Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Proving Myself on the Dark Days

Hello my beloved family!

I forgot to let you know that we have our temple Pday today! Sorry! This past week was pretty dang good! I broke my record for lessons taught in a week! We had 25! That was fun. It was also exhausting! This coming week we will have about 25 hours worth of meetings to attend. That is going to destroy our time to find and to teach. We have a lot of people waiting for appointments, but we just don't have the time to get to all of them! That is a problem I never thought I would have to deal with on my mission. Today we went to the temple. There were over 50 missionaries there. You would think that it would be fun to be able to see a bunch of people after a long time and stuff like that. That is certainly what it was like in the first half of my mission, but having that many missionaries together means everyone has a ton of people that they have to talk to and it is really loud and irreverent and becomes really hard to feel the Spirit. The temple becomes social time and not a spiritually rejuvenating experience. Kind of disappointing.

Mom! I am so sorry! I forgot to thank you for the package! Thank you so much! That candy has now been distributed among all of my investigators, a bunch of members and even more primary kids! Thanks for that!

This week Elder Maurer and I decided to ride bikes to a district meeting in the next area over. We were running a little late so I started going faster and hit a huge rock. That jammed my seat painfully in between my legs and shredded the tire and inner tube. That was a bummer. We walked/ran the remaining 45 minutes to arrive a solid 30 minutes late.

This week I went on splits twice. The first time we taught 5 lessons that day and then the second splits we found 3 new investigators. It seems like miracles always happen on splits! This past week we had very little time to get out and find, but when we did God led us straight to the people he wanted us to meet. It was pretty exciting. When we were planning we felt we needed to go to a specific station. We looked at the members that lived there, felt a prompting to see a specific member. We visited her the next day and she told us where a less active had once lived but moved. We felt strongly that we should go 'house' that specific apartment building. We went there and found three new investigators. That day was a refreshing day of solid guidance and impressions from the Lord that allowed us to be the tools through which God worked His wonders.

I have learned on my mission that there are a few bright days where You feel like you are working closely with God, and then there are a lot more days that feel a lot more distant and less guided. Those are days for you to prove that you will give your all to follow the instructions that God has already given you. It is kind of like Nephi when he and his brothers were trying to get the plates. In Nephi 3:7 Nephi shows a bunch of belief when he says he will go and do, because he knows that God doesn't give any commands that are impossible. So Nephi "go"es and does his best to "do" two times and fails. That is God testing him. "Do you really believe that I will provide a way for you to keep my commandments?" It is also God bringing about a change in Nephi's heart. He realizes that the only way to accomplish what God wants us to do is to do it God's way. So God teaches Nephi that he needs to work through the Spirit, and Nephi proves to God that he is willing to work and give his all to follow the commands that God has given him so far. That's what life for me has become. I know God expects me to go out, and follow all of the rules, and talk to everyone, and do everything that PMG says, and follow my feelings and do what I think is best, and ultimately accomplish my missionary purpose.(just like how Nephi knew he was supposed to get the plates) I like to think that at that time he is putting people in my path. Then some of the time he sends current, and new directions to do certain things that I wouldn't usually do, and at that time he is leading me (just like Nephi in 1 Nephi 4: 6). It gets frustrating sometimes, just like I am sure it was frustrating to Nephi and his brothers (as evidenced by beating each other with sticks). Hopefully it won't come to that out here :)

I gotta go! Love you!

Elder Siebach







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