Dear Family and
Friends, Monday, July 28, 2014 at 11:25
a.m. (EDT)
Note: Elder CW Jensen's Grandpa Jensen served his mission in
Montrose, Colorado and taught and confirmed Dorothy.
Dorothy's Grand-daughter is Sister Upton she was raised in Vernal,
Utah.
So tell me more about Sister Upton and Sister Brown that are serving with you in the Bedford Ward. Sister Brown and Sister Upton are doing some great work in Bedford. They were shotgunned into the area. In some missions they call in whitewashing. It means that both previous sisters were transferred out and 2 new ones were transferred in. I have never shotgunned in an area but I have heard that it is really hard because you dont know the area at all.
What
do the Sister Training Leaders do / Who attends this Mission Leadership
Council?
There are 5 stakes in our mission, the Montpelier Stake, the Concord Stake, the
Exeter Stake, the Augusta Stake, and the Bangor Stake. Currently each stake has
2 zones. Each stake also has one set of Sister Training Leaders. So our Sister
training leaders help the sisters in both the Concord South Zone and the
Concord North Zone. They primarily go on exchanges with the sisters in the
Stake and they take care of girl issues and drama, so that we as Zone Leaders
don't have to deal with that. The Sister Training leaders call us every Sunday
to report how the Sisters are doing in our Zone and if we can do anything to
help. I believe they also report to Sister Stoker how the Sisters are doing on
issues that we dont really need to know about. So for the MLC (Mission Leadership Council)there are 20 Zone
Leaders that attend and 10 Sister training leaders.
This week was a really
fantastic one. This area is just exploding. This past week we had 6 member
present lessons and 6 other lessons. We can definitely attribute that to the
ITLs. (Invitations
to Learn). I am doing really good and am loving the work.
Here is a list of the people
that we are regularly teaching:
S has been doing really well. We don't know
exactly what to do with him. He really wants to be baptized by the end of the
year, so we are working on that. We had a lesson about Temples at the C's house the
other day. It was a good lesson for all of them. S
is excited to go to the temple once he is a member.
TK is our Nepali investigator. He really likes
us coming by but there is a huge language barrier. We got some Nepali
materials. He read the Restoration pamphlet. He said that Joseph Smith was a "thinker." He has come
to church 2 times now. I am really impressed that someone who knows almost no
English would want to come to a church service that is entirely in English.
J and her family are doing better. Her friend
H was there last time we came by. J and H
said that we could come by next week and teach them more about the Plan of
Salvation.
S said that she feels the spirit whenever we
are in her home. We are arranging a church tour. Her son encouraged her to go to church.
T was quite a miracle this week. 3 weeks ago
she wouldnt even talk to us when we walked by on the street. We talked to her
on my first day in Manchester. She was not thrilled with us talking to her at
all. Layer I was prompted to talk to her when
we saw her. She was a different person. She invited us back to teach her about
church. We taught the Restoration and she loved it. We asked if she would want
to be baptized by proper authority and she said Yes that if the restored
priesthood was on the earth people would be hunting for that. Unfortunately she
moved into Manchester Ward, so the Manchester Elders will be teaching her.
D is from Florida. She has a huge
faith in Jesus Christ. She likes us coming by and respects anyone who talks
about Jesus Christ.
B is a lady that Elder Zilles and Elder Holley
street contacted. She gave them her phone number. We ran into her at the
baseball game. We called her and set up a lesson at the church. We were able to
get one of her coworkers to come. He is a member of the ward. We taught the
restoration and she said she would be baptized if it was true. We invited her
to church and she came yesterday. We forgot to mention that it was 3 hours
long. She said that she was a little surprised but didnt mind it being so long.
She stayed for a baptism after church. She said that she really wants to come
to church next week too. She really liked it. It was really cool.
M and C have been taught a few lessons. Their first
lesson was a little over an hour long a few weeks ago. I think that built the
expectation that our visits are always long, so we have tried to tone down our
last lessons to under 20 or 30 minutes.
F and L are an older couple. They are some of the
original Manchester people. They have French Canadian heritage. Manchester used
to be a huge mill town. The whole West Side was French Canandians that worked
at the mills. Manchester used to be a really nice clean town. You could leave
your doors unlocked and not worry about them. New England gets a lot of
refugees dumped here. There are also a lot of immigrants. That brings a lot of
gangs and crime. So Manchester has really changed. They used to live by the airport, but the airport added
a runway that dislodged 123 families. The original runway route would have
allowed the houses to stay, but a nest of endangered eagles was discovered
along the original route, so they re-routed it needing to demolish a
neighborhood. A Mormon neighbor suggested that they have the missionaries come by to do the yard
work. She said she would send a referral in. Well during that week that this
conversation was going on we tracted their road. She answered the door and
was surprised to see us, because the Mormon neighbor had told her that morning she would
send missionaries by. We hadnt even received a referral. We just happened to
tract into them. We have fixed their rain gutters, and their fountain so far.
We have also taught the Restoration.
Elder CWJensen