Hey everyone!

I’m so sorry I’ve been so bad at writing these past couple weeks. Things have just been crazy. These past two weeks have just flown by! We are working with so many families right now. It’s so nice to finally see some of the fruits of our labors haha. We have just been running from house to house teaching the members in the ward about missionary work and how to reach out to their friends. We have really been taking our member visits seriously and have been trying to make them as effective as possible. Something that we have found to work really well is the new planning guidelines from preach my gospel. They recently revised our planning guidelines for investigators in PMG for our mission and a couple other missions. We used to have to go through 12 steps to plan for all of our investigators or anyone we were teaching. The new guidelines are only 5 steps and 2 of the 5 steps are praying haha. But I want to share the 5 steps with you all because I know they work.

1: Pray (seek inspiration)

2: Review Progress

3: Set goals

4: Make plans

5: Pray (confirm your plans with the lord)

I’ll get off my soap box now but I know if you use these steps with specific people that you have in mind by praying for them by name, writing down their progress and just think about where they are right now in terms of the gospel, then obtain a vision for them or where you want this all to go, then plan how you are going to get them there. Our teaching pool has doubled because we have taught this to all the families in the ward and they know exactly what they need to do to help get their friends to where they want to be. So help out your local missionaries and give it a try.

Halloween was three weeks ago and it was so fun! We spent the whole day playing games and fun activities. We started out the night with a sweet volleyball tournament (my team won of course) then we had a huge capture the flag competition. Then to finish off the night we had a pumpkin carving contest. Yeah our district lost that one but hey we’ll do better next year.

Our main investigators right now are the Fisher Family. We have gotten so close with their whole family and we teach them about twice a week. They also feed us every Monday night. Their family is just ready for the gospel but they have never participated in any sort of religious activities in their lives. They don’t even have a clear idea who god is yet. So we have been working really hard with them and they even came to church this week!!!!!!!!

We also found a new investigator named Jada. We got a call to go give jadas husband a blessing because he had cancer and was about to pass away. Someone in the extended family must have been Mormon because when we went over their family pushed us away because they are all Catholics. A couple weeks later we felt a prompting we needed to go over again. We weren’t really sure why but we decided to follow the prompting regardless and went. Jada answered the door in tears and explained how her husband just passed away two hours ago. We had the opportunity to share some of the plan of salvation with her right on the door step and it was one of the most spiritual experiences of my mission. She invited us back the following Tuesday where we taught the rest of the plan of salvation and we have another lesson set up with her next week.

Well that’s really all I got for the past couple weeks, I am just loving my mission and know my time is precious out here. My testimony and faith in Jesus Christ have grown so much this past year.  I know God speaks to his children today and has a perfect plan that requires change. I have seen that change in myself and seen the blessings that come from it and that’s what motivates me to help others find the same truth. The church is true, have a Great week!

Love Elder Taysom