February 13, 2017
Hey all,
Most of my stories this week have to do with snow! We have received far too much snow. We were “red dotted” twice, meaning the weather was deemed too severe for us to be out proselyting. I guess that’s what happens when you ask your stake president to send you to a cold mission!
We had a lot of fantastic contacting opportunities from the snow. We walked up and down the residential streets with our shovels, offering to help anybody that was shoveling out their car, and pushing cars that were stuck. All wheel drive does no good on the ice. It sure was nice to see how happy they were.
We also decided to shovel out our neighbor’s driveway, just to be nice. It was backbreaking work. There’s very little space in Cambridge, and we ended up having to shovel into tall piles and walls of snow. It was all worth it, just imagining how happy the neighbors would be to walk outside in the morning to find their car cleared. I felt like President Hinckley did when he placed two silver dollars in a farmer’s boots when he was a boy.
We had one new investigator that was going to attend church, but it was snowed out! He was even on his way there when we told him it was cancelled. I was just glad he was actually going to come! Fortunately, we are still going to meet with him this weekend.
I finally got to meet one of our recent converts, a woman named Pinyero. She grew up as an orthodox Jew, and she told us that she was converted to the Gospel during Passover in Poland. She had not been able to find any Kosher food for the Passover, so she decided to fast in her apartment, and read the book of Exodus. For some reason, she got tired of Exodus and decided to read Isaiah. As she read the Messianic chapters, she started to cry for reasons she didn’t understand. Had the Jews really missed the Christ? Her extended fast during Passover left her with a testimony that Jesus is the Christ. In the next few weeks, she met the Mormon missionaries on a bus, and they invited her to come to their branch meeting. She had no idea why she wanted to go so badly, but she did, and the rest is history. She was baptized in June of 2016, and shortly thereafter moved to Cambridge. Glad to know that Isaiah’s Messianic texts did somebody some good!
This week, I found an answer to something I have been pondering deeply. My pondering came about as I was thinking about the eternal investigators (people who investigate the church for an extended period of time, but do not commit to join the church) I have worked with, current and past. What is it that blocks so many from believing? I believe there are a myriad of answers, as numerous as the number of people who have ever lived. But I believe that the answer I came to is true for at least some of them.
I wanted to find the most basic step of conversion, the very first ingredient that must be present for somebody to begin on the path of conversion. We often talk of faith as the first principle of the gospel. Faith leads to action, and when we “experiment upon the word,” we are given knowledge that the Word is good and true. But what comes before gaining faith?
We read in Alma 32 that “if ye can no more than desire to believe,” this desire can work in you until you are willing to truly consider the word. Before we can gain any faith in a principle, we have to actually desire answers to our prayers, no matter what that answer may be. This is a form of “real intent.”
If desire must precede faith, how does one gain desire? I think that is a great mystery. I spent so much time thinking about it. Can you “teach” desire? How is it obtained? I’ve read so many lengthy teaching records (notes that missionaries take to help them continue teaching people) that include phrases like “We need to help him gain more desire.” I arrived at the conclusion that desire is something that is either innate in a person, or something only given by the Holy Ghost, hence frequent variations of the phrase, “You have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you.” That didn’t quite satisfy me. I knew that couldn’t be it.
However, Sister Torres, who goes home on Friday, gave a final training that got me over my stupor. She taught about promising blessings as we extend commitments, using chapter 11 of Preach my Gospel: “Promised blessings often provide powerful motivation to obey God.” To me, “motivation” could be reworded as “desire.” We can sometimes help people desire to move along the path by promising blessings.
So my tentative conclusion is that you can help people develop desire, to an extent. If it was a surefire method, it would work every time, and we would baptize far more people than we do! I do know that by following this principle of promising blessings for keeping commitments, we will be able to help quite a few people continue along the path.
Elder Shull
Elder Shull: 