The Dish on the Mish

Liebe Familie,

This week President Kosak came out with our new Standards of Excellence.  (These are our mission wide goals for things like monthly baptisms and progressing investigators.)  There are some pretty daunting numbers in the mix.

To be completely honest, I wasn't totally on board.  

I believe President is an inspired man and I know we can see miracles here in Germany.  It was just super overwhelming to hear these new numbers.  They are two, three, four times as big!  We were struggling to hit the old numbers!

So I tried to be as open minded as I possibly could.  I came to a conclusion that I need to change two things:

1. the way I work

2. my faith

The first one is easy.  Sister Nilson sat down and looked at where we need to improve.  Then we set goals and made plans.  One area we want to do better is our finding.  We were promised in General Conference that if we want to teach more, we need to talk to more people.  So we recommitted ourselves to talk to everyone.  

Then the second one....Faith...I need more faith.  What does that even mean?!?

Faith is so abstract.  I am a list maker and a box checker.  I needed a concrete plan so I studied everything on faith that I could find.  We have quite a bit of study time on the mish.  I won't share everything that I found.  That would eat up all my email time!  

Basically what I got was that God has a plan for each one of us.  As part of this plan we will be required to do things.  Sometimes we will not want to do them and sometimes we will not totally understand the reasons why.  And sometimes we may not think the things asked of us are possible.  We need to just do them anyway.  

That is where the faith comes in.  We obey and do something because we know God is there and he loves us and it is what He wants us to do.  This is that "experimenting" in Alma 32 that I have shared with every investigator ever.  It all clicked in my head as I studied this week.  Mega light bulb moment!

During this studying I came across a talk that I just loved. 

A Time for Faith not Fear

In it I found a quote from Boyd K Packer

 “Faith, to be faith, must center around something that is not known. Faith, to be faith, must go beyond that for which there is confirming evidence. Faith, to be faith, must go into the unknown. Faith, to be faith, must walk to the edge of the light, and then a few steps into the darkness.”

So what will we do this week in Leipzig?

We will take that step into the dark.  We will write bigger goals in our planners.  We will give out more cards and books.  We will talk to more people.  And we will most definitely pray a lot more.  

I wish you all a happy last week in January!

Love,

Sister Brown

We made Pizza and had sprach studium with an investigator A on Friday night.