The Value of Goals

Helló!

Last week was pretty good. I conducted the meetings at church again and everything went smoothly. I am thinking that nothing can phase me now since last Sunday’s experience with the Sacrament water. Haha. If anything embarrassing happens now at least I won’t freak out. Haha.

These past few weeks Elder Smith and I have been trying hard to achieve Mission Standard for our weekly goals. This standard is a performance goal for activities like having investigators at church, finding new contacts, teaching lessons to investigators, etc. that the whole mission is trying to achieve. We haven’t achieved the standard yet, but we’ve been working harder and we’ve had more success at finding people who are interested. For a long time I haven’t understood why we have goals like these when their realization depends mainly on other people’s agency or freedom to choose. But I think I understand the reason more clearly now. Even though success depends largely on other peoples’ decisions to meet with us, it cannot happen without our effort as well. Taking these goals more seriously has helped us become more motivated to share the gospel with others and to find those who are interested. These goals can help if we let them motivate us. Lately Elder Smith and I have found a lot of really cool people; in fact, these past few weeks have been some of the most successful of my mission, and it’s all because I am taking our goals more seriously and not letting myself get frustrated because I cannot control other peoples’ decisions. So that was a cool insight I learned recently.

Elder Smith and I taught Primary—that’s like Sunday School for children under the age of 12—last week and it was great! We had no idea what we were going to teach when the meeting started, but the lesson came together really well! Usually after a short spiritual message we lose control of the kids and end up just playing games. Haha. Neither of us really knows how to teach Primary and kids that young are way hard to teach! Primary is intense. Yesterday when we went to start the meeting, none of the children wanted to say the opening prayer—so we decided to teach them about prayer! We taught them how to pray and then we had them draw things that they are grateful for and for which they could offer thanks to our Heavenly Father. It was way fun. Tibi (his name is pronounced Teebee), who is like four years old, drew dinosaurs and then said the closing prayer. He was sooo cute! I love it when little kids pray!

Well that was some of the cool things from last week! God lives and so does His son, Jesus Christ. They have restored the fullness of the gospel on the earth and I love it!

~Anderson elder