Gratitude...It Makes the Sun Shine

In a bicycle area now!

Missionary work...takes a lot of diligence. If you were to look and my planner you would see that it has about three ways that we spend our time: contacting people at the park, visiting with people that are less active, and dinner appointments with members. We usually spend about an hour every day or every other day going to the park and hand out pass-along cards while trying to talk with people. Sometimes we have good conversations with people and hopefully plant a good seed. 

In the California San Jose mission we don't go tracting (knocking on people's doors) so we have to do everything else we can think of to find people. There are a lot of gated communities here so knocking on people's doors probably wouldn't be a very effective way of finding people anyways. This mission is starting a pilot program called "Just Serve". I think there is going to be a website where people can post service opportunities and then the missionaries (and other people as well) will do so many hours of service each week. I don't think that the website is up yet and we don't have a very clear idea of how it is all going to work, but the idea is that we get out in the community and do service. I think it's a good idea. Sister Kim and I spend two hours a week at the food bank near by and help bagging food. It has been a lot of fun because we get to interact with people there and hopefully they get to see that we're just normal people...at least I try to be normal.

This week Sister Kim and I were trying to think of how we can jump start missionary work here in Fremont through members. Our idea was to teach members how to make their own family or personal mission plan so that they can have a missionary goal to work towards. You can't achieve a goal that you haven't set, so we want to help them set goals. We created a document that talks about how you could make a family mission plan. We plan on teaching families in the ward so that they can get excited about missionary work because sharing the gospel is one of the greatest things you can do!

I read President Monson's October 2010 General Conference talk--The Divine Gift of Gratitude--this week and it completely changed my attitude about what I'm doing here in Fremont. I realized that, like the Savior with the seven loaves and few fishes, I need to be grateful for the things that are going well and focus less on what isn't. This past week someone posed the question, "If all that you had today is what you thanked Heavenly Father for then what would you have?" Heavenly Father has blessed me with an abundance of blessings! There are so many tender mercies that happen each day that show His love for me--and it is usually through the kindness of other people. In his talk President Monson said, "We can lift ourselves and others as well when we refuse to remain in the realm of negative thoughts and cultivate within our hearts an attitude of gratitude. If ingratitude be numbered among the serious sins, then gratitude takes its place among the noblest of virtues."

Sister Kim and I visit a number of less active people and families in the ward to teach them the missionary lessons or to give them some spiritual input. Yesterday after church we visited with Charlotte and John (I'm using different names). Brother Ocon from the ward also happened to be there visiting John and he helped us out quite a bit with teaching. Charlotte is in her late 80s or early 90s and John is her son. Charlotte is Danish and I think "stern" is a good way to describe her. She was baptized a number of years ago but she didn't believe the teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints so now she is agnostic. Yesterday we went over and she had questioned about how we could believe that there is a big man on the throne up there that just orders us around. We told her, in many words and analogies, that Heavenly Father doesn't order us around or make us do anything and we explained the entire plan of salvation. She said that what we were explaining made sense to her, I thought that was incredible because I was expecting her to reject every word we said. If Charlotte is honestly seeking to know the truth, then she will come around. That is the wonderful thing about the Spirit--it always testifies of truth.