So much has happened this week, I don't even know where to start. Last Sunday, Sister Obeta and I were talking about our goals for the week and how many lessons we should try to get. To put things into perspective, last transfer we taught between 5-10 lessons a week and this transfer the most we had taught was 16. I asked Sister Obeta how many lessons we should shoot for and she said 20, which is the "standard of excellence", or the number that everyone should be shooting for. But being in an area where we are limited to pretty much only teaching the Marshallese, which is a really limited demographic, we had always set limits for ourselves and just decided that if we could teach 15 lessons, that was a good week. But I figured that if we could teach 16 lessons, we could push ourselves really hard and teach 20 this week. So we made that our goal.
Well, Wednesday morning came around and we were at 6 lessons. So we were pretty much on track to reach our goal. But we went to our district meeting in Fayetteville, and our district leader Elder Ruka (who is also from Kiribati) asked each companionship to make a "ridiculous but realistic" goal for the day. We each went around the circle and said our goals. Each set of Fayetteville elders (there are 3) said they would get 10 lessons. The Huntsville elders said 11. And when it got to us...we really wanted to shoot that high too but since we have 2 more hours of studies than everyone else AND had to go to a relief society activity that night we decided that 6 was more realistic. The meeting ended and we all went straight to work without taking an hour for lunch like we usually do. Sister Obeta and I started going to every single Marshallese apartment and meeting everyone that lived there. 2 hours later, we had taught 6 people. So we just kept going, and taught 10 lessons that day! We were starting to realize that the whole concept of Huntsville being a hard area to teach people in was just a limit that we set for ourselves. The next day, we asked our zone leaders what the record was for lessons taught in one week in our area. They told us it was 43. So we rearranged our goals a little bit and decided we were going to try to teach 44 lessons by the end of the week. And guess what? We taught our 44th lesson last night. We were SO happy.
The coolest part was that by working our hardest and teaching as many people as possible, everything else seemed to fall into place. More people showed up for church this week than I've ever seen before. Three people are progressing towards baptism. And we know almost every Marshallese person in Huntsville by name. This area is just blossoming so much and I'm so grateful to be a part of it. Our chapel was designed to be a 2 ward building, and right now we only have a small branch. But the members know what kind of potential for growth we have here and they're as excited about it was we are.
One of the best lessons we had this week was with a man named Felix. I can't remember if I've talked about him already or not. Sister Obeta and I taught him about Joseph Smith and the restoration of the gospel and the Spirit was so strong. He said that he grew up in the seventh day adventist church but he always felt like something was stopping him from really growing and progressing there and feeling the Spirit. After the lesson we invited him to be baptized and he said that he would like to, but that he is living with his girlfriend (who is a member) and knows that they need to get married before he can get baptized. He said that he really wants to be a good example for his two little boys so that they can grow up going to a church that he is confident in.
Oh, another cool thing that happened this week - Porter's wife came to church! I'm not sure if she's ever actually come to church before. The missionaries have always tried to teach them together but she was always pretty against the church. So it was really awesome to see their whole family sitting together. When they walked in and I saw Porter's wife there, I almost cried. It was such a good week.
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