Chapter 43: Meetings, Meetings, Lessons

August 28, 2023

Chapter 43: Meetings, Meetings, Lessons

(I've got a mega headache while writing this, so don't expect this email to be super organized).

This week has been busy busy! A majority of our time was spent in meetings. When we weren't in big in person meetings, you would probably find us doing video call meetings planing for the big in person meetings. We had a lot of these video meetings with the Zone Leaders, so we could plan Zone Conference and Zone Leadership Council with the District Leaders. So in case you didn't quite catch on, Sisyer Ray was in a lot of meetings this week.

But they were all good and productive.

So speaking of which, we had Zone Conference! It was really good! Lots of things changed the night before, and I feel like I'm still trying to find my footing in some things as a leader. So in the moment, I felt a little overwhelmed and I prayed a lot in my heart that what we were presenting and going over with the missionaries was what they needed and that it would be edifying for them. After ZC and after talking with some of the missionaries, I put together a little list of little lessons I've learned about leadership.

1) Thorough, Spirit led planning is important.

2) Expect things not to go exactly according to plan and understand that's okay.

3) Change plans according to needs based off the Spirit.

4) Realize things go better than you thought in the moment.

Here's a cool miracle from our week!

We were heading back from a drop visit and Google maps took us down the other fork in the road than the one we had originally come down. As we were driving we got a prompting to pull into a trailer lot. We knocked on the door twice and got no answer. We decided to leave a sticky note on the door, and as we were writing, Kaden answered! He had just lost one of his friends so we shared a little about the Plan of Salvation with him and talked about God's love. What's super cool is another friend of his was recently baptized into the church! We gave him a pamphlet and set a time to go back! God's timing is perfect. I love contacts like that; where someones porch in the middle of nowhere on a dirt road, becomes a spiritual haven.

Here's two lines from church I've been thinking about a lot:

-"Satan promotes distraction. He'll distract good people with good things to keep them from the essential things."

Don't let him keep you from the essential things.

-"I cannot tell it without the Spirit invigorating me."

I don't really have anything to add to that. But that's what I feel every time I talk about Jesus Christ and His Gospel. Every time I bare my testimony. My testimony is a gift, and I will do everything I can to honour it.

One last thing. This is just a fun lil peek as Sister Ray's personal study. I was struggling early in the week to know what to study and to really click with something. But I had such an awesome bing to listen to hymns one morning. That evolved into the thought of "oh! I should read the scriptures that go along with the hymns!" Then that thought evolved into "wait, how cool would it be to study one of the first three lessons as just hymns???" So for the next two days, I put hymns to the points of the Plan of Salvation. I studied the hymn lyrics and the scriptures to go with and y'all, I learned so much! I only made it halfway, so I'll finish this week. Seriously one of my favorite p-studies.

If you're not already, please make the sacrifice to un-distract yourself from the good things, and study the scriptures, or pray, or listen to hymns. Something. Anything you can to feel Gods presence more fully this week. I promise it'll make everything feel more manageable.

God loves you, Jesus loves you, I love you,

-Sister Ray

Pics:

Cool amphitheater we found