Monday, March 11, 2013

Working HARD in Bento Goncalves; The Standard of Excellence! Letissia

Good Morning family and friends! How is everyone doing these days?  I have been doing well here in Bento.  Can you believe that the transfer has already ended?  This last transfer just flew by.  It was a transfer of only 5 weeks, so a little bit shorter than usual, but still doesn't feel like I've been here this long in Bento.  Neither Elder Marques or I were transferred so nothing much will change for us.  I'm excited that he is going to stay another transfer here because he is a cool guy and a really good missionary so it will be fun.  Another reason I am glad that our companionship will stay the same is because we both made the goal of reaching the Standard of Excellence for the mission this month in March. 

The Standard of Excellence is a bunch of goals in various of our Key Indicators as missionaries that we need to reach weekly for the month.  Also part of this standard is to have 3 baptisms in the month which is a pretty high bar.  So this week we both decided to focus on these numbers to motivate us to work extremely hard and accomplish the goals.  This week was a great experience and I feel like we had a lot more results because of this motivation.  Some of the interesting goals in the standard of excellence are 12 Lessons with a member present and 120 Contacts each week.  I don't think I've ever had these numbers of these categories, definitely a different standard then normal.  We had to force ourselves really hard this week to reach these goals, we had to invite a ton of members to go on visits with us and also literally talk to everybody we saw each day to have enough contacts.  We both saw that by completing these numbers, we would also be finding a lot of investigators with potential and helping our other investigators grow some friendships with members in the church to help them progress more toward baptism.  I think that if we can continue at this rate of completing all of our goals, our goal for 3 baptisms will also happen.  Haha I think it was a great idea or maybe even inspiration for President Wright to make this standard because both Elder Marques and I feel like we are having a lot more success.  We were able to mark 4 baptismal dates this week and also find 25 new investigators and all of our other numbers have risen significantly, so the work is going faster here, and I think we will have a lot more baptisms in the near future.
     One of the investigators that was really cool that we met this week was a young woman named Letissia.  We met her doing contacts and were able to teach her the restoration and the Book of Mormon this week.  She really liked our visits and told us that she would pray to know that the things were true.  The last visit we had with her she told us that she prayed and felt that the things were true.  She accepted an invitation to be baptized and on Sunday Morning when we went to pick her up to go to church, she was standing outside her house waiting for us before we arrived.  I think she is an elect investigator and she will be baptized this month so we are super excited.  We also found quite a few other investigators that seem really interested. 

This was one of the things that I think is part of President Wright´s vision.  Talk to as many people as possible to find the elect investigators every week, and don't spend as much time with the investigators that aren't progressing.  In order to reach this goal every week we cant spend very much time with investigator that don't have a very strong desire to know the truth or willing to follow the example of Christ, so we are trying to talk to everyone and find the elect investigators . 

I'm really excited for this week and am hoping that we can continue to find the people that are prepared to hear the gospel and be baptized.  We are going to keep working really hard to hit our goals to help as many people as possible.  I really am grateful for this opportunity to serve a mission and serve God's children.  I know how important this work is and its a privilege for me that I can help out a little bit.  Thanks for the love and support from everyone.  I just want you guys to keep staying awesome!  Keep sending me emails and stuff and if you have any specific questions I´ll try to answer them all.  But have a great week!

Love
Elder Gee

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