Love Our Missionaries: Sweetened and Condensed...Like Milk

Written by Elder Joshua Avery, serving in the Singapore Mission of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, speaking Mandarin Chinese.

Dear Family and Friends,

Elder Joshua Avery - Singapore Mission

This week I have increased my faith by spending a greater focus on repentance. We all try and pray and ask for blessings we need, but I feel like sometimes we don't take the time to acknowledge all of our sins and sincerely ask for forgiveness. However, on my mission I have learned that is only a small part of faithfully repenting. It also requires, first, fully believing that through the Atonement of Jesus Christ you are clean and worthy. And second, believing that God has the power to enable you to resist similar temptations in the future, and to help you to lose the desire to commit that sin. Satan tells us that we will never change and we don't have what it takes. To some extent that's true, but with Jesus Christ we have the power to do ANYTHING we work toward and we believe we can do.

This past week Elder Pierce came to my area for an exchange. He is an awesome elder! It is hard not to get pumped about missionary work when you are around him. When he was inspecting my area book, he opened to the potential investigators section which was filled to the max with pi sheets. Some of them were as old as 2014! He took it easy on me because I have only been here 2 weeks :) Nonetheless, other than the one lesson we taught after lunch, we spent the whole day calling potential investigators. We called hundreds of people! But I think we found some gold in there. It taught me a good lesson. Sometimes we pray to go out and find new families when there are some just sitting in our area book, and all we have to do is call.

One of the guys we called is named Pe**. He spoke Chinese. When Elder Schwemmer and I taught him, Elder Schwemmer only needed me to help him with one or two words the whole lesson. It was awesome! His Chinese is better than mine was this far out! He was also able to talk to two people from China on the bus without my help. Now I just need him to think his Chinese is as good as it is (he can be a little hard on himself sometimes).

This past week we had a member at every lesson but one of them. The members here are willing to help, and we just need to do our part of asking them. On Saturday we had 4 lessons lined up, one after the other, and by Friday night we still did not know which members could come to the lessons the following day. We sent a massive text to all of the members letting them all know the lessons and the times, and asked them to reply if they could help with one of them. We had members calling us shortly after and were able to have members at every lesson! There is always a way to get members to a lesson. We were also able to take a member home teaching yesterday. One of the lady's we met has been off the radar for a while so I think it was a big deal we were able to get an appointment with her and help her to see that she is being taken care of by the branch.