Dear Family & Friends,
I learned a lot about what it means to create vision and establish
vision for the area we are working in right now. As inspired by Sister Anderson, who is one of
the Sister Training Leaders that I go on tradeoffs with, she wanted to focus on
establishing a vision for her area and so I had the opportunity to make that my
goal as well in order to help her. I
studied on this focus for two days and found some beautiful insight that really
clicked for both her and me. A vision is
the ability to think and plan for the future with wisdom. In this case, wisdom coming from God. I studied two Visions that prophets had and
are recorded in the scriptures. The
first is Lehi's Vision recorded in the Book of Mormon and the second is Joseph
Smith's First Vision.
Joseph Smith had established vision from the time he set a goal to
receive an answer to his question of which Church to join. His plans were to study out each Church and
then ask God through prayer. He was only
expecting an answer to his prayer when indeed Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ
appeared to him not only giving him his answer, but later on called him to be
the Prophet to bring back the fullness of Jesus Christ's gospel and Church that
had been lost for hundreds of years. Not
only that but he received the responsibility to translate the Book of Mormon. A young boy asking a simple question, looking
for a simple answer, had his vision expanded much more than he expected after
he saw God the Father and Jesus Christ. Remarkable.
If you study 1 Nephi 8 you will see that the principles of
establishing vision are similar to what Joseph Smith experienced.
Sister Anderson and I talked about trusting in the goals and plans
that we have set and act in faith. When
we do that, our vision will be expanded because it is the implementation of
those plans that make it an exercise of faith.
A neat miracle that we had yesterday during golden hour was that
we were knocking doors and there was a hidden corner that we went down where
there were 5 more houses. We knocked on the
first one and this man named John opened the door. He wasn't open at first, but we shared a
scripture with him and the Spirit testified to him because he completely
changed. He asked what the Book of
Mormon was about and we told him and shared what it meant to us. We then invited him to be baptized and after
asking, he just stood there with his eyes glued on the Book of Mormon. Scanning it for about 30 seconds of the
longest silence, he looked up and said if he came to know if was true he would.
I know that he felt the power and worth
of the Book of Mormon in those 30 seconds.
I had never seen that before. We will be meeting with him on Friday.
As far as my new companion, Sister Clay is
from Washington State and she has done a little bit of schooling at BYU Idaho. She has been out on her mission for just under
a year. I have seen her grow in the
mission since she has been 4 1/2 months out. She works hard, and is determined to share her
testimony of Jesus Christ wherever she goes. It will be a great last transfer ending with
her!
Love, Sister McCook
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