God Taught Me a Lesson

Dear family!

How are y'all! This past week was pretty dang good. We had five people at church which is one of the higher numbers I've had on my mission! It was great!

Throughout my mission I have never really been able to work closely with less actives. Whenever I visited they usually weren't there or they were very very angry at the church (one even got violent). Recently I have felt like I have been spending so much time with investigators that less actives were being ignored. I never really felt prompted to work with them, but I figured that that was because I never really thought about them. Because of that and I felt like we should, we planned a night full of visiting a bunch of less active members. We had a lot of people to visit with very little time so we didn't even stop to talk to many people on our way (I felt really bad about that). It turns out that, like all of my experiences before, they were all gone or had zero interest in church or talking to missionaries. Over the course of the night I was really doubting my feelings the night before during planning. I had felt like we should do what we were doing, but no one was talking to us and we were passing a bunch of people on our way. Finally we only had one more name for the night. A 70+ year old sister that lived in a big apartment building near a train station. Even if she was there and invited us in we wouldn't be able to teach her. We knocked on her door and a middle aged Korean man opened the door and turns out that he was incredibly prepared! When he opened the door I felt like I was in the right place at exactly the right time. God was getting us there, it just took a long time and required a lot of faith in previously received revelation! It was awesome! Who knows if that man will progress, we haven't been able to set a return appointment with him yet, but I know that the gospel can improve a lot of very apparent parts of his life (in reality it can infinitely improve all of them) and we were able to promise him that. Hopefully we have a lesson with him soon, but God taught me a very valuable lesson through him. I still don't really know what to do about less actives, but I feel like the Lord is guiding me and that is all that is important!

This week we got transfer calls! I am staying with a new companion Elder Poffenberger. I am bumped down to junior companion with a district leader trainer assignment! So my companion is the new district leader and I get to show him how to do things! That's really exciting! My current companion will be going to my first area, Machida 1! I will miss my beloved Elder Menzawa!

This week I presented my ideas to the ward council and they loved it! We are having a family Meet the Mormons movie night on the 27th!

I love Y'all!

Shout out to Dad for your birthday! Love you pops!

Elder Siebach

Our ward mission leader