Elder Ryan Pinkney: Mission Office- Week Twelve

2019!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! What a wonderful world

Hello world,

First off HAPPY NEW YEARS To EVERYONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

On New Years night, we were allowed to stay up until midnight to be awake for the new years. The whole mission had to return to theirs house at 9:00 for safety reasons. We decided to try our luck at doing BBQ at our apartment. It was pretty cool.

The rest of the week was pretty slow because a lot of business and banks were closed. It slowed our work down a lot. A lot of the work we do depends on these things being open, so we did the best we could in the office and then left to work in the field. We have built a pretty ok teaching group in these past three weeks. It was sad. This week a really really good family cut us. It was a family of father, mother, and four daughters all below the age of six. The first time we taught them, they were super excited to read the Book of Mormon and pray. We left and then the next time we pasted by the said that they didn´t want to receive our visits anymore because of was not going to work out and they weren´t serious about changing. We did our best in the moment to explain and encourage them to continue but it didn´t work out. I felt particularly sad in the moment, but we keep going. However, during the rest of the week, Heavenly Father keep supporting us and opening doors literally for us.

I read a talk this week called "Put Off the Natural Man, and Come Off Conqueror" by Elder Maxwell in the October 1990 general conference. It was a very powerful talk that related a lot of our sins being the cause of the natural man. It really open my eyes more to how I need to improve personally. There was a powerful example that he used of a mattress that falls in the middle of the highway. Instead of moving the mattress, the drivers just drove around it in a rush and nobody took the time to stop and move the mattress. It would have been quick for someone to just move the mattress but instead each driver was just worried about the own schedules and where they needed to be in that moment. A lot of times in life, we act like the driver going around the mattress more worried about where I need to be and what I need to do. Really, when we apply to teaching of Christ, we start to stop think about I and start thinking about the other people around us, which is to be less selfish.

Stop and think about the mattresses in our lives that would could move to help the other people around us but we leave because I am more important.