now. I only have 20 Sunday's left...
Well this was a good week. I got to go on exchanges with Elder Golling. That was a blast. Right at the very tail end, before we were about to exchange back, we knocked on a door and guess who was inside! Sharon Arnold! The exact lady who ran into us a few weeks ago in the Taco Bell drive thru! What are the odds? Her husband actually let us in and as we turned the corner I saw her, didn't recognize her at the beginning, but she noticed me and said, "are you from canton?" It was pretty cool. We found out she is interested in family history and she knew that the Mormons were big into family history. We told her that we would come back in a few days and teach her why we are interested in family history.

We've still been teaching Robert Baler and Verna. Haven't really broken any ground. Sounds like it backslid a little bit on the last meeting, I wasn't there because I was in Pekin for the day. We've been taking a member with us that has a similar background, but he honestly isn't helping much. He doesn't believe that preach my gospel works. He calls it the "Utah Conversion tool". He says the brethren don't know what it's like out here and we have to do it differently. HAHAHA! I'm gonna tell him to listen to elder Rasband's talk, Standing with the leaders of the church from this last conference. It's been real frustrating. He also told us he went to a grove in Nauvoo to pray for how to teach this guy. He came up with a "short discussion", as he called it. Anyways it's been really dumb, but that's about the maximum member missionary work I've seen in this branch so I guess I aught to be happy that he is trying to help. (:

It's still hot. 

Jacob 1:19
3 Nephi 5:13
Romans 1:16

Elder Scherer

Corn blown over by wind storm


Elder Golling

Home burnt down. Wife didn't make it



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