The Centrality of Love in Missionary Work

iHola a Todos!

I feel like speaking Spanish today, not sure exactly why. I've been very blessed by the Lord in my language abilities, and have been able to pick up more and more fluidity with time. A couple weeks ago I had a landmark event in Spanish, a lady actually asked me what country I was from after hearing me speak! I'm amazed at how the Lord has blessed me even though I don't speak much Spanish most days. I talk in English with my companion because he's a native Spanish speaker and it helps him with his accent so he'll be more comfortable with the intimidating Americans in Aspen. It's amazing though that even with that, I've been able to continue learning and becoming more familiar with the language. I never would have believed it possible even a year ago.

We've had more spare time than usual lately, and we've used some of that to clean out all of our records that the missionaries in the past kept. It's been interesting, we discovered that about 75% of the teaching records created for investigators never should have been created in the first place, because they're mostly spanish people who let the missionaries in to teach 1 lesson, to "hear the word of God", and then never can be found again.

So, I spent about 4 hours transfering all their information to a different form, the "potential investigator" sheet, and we've been working off of that list now to contact these people who at one point let the missionaries in but never really investigated. We've had a couple lessons off of that so far. They weren't the people we were actually looking for, but we did find some of their neighbors who were interested in hearing us, hopefully they'll progress a little bit and we'll have more investigators!

I had a cool experience this last Thursday at a District Meeting. I had an elder train about the role of prayer in conversion, which is one of the 8 Preach My Gospel trainings we've been given, and then I was going to train on the centrality of love in missionary work. I'd been inspired to train on that topic right after I recieved my call to leadership, but I hadn't had time to do it, and this last meeting I was only left with about 10 minutes, so I shortened it and gave it anyways.

As I was teaching, the spirit filled my mouth and started teaching truths that I'd never thought about before, and gave me some answers to questions I'd had for a while. In your missionary call letter, the 1st Presidency tells you that "more joy and happiness await you than you have ever before experienced as you lose yourself in the Lord's service", or something to that effect. I'd wondered before how that was possible, because a lot of the time I find missionary work to be hard and not always joyful.

What the spirit taught me as I was speaking is that when we truly do lose ourselves in the work, and when we have charity for and love the people we teach, we recieve more joy and happiness than we've ever experienced when they make decisions to progress and change, and that's how it works. You get out of it what you put in, because if you really make the effort to seek for the gift of charity and really love the people, their progress will fill you with joy.

I love being a misisonary right now, in these last days, and I'm so grateful for the blessings I've recieved from the Lord! This is truly His work, and He's carrying out His plans for His children, and it's awesome to be a part of it! I love you all, have a great week!

Love,

Elder Damon Janis