It's been a good week. A few days ago it was actually warm enough for us to work in just our suit coats(~40's F). But the next day it went right back to being cold. We had travels last week and I went down to a place called New Market for the day. I worked with Elder Olmstead, who came out with Elder Atwood. He was follow-up trained by Elder Cozzens. Elder Olmstead seemed to have a pretty good grasp on missionary work for the amount of time he had been in the field. For that reason I was fairly taken aback when he made it known to me that he was looking to me as a more experienced missionary that he wanted to learn from. That sure threw me for a loop. It was great to have a chance to do street contacting again. There's no where in the Stayner area that we can go to street contact; it's all tracting. In the area book under notes about the area it says: "Hurontario street is a great place to contact people, if you want to get arrested." Apparently the missionaries got banned from walking on that street because they were slowing the pedestrian traffic.
Saturday night we got a call asking for us to prepare talks for sacrament meeting. One of the high councilman had a family emergency or something. I sure am getting a lot of practice with public speaking. I thoroughly enjoyed giving this talk, partly because I thoroughly enjoy serving in a branch. It's much easier to think as you are standing at the pulpit when you are looking at 40 people instead of 100. It's also much easier to give talks when the topic is one of the principles from the missionary lessons; like prayer as opposed to the martyrdom of Joseph Smith.
Yesterday was Family Day in Canada, so our preparation day was moved to Tuesday so that we could talk to all of the families that were home. That means that today we actually have a normal P-day because the libraries not closed on Tuesday.
I've been thinking lately about how I can improve my finding skills. When you are doing the same thing over and over you start to say the same things over and over and that's not good. Elder Bennett was good at getting people to talk before they shut the door, and I'm trying to remember how he did it. People's automatic reaction to us when they come to the door is disinterest, and starting off our conversation with something like, "Hi, we're missionaries" only adds to their disinterest. In most cases we have like 30 seconds to help the person understand that we are sharing a message that's relevant to them and it's something they haven't heard before. So that's one of the challenges that I am working on. We are going on travels with the zone leaders tonight and that's probably what I am going to focus on. A lot of the more experienced missionaries have found out how to give the impression that we are representatives of Jesus Christ and still talk to them in a personable manner.
Have a great week!
--Elder Wade
