True Doctrine

Dear Family and Friends,

Hello. This week has been a good finding week. We just split our area in half and so we've been really blessed as God has helped us find several new investigators. One of our new investigators is committed to be baptized on the 18th of August! His name is Sopha. We've only met him once so we don't know a ton about him but he’s great. We had to postpone our return appointment because of meetings. That's the only tricky part this transfer, with a new mission president and being zone leaders we have a lot of meetings to attend. It can sometimes be frustrating because we want to be out proselyting. But it's good. In those meetings we get amazing training and we are able to correlate things that need to be addressed in order for the mission to function properly.

One of the themes that was mentioned in our last meeting was a quote given by President Boyd K Packer. I believe, it's something like, "A study of true doctrine will change behavior quicker than a study of behavior will change behavior." We're really striving to apply this in all different aspects of our work. For example, obedience has been an issue lately in our mission. A couple weeks ago, President Tew gave a wonderful training. Even though he didn't say the word obedience once, I went away from that training pumped to be as obedient as I possibly could. On the flip side, I think a lot of times we naturally tend to want to address problems directly, and often that can quickly turn into criticism, and criticism doesn't make anyone want to change behavior. Whereas lovingly sharing true doctrine helps a person feel the message and then they often naturally have a much greater desire to change. We talked about how we can apply this principle to struggling missionaries, member missionaries, inspiring a zone to do better etc.. It was awesome!

Another highlight this week was Sitha. He is just doing amazing! He's a recent convert of about 3 weeks. He finished the Book of Mormon and is now almost to section 30 in the Doctrine and Covenants! Wow! We’ve had several really powerful meetings with him about the priesthood. It's so fun because he's someone who really "get's it.”  I love that he’s hungry to learn. This week we helped him prepare the sacrament for the first time. It was neat. He's going to be a powerful leader in the ward.

Thank you everyone for your prayers and support. It is felt! I love this gospel!

Love Elder Hicken