This week Sister Liu shared the following...
Planters and Harvesters
Planters and Harvesters
<HELLO EVERYONE>
Well this week was a trying week.
It tried my patience, It tried my humility,
and it tried my ability to not just sit on the floor and throw a fit.
But I learned a whole lot- so here we go.
Monday started off as a great P-day.
Sister Olsen and I were feeling lazy so P-day festivities consisted of:
going to church,
moving the couch from the foyer to the cultural hall,
turning off all the lights,
and spending the rest of the day watching Mormon Messages and 17 Miracles.
Best P-day Ever.
And turns out, we really needed it because we had a long week ahead of us.
The following days were long, we had no investigators set up for the week.
Phyllis wasn't answering our calls so our schedule was pretty empty.
We spent the days contacting and tracting with very little success-
I started to wonder why my last area was so hard to find investigators and why my new area was beginning to be hard to find investigators too...
I guess you could say I was frustrated.
Just a little...
I remembered that someone once told me there are two types of missionaries:
planters and harvesters.
Some plant seeds of the gospel so that maybe in a few months/years when new missionaries approach the people that once said no to us they might say <Yes, I've changed my mind, I remember talking to missionaries once..>
Those new missionaries are the harvesters- they harvest what someone once planted.
But they wouldn't be able to harvest if those seeds weren't planted in the first place.
So they are both equally important-
I guess what Heavenly Father wants me to do now is to plant seeds.
It's just hard not to wonder if anything I did in Chao Zhou and what I'm doing here is benefitting anybody...
Sister Defranchi BUT and her companion spent the night at our apartment this week ( they were traveling up north and our house was the halfway point)
It was definitely a tender mercy from the Lord.
It was like being reunited with my big sister again.
She told me about Chao Zhou:
how our old doorman, who we shared a pamphlet with and talked to every night, is now meeting with them, and his whole family has joined in.
how Ryan, a boy from our english class that I always played with and who's dad we always talked to after class, has started going to church.
how our old neighbor, who we both tried to teach countless amounts of times and always politely walked away, has started meeting with the missionaries.
It made me so happy to know that our hard work wasn't for nothing. Most of the time missionaries don't even get to know about the results of their labors, but I was really lucky to be able to hear about the success in Chao Zhou.
Later Sister Defranchi sent me a letter that said,
"....Anyways I wish you could see the fruits of our labors, sometimes I think about how unfair it was for me to watch another Sister harvest all of the good fruits I planted in Jiayi (an area where she previously served), but in the end I realized that what matters most to me is to make all those efforts acceptable to the Lord, and it still brought me all the joy."
I think that is so true.
As long as we make all of our efforts acceptable to the Lord,
that is all that should matter.
Sorry for the rambling email this week,
this week is a new week and Sister Olsen and I are determined to KILL IT!
Sending love from Taiwan,
Sister Michelle Liu