Missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Letters sent home from the Phillippines

Elder Nielsen

Elder Nielsen

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

1st Transfer Already?!‏

This week we had my first transfer! Where did the time go?! It went by so fast! That's why I'm writing you today and not yesterday, so note to the Nielsen family * Every transfer week I will be emailing you guys on Tuesday. But I'm staying in Malolos with my same trainer so no surprise there! But Elder Tinasas is leaving :( And Elder Rodriguez is training, so I'm not going to be the young one of the house anymore, even though I never felt like I was the young on in our house anyway, I'm like always babysitting them, telling them its bed time and making them leave on time, I still haven't got them to workout in the morning.. hahaha.  

We had a busy but a really good week this week. We had church meetings, a trip to the hospital, and a service project, so we weren't able to work as much as we wanted this week. We tried to make the most of our time, but unfortunately we couldn't visit all the Less Actives and Active member families as we would've liked. Most of our time and effort was spent teaching our investigators and less actives. Our investigators are continuing to progress, we had four attend sacrament meeting on Sunday. And we have one other investigator that has been coming in the past weeks, but had to work this Sunday. We are seeing great growth with them. Two of our investigators, who have accepted a baptism date, are currently leaving together and aren't married. We taught them how they need to be married first, luckily they have been planning to get married, so we rescheduled their baptism date back three months in order to give them time to be married. 

This week I saw how Heavenly Father makes everything happen for a reason and there are no "coincidences" in his work. On Thursday, my companion and I had to travel to Manila to have a checkup on his ear. We were waiting on the side of the road trying to flag down a van to take us to Manila. But van after van was full and didn't stop. After about 15 minutes, my companion said, if this next van is full we are going to try somewhere else. As we were waiting for this next van, a woman walked up to us and asked "Oh, are you the Mormon missionaries?", so we jumped on this opportunity and introduced ourselves and got to know her. It turns out she was a long lost less active member and she moved so she hadn't been visited by the missionaries in a long time. We asked if we could come visit her and teach her and she agreed. And just as we finished writing her address a van pulled up and we left. It was literally perfect timing. Unfortunately she's not in our area, but we sent the referral to missionaries in her area. The other experience happened on Friday, we were on a jeepney heading towards our area we wanted to teach in that day, but somehow we missed our stop, which never happens, so we decided to keep going and visit another investigator that lived farther away. The last two times we visited her she wasn't home, so we hadn't met wither her in about a week and half. So we stopped at her house and she let us in and we had a wonderful lesson about the Word of Wisdom. Her friends were talking to her about "the Mormons" so she had a few questions about what Mormons can and can't drink/eat. So we switched up our lesson plan and taught her and answered her questions. At the end of the lesson she said she would give up drinking coffee even though it would be hard. She had been reading the Book of Mormon and she went to church on Sunday. I know we missed our exit spot for a reason, the Lord wanted us to visit that investigator at that time. The more I've thought back on it, we probably wouldn't have been able to visit her last week if we didn't visit her at that time because we had so many meetings and didn't have time to drive all the way out to visit her. I know the Lord guides us to where we need to be, and when. It's our responsibility to be listening to the spirit so we can be guided where to go and be exactly obedient and be on time, so we are at the right place at the right time. 

Besides that everything has been running smoothly. I have just finished my first transfer and it was wonderful, but I wanted to work even harder and make my next six weeks better than the last. I've learned so much this transfer in all areas, my tagalog has come so far these last few weeks, I learn so much spiritually daily, and I'm learning what kind of missionary I want to be because there are many different kinds of missionaries, Amber and Erin can testify about this, but I'm starting to write in my journal traits I don't like in missionaries and traits I do, so I can be the missionary not only I want to be, but the missionary the Lord wants be to be. 

Mahal,
Elder Nielsen

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