Serving the Lord in England : Patience and Rain

Hey fam bam,

How are all of you? How was the first week of school? I can't believe that school has already started...it feels like just yesterday summer started. Now look, I come home before this school year ends...that is scary. I know I have said it before, but time on missions is such a weird thing. I was reading through my journal from the beginning of my

mission the other day and looking at pictures and it literally feels like 2 seconds I was in Brighton, not 6 months. It is all so weird.

This week I came to the conclusion God is making me learn patience big time right now. This week was really hard for me for a few reasons. I have struggled a lot on my mission with feeling like a bad missionary, as I am sure every missionary does. But in Taunton and Brighton the same thing happened. I came into the areas and they were baptizing like crazy, like almost every month, but once I got there we would baptize the first transfer I was there and they were people who had already been found. Then the rest of my time in the areas the work just doesn't seem to be what it was, we don't baptize and we don't have a lot of people out at church. I know it is the Lords work and will go forward in his time, but I can't help but feel like a bad missionary when every area I go to gets worse. I just don't feel like I am as good as past missionaries and it is hard. This is a huge thing I have had to get over this week, knowing success isn't measured by numbers but your diligence and faith and knowing the Lord knows how hard I work and the intents of my heart. The stress of leading the area and training just really got to me.

Something that I have learned a lot on my mission is the importance of communication. This has come over time seeing as I am not an open person at all, but I have learned that if you don't communicate how you are really feeling and talk about what is bothering you then it really affects the work, and we saw that this week. As I have said before Sister Bills is very similar to me, so just like I was, she is very closed to sharing feelings, but this week we had a few moments on the street where one of us would just break down because this is so hard. We are really struggling in this area and with other things and it is hard. Communication is key and really helped is this week.

In relief society this week we read the talk "truly good and without guile" from this conference and it was really good for me. It is all centered on being like Shiblon, one of Almas sons, who didn't really stand out, but he was a diligent faithful follower of Christ. The story of Shiblon is in Alma 38 and he is one of my Book of Mormon heroes. I have learned so much from him and that talk was exactly what I needed, you should all read it :)

So the beginning of this week was hard, but the end of the week we KILLED IT. Literally, I am so exhausted because of how hard we worked. I went on exchanges this week and we just worked so hard and talked to so many people and all of a sudden we have a ton of people to teach. We even had 3 new people at church this week we met yesterday, which was a big deal for us. On Saturday the zone leaders and sister training leaders all came to Taunton and we did "district finding" (cause we don't really have a district right now...I'll explain later...). We drew with chalk the plan of salvation on the high street and it was so fun to just watch people look at it and answer their questions. It gave us a lot of hope for the area. At the middle of this week we had quite low numbers (not that numbers matter or anything...) but it really got to us. We had only taught 6 lessons and no new investigators by Thursday and usually we are at 12 lessons or so by then. But this weekend like I said we killed it. We ended up teaching in total 26 lessons I think and having 7 new investigators with 4 investigators at church. It was so good for us to see that despite all the hard times this week that the Lord blesses us for our efforts. I am still discouraged about the area and pace of the work, but we have a lot of potential now. The Lord blesses the diligent.

Other miracle from this week: 3 of the people who came to church we met while doing the chalk finding. They are from Romania and speak very little English. But huge miracle, we had a Romanian move into our ward about 3 months ago, so during Sunday school we taught them the restoration and this member was able to translate for us. When we got to talking about Joseph Smith one of them had watched the Joseph Smith movie on YouTube recently. It was really cool.

Well that's about it for this week folks. Pray the weather will get better here, it is pouring down rain all week which puts me in a really bad mood as well as everyone else here. I love you all!

Love,

Sister Robison xxx