Having a Second Zone Leader Again

It is transfers tomorrow, Elder Nelson will be moving (Not that he has even been here in Fairview) Elder Lutz will also be moving and Elder Pajarin will be coming – he is an amazing missionary, new zone leader, great teacher (I used to be his zone leader back in Valenzuela). I am excited to work with him and see what I can teach him and learn from him. 

It has been an interesting time being the only zone leader. Normally there are two in each zone: to make sure the work is distributed nicely and everything gets done nice and orderly. I will be training Elder Pajarin on his responsibilities as a zone leader, but he knows a lot – he is a really solid missionary.

This week, I went back to Bocaue. I got to do mapping with Elder Nelson. We got to visit those members I used to teach. For two days we had a car and were able to go around the whole area; it was a really fun time. We even had to change our tire (thanks dad for teaching me). 

This week we also had dinner at the mission home. They do that sometimes with the missionaries to give them a chance to talk with President Hughes and have a nice dinner. I really enjoyed it. I will attach a picture we took afterward.

This is a great time in the mission. We are seeing a lot of progress in our zone now that we are finished with the mapping. We have seen a good response from the members, they work with us and things are a little more organized. I look forward with faith that we will have a lot of progress in the zone and see many miracles in the next few weeks.

Well I love you all, have a wonderful week. I wish you all the best of times.

Elder Faulkner

Stairway to Heaven

So last week I mentioned that we made a new baptismal board. We had one before that was about time. It only kept track of the months in which our investigators would be baptized. It helped us plan for the coming months, but we often saw that most of the people on the board would not actually progress or go to church. We worked out a system that will allow us to better track the people that are actually progress toward baptism.

The idea is to divide the investigators into groups based on their percentage chance to be baptized; we have 3 groups: 20%, 50%, and 90%. The requirements to be counted in those groups are as follows:

20%: Go to church, and start reading the Book of Mormon

50%: Go to church twice and accept a baptismal date

90%: Go to church thrice and start living all the commandments necessary to be baptized.

This all stems from the requirement in the Philippines that to be baptized, you have to go to church at least 4 times. We have seen in the past the struggle of getting people to church. Once that stumbling block has been overcome, most of the time people love what they learn at church and have a desire to keep coming back. Its always that first time.

Elder Lutz and I have two wards to work in. There is lots of work to do to fix our schedule so we can work in both wards without people getting dropped out of the teaching pool. It has been a little bit of a struggle; but we have also seen many wonderful things happen with those that we are teaching, and we have found some good potential investigators this last week that might make it to church this coming Sunday.

Today we had a fun zone activity where we all got together and played capture the flag and a couple other games as a zone. It was a little unorganized, but in the end almost everyone had a really great time; we were able to get everyone participating. This zone is a really hardworking one and we are generally pretty close, so it was nice to see everyone joining in today.

Well that is a really short email. Sorry about that I will try to get everything longer with pictures next week. There will be pictures. 100% promise.

Love you all

Elder Faulkner

Big Changes

So last week I hinted that their may be very large changes happening in my companionship and in the area that I have been working. Here they are:

·         Elder Nelson is now on a special assignment to Map 4 wards.

·         I get to go back to Bocaue this Thursday to map my old area.

·         His companion is Elder Villanueva

·         My new companion is Elder Lutz

o   Elder Villanueva's last companion

·         We now have two wards:

o   Bagong Silangan

o   Batasan Hills 2nd

·         We are almost finished with the mapping in our whole stake

·         We are close to normal missionary work

·         We tried the JIFFY in our ward and it didn’t work out as well as we had hoped

·         We are trying again next week

·          Got a new baptismal board for the whole mission that I helped design

·         Helped redefine weekly planning in MLC

·         Talked to Elder Ewing about how to do mapping, and about my old investigators

·         #puyat

·         Apologizing to all readers that this is the format I am using today

·         Learned a lot about evaluation of myself and other people

·         Learned that planning is literally everything this week

·         Rainy season started

o   Got rained on really hard

§  Rain didn’t stop

·         Found a broken umbrella

o   Used broken umbrella

§  Found better umbrella

·         Used Better Umbrella

o   Gonna buy a good umbrella

·         All my Clothes are wet

·         Trying not to get Dengue (I won’t get Dengue) 

·         Honestly, I am safe from dengue I have taken the necessary precautions.

·         We had 2 baptisms

o   but no confirmation

·         Studied 2 Nephi, Chapter 9 (

o   blew my mind over and over again

Well those are a lot of the things that happened.

I will share with you a little bit of what I have learned because I am still learning it.

When looking at a situation where one person has failed, and one person has succeeded, most of the time we ask ourselves why the person failed. If we take Satan and Jesus Christ as an example. We can analyze all we want about Satan’s fall and what he did wrong and what he did right – but in the end, we will learn a lot more asking the question "What was it that allowed Jesus Christ to succeed?" This course of analysis will allow us to see what we can do to be like that person. Jesus had all the more reason to be prideful, He had all the more reason to fall – but something about him allowed him to succeed. Find out what that is, and you might just have the key to the universe...

Well, love you all.

Keep it going, and if it isn’t going, get it going.

Love you

Elder Faulkner

Fairview, This is the place

We are currently working on making this stake the first stake in the Philippines that is 100% GPS mapped. Which means we will know all of the active and less active members within ward boundaries and we will be able to get more accurate numbers on who actually lives around the church and in the surrounding areas.

       

This mapping should lead us into a new stage of missionary work, where we are able to work with the wards and stake to reactivate members and bring them back into the church. Elder Nelson and I are acting as Stake clerks, fixing all the clerical errors in each member’s account. We take the more accurate address information and find the people to make sure they actually live there still. If the information is correct and current, we place their house on the internet map. At that point, everyone has accurate information about the people that live around them. This will also work in the future when new people come into the ward or are baptized. We will be able to map their houses immediately and these problems will never happen ever again.

       

After all this is done, we will be only focusing on working with the members and teaching investigators. We will be bringing out the JIFFY into every ward and be doing in on the ward level. Most of our missionaries are really excited for this next phase and are looking happily towards the future. As we are working with the missionaries to finish all this up and start the next phase, we will be working on teaching skills and other things that we can do to improve our work quality.

       

Elder Nelson may be called on for a very special assignment very soon. If that happens, I might be left with another missionary and have to do most of the zone leader responsibilities by myself. If that happens, it will be an interesting time in my mission. We will know by this coming week. And then you can know what his secret mission is.

     

There may be a lot of changes that come about in the work and the mission. I like doing the work this way better than the way I started. So far in the time with President Hughes, we have jumped in progression. Even though our total number of missionaries has gone down, we have gone up in baptisms and trust from the members. I love both my mission presidents and I have learned so much from both of them.

       

This week was zone conference and we learned a lot. We gave a workshop about reading the Book of Mormon and I realized that I have learned a lot about the Book of Mormon on my mission. I have learned how to give hours to study it and get close to the words of the prophets. It makes me happy to see that personal revelation in my life and I encourage you all to do the same in your life. Find a way to receive personal revelation.

       

I love you all I will have updates for you next week.

Love

Elder Faulkner