Labor in the Vineyard: week 97: Working Hard til the end

Monday, July 2, 2018 (transcription from Audio letter)

Hey everyone, Elder Olson here. This is week 2 of transfer 16.

It's been a pretty good week. We had transfers. I came up to Buin to be finishing my mission here in the Los Jardines branch. It's a big branch. It's about 80 people in sacrament meeting...a little bit more maybe 90 people in sacrament meeting. It would be a ward probably if they weren't in a district but they don't have enough branches that are big enough to be wards to make this district into a stake and so this branch stays as a branch...it's just a very big one.

So, it's been CRAZY! We've been working sooooo hard. My new comp's name is Elder Koche, he's from Bolivia and he's super cool...a machine for talking with people in the street, which is awesome. He's a really good, really focused, missionary. So, on Tuesday we had changes. It was cool to see some people in the bus terminal. We got the new sector, ate lunch and went out to work right away. A couple of our investigators have baptismal dates. One of them is a Venezuelan named Luis, who's pretty cool. Super cool. But he hasn't come to church these last two weeks so we had a pretty heart to heart talk with him. It looks like he was supposed to be baptized this coming Saturday, but he's not ready. And he says he wants to be baptized, but it's gonna be a little bit longer.

On Wednesday, we had a goals and plans meeting with the zone, something we do every transfer. And it was good. It was a little long. We've got kind of a bigger zone here...18 missionaries. When I was here there were even more. There were 24 missionaries. But we've been slowly going down in the number of missionaries in the mission. But we set some pretty high goals in that goals and plans meeting for the zone. In the last transfer they had 7 baptisms in the zone here, which is good for our mission. But we have the goal this change of beating it. And it seems very possible. This last weekend we had 3 so we are already about a 1/4 of the way there and we have 4 more weeks to get that goal.

This week I did a baptismal interview for a Bolivian investigator named Herald, who the Elders of Buin, my old sector, have been teaching. Super cool guy. Super good. He was baptized the next day and then confirmed on Sunday. It was really cool actually....while I was there to do the interview and I don't know what else, I passed by a couple times the chapel and I saw a few members from Buin and it was pretty exciting to see them. One of them, is a convert who I taught and was baptized very soon after I left the sector and so it was really awesome to see him. His name is Bernie. So that was cool. Then there are some other people who we'd visited...some less actives who started coming to church while I was here...who I saw in church on Sunday, so that was really cool as well.

So I think I explained this last week, but I'm not in the same branch as before but I'm in the same building. This is one of, I think there are two places in the mission, where they have 2 branches sharing a chapel or a building. So here that's one of those places. So my branch shares with my old branch from three or four branches ago, when I had about 6 months in the mission.

On Thursday we had leadership council as a mission. That went really well. Also set high goals that kind of reflected the high goals of the zone. I think a lot of it has to do with my group of missionaries, because we are 29 who are all going home together. I think a little over almost a quarter of the mission, about a fifth of the mission...a little more than a fifth. So there are a lot of us going home and a lot of us want to go out with a bang. So there are a lot of high goals and a lot of energy to be working hard this next change. So that was really cool. It was kind of weird to say some of my first "last goodbyes" to missionaries there at the leadership council. In the leadership council, we set a new focus for the mission. We started focusing on attributes of Christ...which I really like. I think they help us focus a lot as a mission. Last transfer, our focus was on diligence. This transfer, instead of telling you what the focus is going to be I'm going to give you two scriptures which I've been memorizing. I'm trying to memorize 10 scriptures this change that all have to do with this Christlike attribute. The two I've memorized so far in this first week are Alma 57:21 and John 14:15,21. And this attribute is something super important. In the MTC you hear a ton about it. It's one of the Christlike attributes in Preach My Gospel chapter 6. And PMG promises if we have this Christlike attribute, we'll have more FAITH, more PROTECTION, more LIBERTY, more CONFIDENCE and we'll have POWER AND AUTHORITY in our CALLINGS. There are a lot of promises if we are able to develop this Christlike attribute. So, I've been working extra hard to not "die" (the missionaries who are ending the mission here, they call it "dying.") and I've been trying to end my mission well. So far, I've been working my butt off. Harder than I've had to work in a while. So hopefully it pays off. And I'm sure it will.

I love you all. I hope you're having a good week. Take care. Bye!

Elder Olson

(more videos will come next week when the person who forwarded them grants my email address access)