Elder Merrill's Current Address

Elder Merrill's Current Address

Elder Nathaniel Merrill
Philippines Baguio Mission
PO Box 7 (po box for letters only)
Brgy: San Vicente East
Urdaneta City, Pangasinan 2428
Philippines

Monday, September 3, 2012

Septemer 3rd, 2012

This week was a good week.  How many letters do I start that way? Well it's true every time.  This week we got 20 less actives at church.  We also started teaching a few families that are preparing to enter the Temple.  They aren't less active, but we visit them once a week and can definitely help strengthen them to prepare for the Temple.  
Another thing that we did this week is that we went to every less active that has a baby that hasn't been blesses and taught them about children.  Being fast Sunday it means you can bless a baby and it seems that for most less actives they just need a push to get over the edge and go to church and after that they do pretty well.    So we went and taught from 3rd Nephi 17 about bringing the children to Jesus and Jesus blessing them.  We only ended up having one baby blessing yesterday, but it was good to see at least one new less active come to church. We got a lot of new investigators this week as well.  What we have been doing is instead of teaching less actives is using the less actives as fellowshippers and teaching the friends of our less actives.  Less actives feel the spirit that once blessed their lives and they also testify of the truth to their friend, they also get the benefit of the doctrine we teach.  It has worked pretty well, depends on the less active though.  We have to brief the less active beforehand and also be careful that they don't teach false doctrine.  We had one experience though that was just Golden.  We were at the house of a less active to teach and her friend came over.  Our less active invited her friend to come and listen to the missionaries.  We taught a good lesson and then guess what.  We didn't invite her to come to church.  Our less active fellowshipper beat us to it.  She invited he friend to come to church with her.  Just Golden.  Get a less active and an investigator to come to church.  Essentially we do our investigator finding through less actives.  

     We found another investigator couple this week that is just great.  They are cousins of a less active and happened to be there when we went over.  The only problem with them is they don't live in our area.  They were very receptive, but when we asked if we could go to their house they said they'd rather be taught with their cousin at their cousins house. i.e they'd rather be taught in our area, but we can't actually baptize them in our area.  We are thinking of going on exchanges with the Zone leaders for the next appointment so they can meet the missionaries in their area.  They want to learn more but I think don't like the idea of being taught by a new and different missionary.  We live with the Zone leaders so we might make it happen. 
      I also found out that a lot of names in our area book are wrong.  Missionaries just wrote what they heard and wrote a lot wrong.  For less actives I just took a ward directory and corrected them, for investigators I just had to ask them all what their names were again.  There is not a less active named Mom.  That name was misheard.  
Anyway a lot more happened but if I were to write it all I wouldn't have any stories to tell later.

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Have a good week, keep your head up, and smile.
                                                                           Elder Nathaniel J. Merrill

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