This week has been incredibly busy and quite exhausting. Lots of high highs and low lows, it’s been an adventure. It’s a good thing that we are on God’s side, because everything works out with Him, every time.

The Keys to Eternity

We had a lesson with our new friend Justin, and I have to say, it was likely one of the greatest lessons I’ve been a part of on the mission. Which was great, because we didn’t have any other lessons this week and we’ve had to stop teaching almost 20 friends now. He began the lesson by asking us many different questions, I was worried that he was about to start bashing us haha. But he was just curious and knew that we could direct him to answers.

Among his questions include: Is it okay to have long hair, the Bible says that men are supposed to have short hair? Do I need to be legally married to my partner? When do you observe the law of the fast? How do I repent?

It’s incredible to teach through the Spirit; we focused heavily on the Doctrine of Christ, the importance of covenants, the Temple, and what the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has to offer that no other organization can offer. We read the Family a Proclamation to the World, as well as watched the Rome Italy temple tour, with him. I have high hopes for Justin; the Lord definitely has been preparing him.

Elder Blake and I were very united through the Spirit while teaching this lesson. I felt that we needed to share the Family Proclamation, and the Rome Italy temple tour video, and Elder Blake was on the same page and had them pulled up before I had the opportunity to haha.

While we were talking about covenants, I shared D&C 132:7 with him. I honestly wasn’t even close to planning on sharing that because we haven’t even gotten to explain what the Book of Mormon is yet. But despite this, I felt the need to share it, and that was pretty awesome.

Productive and Action Packed MLC

I’ve been to my fair share of seven hour MLC meetings, and I have to say that this was probably one of the most productive ones I have seen thus far. We touched on many important topics, and there’s a great amount of preparing ahead of us. So buckle up, this is going to be a good one!

We began the meeting with a quote from Brigham Young,

“The Lord can’t reveal to you and I [what] we can’t understand; …for instance when Joseph first received revelation the Lord could not tell him what he was going to do. He didn’t tell him he was going to call him to be a prophet, seer, revelator, high priest, and founder of the kingdom of God on eath.”

The early church was struggling after the loss of Joseph Smith and there was great confusion with the future direction of the church. President Gill then shared that Joseph Smith instructed Brigham Young and the brethren after his martyrdom to follow the Holy Ghost. This instruction is incredibly important, and its significance, especially today, cannot be understated.

President Gill shared his experiences learning the language of the Spirit. He said learning how to recognize the Spirit is one of the most important if not the most important thing that we may learn in life.

There’s a principle of leadership in the language of the Spirit. The Spirit teaches line upon line, precept upon precept, according to the understanding of the individual He is teaching. There are incredible blessings for God’s covenant people as they lead following these principles.

Throughout the history of time, the Lord has erected temples only when people are willing to be obedient to God. We are seeing a major growth in temples in recent years because there has been a major growth in people who are willing to be obedient to God. As Sister Gill says, many people believe that once the world gets wicked enough the Savior will come again, but instead the Savior will come again when righteousness is increased.

There was a very strong focus on social media. We are reaching a turning point in missionary work with regards to social media. The acceleration of this work has been incredible, and we are expecting to see an exponential increase soon. The importance of this work cannot be fully realized right now.

They shared the stats in the past year: 76 total people have been baptized through social media referrals. 7 total people have been baptized through home to home contacting.

The teaching rate for referrals has also increased from I believe 9-10% to 13-14%. We’ve been sitting at 9-10% pretty much my whole mission, we’ve really struggled hitting that 10% which supposedly is a minimum for qualifying to receive ads for the mission page. About 7 months ago there was a point that they were about to pull the ads from the page due to our lack of success increasing that teaching rate. In one of my emails to President I emphasized how incredibly important it is to do everything we possibly can to keep the ads going.

In that email I shared the following:

“The magnitude and importance of the Facebook page and keeping these Facebook ads running, cannot be overstated. It’s quickly becoming our number one finding source in the mission, and there’s so much potential that continues to exponentially grow in the page as the work accelerates. My hope is that as a mission, we can tap into that potential, and that other missionaries can come to a knowledge of it. Many missionaries come in with the outdated approach to missionary work. They go and do in person finding, door knocking, etc. Not that it’s wrong, but they neglect the friends that they already have that they aren’t actively teaching in PMG. And sometimes they neglect their referrals which are knocking at their door. My hope was with the Preach My Gospel mentoring sessions that the technology elders were doing is that it would change the culture of the mission. It would help missionaries step outside of going to find new people, when they already have so many people that are searching for answers at their fingertips. Not that those legacy finding approaches were bad, I believe doing a combination of these efforts will bear the most fruits in our mission labors. I just believe the magnitude of how much the page affects everything cannot be overstated. We truly live in the fullness of times, the work is accelerating, the brethren are preparing us, and we need to keep up. The urgency continues to rise. And with the rise of AI translation technology, we truly will be able to reach every nation, kindred, and tongue. I’m really looking forward to the adoption of these tools. This mission will benefit so much because of its diversity! People that it wasn’t possible to share the gospel with previously, it will make possible.”

We are now beginning to see and realize the matters that I brought up previously. Despite that we didn’t reach the required teaching rate to keep ads for the page, the folks at Salt Lake decided to keep the ads going. I believe the social media sisters at the time shared that they didn’t feel right to take away the ads, and so they left them. It’s pretty remarkable that we are now beginning to see the fruits of this. I’m looking forward to the future, and I’m grateful to be a part of it.

At MLC they taught us that the effectiveness of getting into contact with referrals is much greater when calling; we should be calling our referrals for our first contact right when we receive them. People who are contacted within the first hour are 20% more likely to hear the first lesson. And not only that, but we should even begin to teach them a few principles and set up a time when we can meet them while we are on the phone.

There were a few logistics that we went through in regards to the mission visit from the Apostle of the Lord, Elder Neil L. Andersen. We’ve all been preparing for that, and I look forward to hearing his thoughts when that day comes. Each Zone will park at specific spots at the Temple View chapel, and will enter and exit through specific doors. This was done to ensure that we are able to efficiently and quickly arrive and leave and keep the silence that Elder Andersen has requested.

We also touched on having “temple shifts” for the missionaries. Many people will pass by the temple or walk around it that may be interested in learning more about the House of Lord. Because of this, we are working with the temple presidency to work out shifts that missionaries may be on the property.

Working Against the Clock

This week was packed full of meetings and planning. We’ve been calling and reaching out to many of our friends as well, and sadly haven’t been able to get into contact with much of anyone. Also, with my special assignment making content for The Christ’s First Light page, I’ve been working with quick deadlines, and with no resources to pump out content as soon as possible. It’s been difficult and I’ve faced a lot of stress and disappointment, but things have been working out in the end and I’m hopeful for the future.

There’s a big content calendar list that outlines the content that the Social Media Sisters want created. It covers all the principles in every PMG lesson. Next to all of them are a bunch of dates when they need to be completed by. So I began working on the first video about the resurrection. I reached out to some missionaries to film a video of a member for it, but that later cancelled and didn’t work out. The sisters didn’t tell me that they wanted the videos completed a week in advance before the due date so they have time to approve them.

We needed to have this video done by Saturday. At this point it’s Thursday night and we have MLC which will take up most of the next day. We were hoping to come across a member while we were at Richmond to film the video with, but that didn’t work out either. In our last effort, Friday night we had Farsi class so we were thinking of having the Farsi teacher bear testimony of the resurrection. Sadly for his security, he’s unable to do that. So we were left with nothing, and the video needed to be posted by that night. I was thinking we were just going to have to throw in the towel and just grab a clip from general conference or something. But right as I was about to abandon the idea of filming a member, a family walked into the building trying to set up some stuff for their child’s baptism the next day. It was a miracle that the father was willing to do it. He was the Ward Mission Leader in the Brookswood ward as well which was perfect.

I showed him a brief script, and told him this is the idea, you don’t need to stick to it. Feel free to add whatever you would like, and testify from the heart. He did an awesome job, and did it in two takes. Wonderful miracle, and it really shows that God always prepares a way.

So I had to steal the YSA laptop from the church. Which I know we are not really supposed to do, however, the work of the Lord must go forth! I don’t know how they expected me to fulfill this assignment without a laptop and a lack of any equipment (all the equipment I have is my own), but as I said before, God makes a way. At this point we are fighting against the clock, it’s almost 9pm so we quickly drove home to our apartment with the laptop in our hands. We arrive home, and the grind begins. I have a video to submit by 10:30pm. So I throw in the clips, process the audio with AI (cause I don’t have a good mic), and rapidly edit as fast as I can. Despite the immense amount of stress and pressure putting together the video, failing to find members, driving back and forth lots, with meetings and planning and preparing, the video was complete. The time was 10:15pm, I submit the video, and completely exhausted I hit the sack.

Needless to say, the video was okay, it’s a miracle it exists, and it’s nothing too remarkable. I’m grateful that God made it possible despite my lack of faith at points of the production process. But let’s not celebrate too quickly. The next video is due in three days. Now remember, when I say due that means that’s the day it gets posted. It needs to be “done” a week in advance. Now obviously with three days to the next video, it’s not physically possible to have it done a week in advance, unless I break the laws of time which is beyond the scope of my assignment haha.

So I went straight into planning and preparing production for the next video, which needed to be submitted as soon as possible at this point. Luckily I reached out to a set of missionaries in advance on Wednesday to locate some members that we can film for this specific video. I’ve tried to learn from the last painful experience. I followed up with those missionaries to see if they found a member for it, and sadly it fell through. This turned out to be much more difficult than I thought it would be. I had a whole script ready to go and planned which included the member, and the missionaries, but now I needed to make some serious changes to the original plan. So it’s Sunday night, same situation, I’m cranking out this video as soon as I can.

I can make up as many excuses as I want, but I will stand with Nephi and say, “for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them” (1 Ne. 3:7). So I scrapped much of my vision, similar to what I did with the previous video, and tried to keep it simple. I tend to overcomplicate and make my ideas much bigger than needed, because they sound so grand in my head. But I often miss the beauty and effectiveness of simplicity. I really tried to follow the Spirit and yield my will to God’s. As a result I was able to complete the whole video in under two hours and had it submitted and ready to go by the end of the night.

His Ways are Higher than Mine

Over the past week, I have gained a deeper understanding of this principle: “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isa. 55:8) I tend to lean upon my own understanding when it comes to computers and creating content. I often find myself with strong opinions on how specific technical things should be done. Similar to how the Apostles may have specific opinions on subjects and manners that they’ve specialized in prior to the call. And then in councils where those matters are put forth, they have to put aside their ways and their thoughts and yield to the Lord’s ways—which often may seem contrary to what seems most effective on the surface. With regards to the assignment I’ve been given, I’ve definitely been learning how to apply this more.