I can´t believe that I am already writing another email again. The days are going by quicker and quicker and I have no way to make it pass by slower. This week I went to the area of one of our missionaries who has been struggling a bit lately with the disobedience. In my time in the mission, I have come to realize that there is always a reason behind the disobedience that is not seen. Some missionaries who see these disobedient missionaries immediately judge them without trying to know nor help them. This is not the way to do it and many time this will cause a missionary to be even more disobedient. The best way to help this type of missionary has two steps (from my own experience): 1. See them in God´s eyes (President Monson´s talk in the October 2012 Conference) and 2. Dig deeper and find the iceberg underneath the disobedience (Preach my Gospel). The iceberg may come from homesickness, lack of faith, frustration, a misunderstanding about the rules, or even at times lack of sleep. Now I will return to the experience that I had with this elder. I went to his area with desires to help him change. I have about 6 months here in the zone and he has 4. When he arrived, there was not even a lick of disobedience (does that make sense?) but through the past months, we noticed that he was changing. I knew and had seen his true potential and was praying, practically begging, that this interchange with him would help him in his conversion process of the mission. I already had a strong relationship with him, so I straight up told him about what we had seen, and how we desired to help him due to the love we felt towards him. While walking in the street, he told me that the disobedience had come from frustration. Frustration in not seeing results, especially from the contacts in the street. Our Mission President always has promised that if we do 20 contacts each day, we would be blessed with results. I helped him realize of the blessings that he had been receiving before when he was happily doing the 20 each day, and of the blessings that he had lost when he stopped. He expected that the blessings would come through more investigators, better numbers, more baptisms etc, but we talked about how he personally had become spiritually strengthened during those contacts. We then offered a prayer so that the Lord would show us even more blessings from the street contacts and then set the goal to do the 20. Let me tell you that our prayer was answered! The Lord seriously placed about 5 people in our path that day that truly were striving to make a spiritual change in their lives. One of the best days of my mission. That was a day when we saw miracles in the street. We must have the faith that those days can happen everyday, and not get discouraged when it doesn´t happen. There is always a reason why!
Love,
Elder Weidman
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