Preach My Gospel

Good Morning,

I knew Rylito was going to be dressing for the game, so I was really looking forward to receiving the pictures, but Carson's email didn't come until about 1:00, and luckily we had time to go back to the library.  I also received the BYU magazines, so that was awesome as well, thanks! 

Hodges BYU #1 Fans in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin

I heard about the Spencer Hadley story via the Hodges this past week.  I got to go back to Sun Prairie! We slept over last Wednesday night, so we went and visited some members before we went to the apartment.  Of course the first members we visited were the Hodges, and they told us about the Hadley story, so that was pretty crazy!

In our meeting with Elder Perkins this past week he was giving us a discourse of having the faith to find new investigators and while he was teaching more about having the faith to receive spiritual impressions he says, "I've had this impression for the last 3 hours, and I'm now acting on it.  This group IS NOT prepared.  The other groups were prepared, but this group is not! I'm not sure what it is be it obedience. . ." so on and so forth.  I was shocked, because I felt the exact same way.  I didn't feel like it was worthiness or obedience issues, but I felt something was wrong with both the Wausau and Madison zones.  He then went on to tell a story about how his mission was not using Preach My Gospel effectively when he was serving as mission president, and the Lord chastened him for it.  It was then that I received a major impression the missionaries here in the zone need to focus their efforts on using Preach My Gospel in their proselyting.

Preach My Gospel

I have felt this tremendously in the Wausau zone because of how many new missionaries are in the zone.  We've had a lot of missionaries who are focusing their efforts from the Bible and other sources, but there has been no focus on Preach My Gospel.  Elder Perkins posed the question "why is Preach My Gospel written at a 7th grade reading level?" My immediate thought was because that's the education level people will understand the Gospel at, and Elder Johnson had the same impression.  As hands were raised...not one person even alluded to this principle I felt so strongly about.  As I began to put these pieces together it was evident to me Preach My Gospel is not being taken as seriously as it ought to be.  We're putting some things together for our zone to review in the up and coming zone training meeting.

Although that happened at mission tour, our zone did awesome this past week! We had 16 baptismal dates and found 20 new investigators, which isn't too shabby for the smallest zone in the mission.  We have a vision of 4 baptism for the month of September (probably going to be it for the month of October as well), and we have 2 goals to accomplish this and they are:  16 baptismal dates and 20 new investigators each week.  We achieved that this week! It was great! We were really proud of the zone for accomplishing that, and we encouraged them to do even more this week to move the work forward.

Everything is going well for us here in Wisconsin Rapids as well.  We currently have 3 people progressing towards baptism which is great.  I can say it has definitely been hard trying to keep everything in line with our own proselyting, lifting the zone, and figuring everything out for school.  My mind has been absolutely fried the past couple of weeks.  

Thanks again for your support in my first decision to come home early, and I hope you can all support my new decision to stay here until January 30th even more.  I'm not 100% sure why I'm staying longer, because I felt so strongly that I needed to go home early, but I feel great about staying here a little longer.

I love this work, and I love the people of Wisconsin.  Thank you for everything!

Love you guys!
Elder Gautavai