I hope you all had a great week! I would say that my week was pretty solid. The work has been really slow lately and to be honest it's been frustrating. We have been working pretty hard and all of our investigators seem to just keep disappearing. Right now our only solid investigator is Oliver normally he has been pretty solid but in the last two weeks he hasn't been to church and both of our appointments have fallen out. We invited him to a baptismal date partly because he had been asking about getting baptized and since then we haven't had a solid lesson and he hasn't come to church. Naja hopefully he has just been busy and we didn't scare him away;)
This week was our meeting in Berlin though! It was pretty cool. We had to seventies come: Elders Kearon and Nielson. We didn't actually get the iPads because they haven't arrived yet but we did have a really long meeting about how the work will go once we get them. It was actually a very good and interesting meeting, even for someone who has less than a month left. They talked to us about how the church has been trying to improve the video campaigns that they've been doing and with each campaign they are seeing more and more success. Through the Christmas initiative alone the church received 134,000 requests for the missionaries to visit them. That's so crazy! The entire meeting though wasn't even so much about how we will be using the iPads but how the Lord is hastening the work. The iPads are just a very small part of whats happening overall. Elder Nielsen is one of the top guys in the Missionary department and is in charge of a lot of the stuff happening. He told us a pretty cool detail about the iPad thing. When the missionary departments presented the idea to the Quorum of the Twelve and the First Presidency, the two concerns that they went into the presentation with were that missionaries would first, forget their purpose and second, that they would misuse the technology. When they presented the idea and addressed the concerns the brethren told them that they weren't worried and that "We trust them." Ever since they have announced iPads that is all we have heard is how absurd it is that missionaries would get iPads and that they would all just do bad things with them. He told us that we need to remember that from the mouths of the twelve and first presidency came the words that they aren't worried about us and that they trust us to use them properly and more importantly the Lord trusts us.
He then told us that the idea for missionaries to have access to the internet and to use the internet in doing missionary work was an idea that first appeared about seven years ago. The whole reasoning was because the world is becoming smaller. People all have tablets and smartphones and they are constantly using them. The world almost runs solely on 4 in screens that we invest so much of our lives into. Because that is where the people are that is where we have to go. People don't respond to door to door or street contacting like they used to. We don't live in an age where people are flooding in masses to the churches and so we need to adapt. So many people have voiced their concerns that the safeguards the church has on the iPads won't be enough. It's not about the safeguards or whether or not the missionaries will use them appropriately, although the safeguards will help the missionaries to use them properly. The iPads and using social media in missionary work is a step that must be taken in order for the Lord to hasten his work. We can connect and contact so many more people using these tools! The safeguards themselves are kind of cool. The church has been working very close with Apple to get the Ipads set up and made in almost a "special order" kind of way. The church approached Apple with the request of a large amount of iPads that will be made with a special safeguard allow the church to monitor and see all activity of the iPads. Every app that is downloaded, all internet activity everything is view able from Salt Lake. There is still a lot of freedom and the missionaries could technically download whatever they want. They just have to keep in mind that Church HQ and President Kosak see everything. I thought it was pretty cool that Apple worked so closely with them and has made a lot of this possible. Elder Nielsen said it was kind of funny at first because Apple was really confused at why they would want to restrict so much on the iPads and why they would want all of the features they wanted and the church had to try to explain to them the life of missionaries and the rules and so on.
Well I wish I could tell you more but I don't have time to tell you more about the meeting. President and Sister Kosak posted a video of our entire mission singing "Lead Kindly Light" on the blog. We sing this every single Zone Conference and this time they started our crescendo singing;) You should check it out!
Well sorry thats all I have time for this week! I hope you have a great week! I love you all! May the Force be with you.
Elder Trevor "Longbow" Bone
Little Child of the West Winds
The Duke of Awesome
Pictures:
1. Me and Elder Peterson, my first MTC comp
2. I found it! Totally random too. Just walking around and I saw it and then I though,"wow, what a sign!" ;)
3-4. We went to Hard Rock Cafe today and then to the Hafen (Harbor) Thats also the reason I took some money out of the account
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