Hello Family!
This has been another great week here in Jordan. I am happy here and enjoying my time here on the mission. Just to let you all know how close I am to coming home if I hadn't extended I would've gone to the office today for interviews and departure meeting and would've flown to Manila tonight. This is now the first week of my last transfer on a mission. I'm not being trunky... just accurate. HA. I was in a tripanionship. Elder Doig, Elder Faran and I just combined areas and had a blast working with each other. I have known them ever since the MTC so it has been fun to work with them. In fact Elder Doig will be going home with me in October (he goes home to Cardston). We weren't able to work in my area very much but we got lots done still. The work is still moving really slow here in my area and I am still trying to find out what needs to happen to get things going again. We have been contacting LOTS more less active members these past couple weeks. So I feel like I know the are much better now and I am excited to get my companion here on Thursday.
I am way excited for tomorrow as Elder Bednar will be visiting us here for a day. You cannot even imagine how excited I am to get to learn at the feet of an apostle of the Lord. I am so excited to hear his message. He assigned us to study a couple talks he has given in the past and those talks were just fantastic. I have learned so much about learning and teaching and I am excited to see what his training will be like tomorrow. I will take lots of notes and fill you all in next week. Then when I get home that will be a big part of my report I'm sure. I got my clothes all ready this morning... meaning I literally did laundry for about 4- 5 hours this morning. My hands look like ground beef.. they are rubbed so raw. I was pretty lazy last week and didn't do all my laundry because we were in the city for most of the day. So I had quite a pile of clothes to wash (by hand) and I did it! But it literally took all morning. I will be so grateful for a washing machine in a couple weeks.
The work has been tough and my big focus is just contacting and teaching as many less actives here in the area. There are so many of them and I want them back. I don't care if I don't baptize another person as long as I can have some people come back to activity. That is what the branch really needs right now and so that is what my goal is. I think this last month we contacted 12 less active members for the first time. So that gives us a LOT more people to work with and hopefully through them we can find more investigators that will progress in the gospel. We have taught lots of people but they are still not wanting to act according to the message yet. That is always the tough part... getting people here to do something. They would much rather just listen. I also feel like some people require a visit from the missionaries if they are to go to church. But if you don't visit them... no chance. So that is another thing that needs to be fixed.
Yesterday I had a cool experience with working in the area next to mine... We got to take the sacrament to a woman in the hospital who is going to die of cancer soon. She is pretty old now and the other Elders bring her sacrament and we had a little sacrament meeting with her... it actually reminded me of when Dad and I would bring sacrament to an older woman in the ward. But we administered the sacrament and shared a message. For my part I just had to express thanks that we were members of the church and that no matter what our circumstances are or where we may be when we partake of the sacrament we can enjoy the presence of the Spirit and have that peace that Jesus Christ promised to leave with His Apostles. It was such a testimony to me that I was where I needed to be and doing the right thing as I sat in this hospital room (an over packed noisy place that you don't think could ever be peaceful) and enjoyed the companionship of fellow members and the Spirit of the Lord. Another one of those experiences that mkes you just sit back and thank God that you went on a mission.
I think that my goal for this area before I go home is to just get things moving here in Jordan B. I wanna leave this area with a good sized teaching pool and with investigators that are at least progressing. I have had some good weeks here but getting any consistency has been quite the challenge for me here. I am praying way hard that I get a sweet companion that is ready to work hard... he's gonna have a hard time here in Jordan if he isn't ready for that. I am excited to push hard through these last weeks of the mission. I am happy I extended and now I get six more weeks to enjoy on the Philippine islands. I know I can get things going here and get Jordan branch bumping again.
This next week is looking to be quite an exciting one for us here and I am way excited to get through it and report back to you all what all happened. It sure sounds like everyone is having a great time over there and keeping busy. I'm sure the next transfer will fly by and be over in no time. After all we are only talking about 42 days or so until I'm home... get excited!
I love you all and hope you all have an awesome week.
Elder Lowry
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