On the Radio

We got some interesting news on Sunday. Estrella ward is getting realigned. Apparently our ward needs a bit of a boost, so we're taking over a chunk of the other Spanish ward in the stake. We're pretty stoked. It means a lot of good members (possibly the Bishop of the other ward since both Bishops are being released) and probably another companionship (probably the sister missionaries in the other ward). The only thing I'm sad about is that Bishop Morrison is getting released. He's awesome. We got along really well and I'm definitely going to miss him.

We also had interviews this week. President had hinted that there were some interesting and exciting things coming up for our ward. Now we know what it is. President had a lot of good things to say about how well we've been doing here in Estrella.

In less exciting news, all of our investigators are rapidly disappearing. I hate it when that happens. People are just getting busy or ignoring us or going to Mexico, etc. So this week we did a lot of tracting. The problem with this ward is that tracting is not super effective. Too many white people. I've found that sometimes the Lord gives you slumps in your mission in order to motivate you to do something better. He needs to give us a wake up call from time to time in order to get us to work harder.

So towards the end of the week we got desperate and decided to try a different approach. We've started setting up family mission plans with the families of our ward. We basically came to the conclusion that tracting isn't going to get us anywhere fast and that the members are where the investigators really need to come from. It's been great so far. Last night we went over to a family in our ward and the mom told us she'd been praying to know how to help the missionary work in the ward. So we made plans for a super huge family home evening with them. Then they challenged another family to see who can have the most investigators at their family home evening. There was a fair amount of trash talking. So that got us another super huge family home evening for the next week.

So yeah, the family that we visited, the Soto family, is doing an awesome job. The husband used to be Bishop of our ward and so he gave us a lot of pointers with how to work with Hispanic wards. He basically said that if we get them excited and involved and do a whole bunch of activities then everything will start exploding (Mexicans like parties). So that's what we're planning on doing. We're going to make Estrella the home of awesome missionary activities that produce tons of investigators. So that's our goal. Bishop Soto said that it's really in our power to make the work explode here. We just need to plan cool things and work hand in hand with the members. So we're just going to turn the excitement level up to eleven and hopefully the boost of new members we're getting will just make it boom.

So we're pretty excited. We're basically just going to take the reins and make this ward really really fun. I think just making missionary work fun is going to be our goal from here on out. I'm just kinda sad that I'm only starting this now. Oh well, we're gonna have a ton of fun over the next few months. We're already planning a huge amount of family home evenings and temple trips and sports, etc.

So that's the challenge. Make missionary work fun. Maybe all of you at home can try it too.

Love,
Elder Grasley