This last week was honestly probably one of the craziest weeks of my entire mission so far! Not all of it was good, but it sure made for a crazy week. We ended off the week with 5 new investigators which was a great change to the last couple of weeks so things are going really well! I'm just gonna give you a day by day of what we ended up doing over the last week so I make sure to not forget anything. After we finished Preparation Day last week, we met with a lady named Stacey who called our Bishop and wanted to meet with us. She grew up in Oregon and went to church with a lot of member friends, but she moved out here to be closer to her sons and wanted to get into church out here, so she did a bunch of researching and found our Bishop's number and called him up, and then he called us. So we met her and taught her and she was super excited to come to church, so we lined up a ride for her and she was able to be there on Sunday! We are seeing her again on Thursday, and she has a baptismal date for March 10th.
On Thursday, we had a special meeting with President and Sister Brown to talk about new guidelines for planning that really help us to focus on the people we are teaching. We were supposed to have district meeting and interviews on Thursday, but instead we did district meeting on Monday and then this special meeting and our interviews on Thursday. So that along with our weekly planning session took up most of the day on Thursday. By the time all of that was done, it was 5:30, so we tried going by someone we had an appointment with who was busy, and then we had time to go get dinner. But after dinner with had an appointment with Callei again. We ended up seeing her three times last week, preparing her for her baptism on the 3rd. We are almost finished up with the lessons and those kids are some of my favorite people ever! Super cool and funny kids, sometimes hard to keep on track with the lesson, but always all good.
Friday wasn't a super good day, we got dropped by Rodney (the crazy guy) when we had an appointment to see him that night, and our afternoon was kind of shot as well getting everything done that we needed to and also someone that we had an appointment with saying to come back at a different time later that day and then being busy when we went back. Kind of disappointing because then all our plans were kinda messed up for the day. Also, the roads out here are straight destroyed from this winter with pot holes everywhere. All Ohio does is fix their pot holes and then winter comes and destroys everything again. So it's always a fun time driving around here. At like 8:50 at night, we got a text from one of the Assistants saying there was going to be a mission wide conference call the next morning at 9am that everyone needed to call in for a big announcement. Nobody knew what it was about, but then we had to call everyone in the zone and make sure they got the text and were going to call in in the morning. Lots of guesses on what the announcement was going to be, but all we could come up with was that there was a general authority coming to visit the missionaries. Friday night was pretty much like Christmas Eve and definitely didn't sleep for a long time because there was some huge announcement and a conference call the next morning, and 9 seemed like it took forever to come around.
So we called in Saturday morning and at 9 the "meeting" started over the phone and President Brown started talking to all of us. He started talking about the mission getting smartphones which we already knew, but then he started to get emotional, so at that point I knew it was bad news. We had kind of joked about the mission getting split the night before with other missionaries, but then it became more of a possibility. Then President Brown referenced a news release from October or November and read this part of it to us over the phone:
"In 2012, President Thomas S. Monson announced the change in the ages for missionary service. Young men could begin full-time missionary service at 18, while young women could begin at age 19. A surge of missionaries occurred following President Monson’s announcement. The number of elders and sisters serving full-time missions reportedly jumped from 58,000 to 88,000 in just a few years. Five years after the age changes, with missionaries spread throughout more than 400 missions, the Church will be implementing reductions to achieve an overall number “that better fits the total number of missionaries and the needs of each region,” according to Mormon Newsroom. “We’ve leveled off to around 70,000 missionaries—still way up from the 58,000 we had,” Elder Nielson said. “In the orderly process of accommodating changes in our numbers, we’ll be slowly closing missions because we don’t need as many as we required for the great increase we experienced in 2012–13.”
So, the sad news, as of July 1st, the Ohio Cleveland Mission is being shut down. The Presidency of the Seventy determined that missions in Ohio are relatively small in size compared to elsewhere in the world, and due to the number of missionaries decreasing, they are splitting our mission up and joining it with the three surrounding missions, Cincinnati, Columbus, and Pittsburgh. The Youngstown Stake is going to join with the Pittsburgh mission, the Akron, Cleveland and Kirtland Stakes are joining with the Columbus mission, and the Toledo Stake is joining with the Cincinnati mission. So instead of 1 new mission president in July, we are getting 3 new mission presidents. Totally unexpected and took everyone by surprise, and nobody really likes it. It's just weird to think that this mission is going to be gone before too long. So that was a terrible way to start off our Saturday that we had appointments set for noon, 1, 2, 3, 7, and 8 which we thought was going to be a great day. But of all those appointments, we got flamed for all of them except for the 7 and 8, but we had a lot of good backups and were able to get one new investigator from our service finding earlier in the week! So it did end up turning out well for us. Kind of a discouraging day and lots of things going through my mind that day. But the Lord knows what he is doing and it is going to help move the work along in the area and things are going to be good. The leaders were led to do this so that sure does help a lot knowing that and knowing that the Lord is in control of it all.
On Sunday, we were at the church from 8:00 until 4:30 because we had meetings before and after church, but we ended up having about 2 hours to proselyte with dinner and call-ins, but we found two new investigators, another from our service finding on Monday and Tuesday and then the husband of a referral we got. So this area really blew up this last week and the Lord blessed us with a lot of people to teach! So far for this week, we got another new investigator on Monday from our service finding (once again) and then yesterday we had MLC at the mission office. All we learned about was how to use technology effectively and all the ins and outs of it, which is going to be all what zone conference is about this next round. The lucky part? Three transfers as a zone leader now, and this will make it ZERO discussions in zone conferences since then. I'm the luckiest dog ever out here in THE OCM. Not only that I don't have to give a discussion, but I'm the last transfer going home that doesn't need to buy a smartphone, I'm the last transfer that President and Sister Brown have, I'm the last transfer that gets to go through Kirtland right before they leave, and I'm the last transfer that dies with the Ohio Cleveland Mission. Pretty much the most blessed transfer in the history of existence.
Sorry I really haven't taken any pictures since being here, but there's some pics of the new mission maps and the one from a couple of weeks ago that the lady took of Elder Talbot and I on exchanges. Just so you know what it takes to stay semi-warm in the five degree weather, I have two pairs of socks on, two pairs of thermals under my pants, top thermals, white shirt, sweater, coat, gloves, hat, and whatever you call the thing around my neck and I was still cold. But that's about everything warm I had to wear so I was outta luck. Good times in Ohio :)
Love Elder Woodward
No comments:
Post a Comment