Steilacoom: Ask, and It Shall Be Given You

To my family:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD!!! Wow you're 50 years old! That is great! Yesterday and Saturday I was thinking what you might be doing and thinking Happy Birthday thoughts towards California :) Good job Matthew on BYU-I!!!  Good luck Charlotte, Claire and Matthew in the Roadshow this weekend and have fun!

We had an interesting week. It's funny how every week when I sit down to type an e-mail I only remember the good things or what I learned from the hard things. Most of this week we had appointments fall through, and many with members ready to come with us, which makes it more disappointing. But for many of these lessons that fell through, it is interesting to see what God will lead us to do instead. Usually it is better than what we had planned. More evidence this is God's work, not mine.

Drought here in CA, floods there in WA

On Tuesday, Elder Schaffner and I went to teach Cesar about the priesthood and missionary work. He is so amazing, he just takes it all and loves it. You can see in him, that he is starting to realize just how important and big this is. How life-changing and miraculous that The Church of Christ is on the earth in its fullness and with it the sacred priesthood authority to perform saving ordinances, and even ordinances of exaltation. He told us he would study this (his hand resting on his new Preach My Gospel) every night until he understands it. Funny enough yesterday was his dad's birthday so he couldn't make it to church but he will hopefully receive the Aaronic priesthood this Sunday.

We had an exchange Friday with Elder Oliphant, the missionary who served in Steilacoom the three months before I got here. We realized together we had about 7 months of Steilacoom missionary history! It was so fun, we biked around Steilacoom and met so many people, and got in touch with 3 former investigators, met 4 more people from the church group, we met with Jay and Justine (where we taught all 10 the first three lessons) and also taught Haopeng and Tiffany. They are having some complications with visa-marriage things, that I don't understand. They have a friend who is helping them, though. It might be this Saturday, if we can work that out!

Also we met with Rebecca and she committed to church this Sunday! We are having a church tour Wednesday morning which should really help!

We meet with the Sisters that are serving in our ward once a week to discuss the work and help each other with ideas for our investigators and coordinate member involvement and so on. This week we all four had been thinking about referrals and how to best get our wonderful members to not only come with us to lessons (which they do amazingly) but to invite their friends to meet with us. We brainstormed and all decided to fast and pray for member missionary work to hasten. The Lord doesn't always answer prayers immediately, but sometimes He does. Sometimes it as simple as: "Ask and it shall be given you." Heavenly Father loves us and the purpose of prayer is to align the will of the child with the will of the Father. To secure for ourselves, and others, blessings He is already ready and willing and wanting to give. Where I'm going with this is that yesterday we had our Ward Conference. Our Bishop and Stake President spoke on "Hastening the Work"! It was very spiritual and powerful. During our third hour all the members 12 and up got together to share what promptings we had during our sacrament meeting. We had an hour of open discussion, from the members, on how they can better do missionary work. Prayer works. They all came up with a few steps to hasten the work in the Steilacoom ward. The biggest focus was "invite, invite, invite." The missionaries do the teaching, the members do the inviting. What a special privilege to serve in this wonderful ward. So many of these sweet Saints do so much. And we do all we can to help them!

To each of you: invite! invite! invite!

Much Love,
Elder Webber

Scriptures on prayer: Matthew 7:7 and 3 Nephi 18:18-21 and D&C 50:29-30