Let me discuss a little more about this area. When I was in Pickering, there was only 1 "Eastern" missionary our whole district, even though it was an eastern area. Now that I'm back in the West, I'm the only "Western" missionary in my entire zone. Our area has potential for sure; there are a lot of good members here. But the options we have for finding through our own efforts are very slim. We have to tract. So when the zone leaders challenged our zone to go the whole week without tracting, it was pretty tough. Our zone has been struggling with finding new investigators, so the zone leaders wanted us to try new things. There's a great place to street contact in our area, but it's a privately owned commercial district and their security guards have already kicked Elder Sorensen out 3 times. There's one place we can contact at, the public square, which is like 30 feet of sidewalk in the middle of the commercial district, and most of the people there are YSA or Chinese. So our options are pretty low.
We looked over a few of the finding ideas from Preach My Gospel for things to do. We dropped by 2 funeral homes asking for our names to be put on their list of clergy to help those in crisis, but they all already have a ton of counselors. We spent some time looking for better places to street contact--no luck. We spent a lot of time doing service; I'm getting pretty pro at painting walls. Calling former investigators proved to be pretty useful, we got two new investigators from it and there haven't been new investigators in this area for like 6 weeks. The best thing that happened was the Living Christmas Card. This idea is common among most missions, but neither of us have ever done it.
The idea is to have a spiritually powerful, non-threatening Christmas message that takes less than 10 minutes. We share it with the members first and they refer us to their friends. First we sing O Come All Ye Faithful, then we recite 4 verses(Isaiah 9:6, Alma 7:10, Luke 2:7,11), then we sing Away In A Manger, followed by a prayer. It's simple, brief, and powerful, plus it's non-threatening and helps people to know that we are Christians. The members have already given us a tone of neighbors and friends to drop by, which we will be doing this week.
We had a member scheduled to come teaching with us earlier this week, Brother Leigh. He was trustworthy and dependable, but for some reasons he wouldn't answer his phone or his door. Elder Sorensen and I were really concerned about him as he is rather elderly. We were sad to hear from the bishop that he was hit by a car on his scooter and he is in critical condition. His spine was broken, he has a punctured lung, and a lot of other things wrong with him. Elder Sorensen and I visited him in the hospital, and it was a tough sight to see. I just hope he will be ok.
Christmas is coming and there's barely any snow on the ground. This time last year there was a lot of snow, but my faith has increased this year and God is answering my prayers so that we can have a warm winter. I'm kidding, but we can always hope, right?
--Elder Wade
