Week 32: Super-Planning and Finally Teaching

We finally have an investigator in our area. We've been without non-member teaching in our area for the last few weeks. M is a wonderful guy from England, and his son B is very inquisitive and extremely bright. M hasn't had a Christian background for over 40 years, and his neighbors are members. He has gone to our church once or twice, and he wanted us to come over and talk to him about Jesus. It went fantastic, and B was constantly asking questions that could be answered with the Plan of Salvation, which is what we are definitely going to be teaching them this week.

 

This week we had zone training, and the zone leaders and sister training leaders told us about a wonderful thing called weekly planning and how we can do it right. Two representatives from the Missionary Department came by last week and went on exchanges with the zone leaders and APs. They evaluated what one thing if the whole mission worked on would revolutionize the mission, and they decided it was weekly planning. They showed the MP, APs, ZLs, and STLs how to do weekly planning effectively, and they brought up this awesome way to make weekly planning work. We start off by having a vision of what we want our investigator to accomplish, then we make a goal based off that vision, then we make plans based off the goal, then we schedule around those plans. Vision, goal, plan, schedule. Me and Elder M hadn't done weekly planning yet that week, so we tried it out, and was INCREDIBLE! I really could feel the Spirit during planning, and we learned a lot about those we are working with through the Lord's help.

 

One of the people we planned for was B, a less-active member. We were planning on going in and helping him find a relationship with God, but that quickly changed and we realized that we need to work on helping him have faith in himself first. If we hadn't planned like that, though, we wouldn't have been prepared for that shift and it would have been a disaster, but instead it was AWESOME!

 

Planning has made me realize that it is a tool we need every day of our lives. Effective planning leads to effective living. I invite all of you to learn how to effectively plan.

 

Sorry, I don't have much time, so I've gotta go now. Until next week, I love all of you.

 

PS, Elder Holland is coming in 25 days to our mission conference.

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The Lord's Soldier,

                      Elder Jacob C. Tibbitts