Find Them That Will Receive You

And from this place ye shall go forth into the regions westward;and inasmuch as ye shall find them that will receive you ye shall build up my church in every region

-D&C 42:8

Hello friends. So it's August now, so time is continuing to go by quickly. But anyways, this last week I had splits with our District Leader Elder Corcuera (and yes, that would be a Filipino) here in San Pablo that went pretty well. Something that Elder Corcuera is really good at is "OYMing" (Open Your Mouth. Check out these cool missionary abbreviations eh?) Or in other words, conversation skills while tracting. By the way, let me tell me how 'tracting' works here, because I don't think I really have in the 9 months that I've been here in the Philippines:

Most people here either leave their front door open or some don't even have one, so you basically just stand in someone's yard and repeat "Tao po!" (Which means people. Now imagine if that's how the whole knock-knock system worked in America haha) and stand there until someone comes outside. The next step is you pretty much say, "Hello, can we get to know you?" (Again, not sure how advisable that method would be for missionaries in the States) You then proceed to have a casual conversation about life and eventually introduce the gospel and ask if we can leave them with a pamphlet and if we can return sometime to share our message.

So that is tracting. And this is something that Elder Corcuera is good at. Like I have said before, 'finding' is something that we have needed to focus on here in San Pablo, so I was pretty grateful for our splits and his advice to me improve these skills. As a result, this week seemed to be more successful for Elder Sison and I. We technically didn't get any new investigators yet, but we found some people that hopefully can become investigators when we follow up with visits this upcoming week. And although we came up a little short of our goal for total lessons, I think we gave a better effort this past week and as a result, our total of lessons was the highest that we have achieved yet. Success doesn't always come immediately, but if we do our part, everything we do will always be worth it. And that's all I've got for now. Have a wonderful week guys!

Picture: Saturday morning, we took a little nature hike with a less active family. So here is a nice view of our area (from very far away)