Hey Everybody,
This week has gone by fast again. We are trying to get a few more baptisms in this area before transfers in two weeks. We have quite a few people that are close to baptismal dates.
It has been very hot this week and has rained quite a bit, but the rain never seems to cool the heat down.
I am sure am grateful to be serving a mission and doing the Lord's work. I can't believe how fast time keeps passing. Before I know it I will be home. I am trying to soak up every minute of my mission.
We are blessed to be members of this church and to have the knowledge of the gospel in our lives.
I hope everyone is doing well. We are going to put our heads down and get to work this week.
Thank you for everything, have a good week, and love you all.
Elder Nickerson.
I have a story that is
told by President Gordon B. Hinckley:
“You don’t know how
much good you can do; you can’t foresee the results of the effort you put in.
Years ago, President Charles A. Callis, then a member of the Quorum of the
Twelve, but who previously was president of the Southern States Mission for
twenty-five years, told me this story. He said that he had a missionary in the
southern [United States] who came in to get his release at the conclusion of
his mission. His mission president said to him, ‘Have you had a good mission?’
“He said, ‘No.’
“‘How is that?’
“‘Well, I haven’t had
any results from my work. I have wasted my time and my father’s money. It’s
been a complete waste of time.’
“Brother Callis said,
‘Haven’t you baptized anyone?’
“He said, ‘I baptized
only one person during the two years that I have been here. That was a
twelve-year-old boy up in the back hollows of Tennessee.’
“He went home with a
sense of failure. Brother Callis said, ‘I decided to follow that boy who had
been baptized. I wanted to know what became of him. …
“… ‘I followed
him through the years. He became the Sunday School Superintendent, and he
eventually became the branch president. He married. He moved off the little
tenant farm on which he and his parents before him had lived and got a piece of
ground of his own and made it fruitful.
He became the district
president. He sold that piece of ground in Tennessee and moved to Idaho and
bought a farm along the Snake River and prospered there. His children grew.
They went on missions. They came home. They had children of their own who went
on missions.
“Brother Callis
continued, ‘I’ve just spent a week up in Idaho looking up every member of that
family that I could find and talking to them about their missionary service.
I discovered that, as
the result of the baptism
of that one little boy in the back hollows of Tennessee by a missionary who
thought he had failed, more than 1,100 people have come into the Church.’
“You
never can foretell the consequences of your work, my beloved brethren and
sisters, when you serve as missionaries” (Teachings of
Gordon B. Hinckley [1997], 360–61).
