The Corn is Getting Tall... - July 15, 2013

Another Great Week in Story City!

 

We taught a FHE at a members home Monday night where we watched the mormon message "Our Eternal Life" with them and talked about how the internet and the videos the church produces can be such a good force in the world for truth. Use them!

 

Our branch has a new Branch Mission Plan!!! We are very excited. It has 3 parts.

1. Activate/introduce one person to the gospel and do all the temple work for one person. 
2. The focus families of the branch. 
3. Each quorum/auxiliary will be in charge of filling our schedule each week, one at a time.

The Young Men are in charge of it this week. We are excited for the members to get even more involved! Since the Work of Salvation Broadcast, our Branch President hasn't been able to get missionary work off his mind and he wants to do all he can to fulfill his responsibilities as the branch president. His first counselor is sending off a missionary this week to Paraguay, and their family is super awesome and supportive of missionary work as well.

 

We received a referral from a member in another ward for a less-active member that lived in ours. She told him that she was ready to come back to church. Her name is Paula. She smoked for years, and had a stroke with a couple of aneurisms and she now has trouble getting all of her thoughts and words put together. But she is coming to church next week!

 

Brother Bennett's friend had a wedding Saturday. He asked his friend if he could bring some friends, and told him his friends were mormon missionaries. His friend said it was fine, so we went to a wedding Saturday! And to Kaiden's Open House/Farwell Barbeque! Kaiden is a member of the branch here who leaves to Paraguay Wednesday for his mission. He will be going to the MTC in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  

 

From my studies this week. One definition of call is "invitation," another is "cry." In the scriptures, we read of God's servants crying repentance unto the people. As missionaries, our puprose is to "invite others to come unto Christ by helping them receive the restored gospel through ... repentance" (Preach My Gospel, pg. 1). We are to invite others to repent. Elder Neil L. Andersen of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, when he visited the Iowa Des Moines Mission on May 4, 2013, told us that we are fulfilling our purpose if we "get them [people we work with] through some repentance." We all need to repent daily. As we love God and His Son, Jesus Christ, we truly want to be seen as clean in their presence always. We all sin and therefore are need to follow Alma's counsel which says "And now, my brethren, I would that ye should humble yourselves before God, and bring forth fruit meet for repentance, that ye may also enter into that rest" (Alma 13:13). I pray that we may all repent always.

 

Love, 

Elder Zachary R McKenzie

Iowa Des Moines Mission

    D&C 6:34, 36

Doubt Not, Fear Not.
550 Souls to Christ