Talking With People (A Simplified Guide)

It would be imperceptible!

Our Memorial Day was fun, we had a ward brunch! Good times, we played football and Frisbee! And ate pancakes and scrapple. Ugh. Hopefully you get some things going on with that. The work here is going great, I am very excited for Luis next week, he passed his interview and he is very excited as well! 

Let me tell you about Elder Holland! Wow, what an experience. It was something you can just feel as he enters the room, just a mantle of power and reverence. He started off and shook everyone's hand, conducting, as he told us, personal interviews with all of us.  Really powerful, you can feel that his eyes aren't even seeing you but are going into your soul.

 Then he clipped on a mike, stepped away from the podium and was just pacing the chapel, talking with us. He is a little shorter than you'd think, a little older, but still as powerful and passionate. He really cares, and you can tell. I could see a tear on his cheek (that's how close he was to me at some points) as he talked about missionaries going inactive, "losing the shepherds" as he called it.

Wow. He was also really funny, in an off-the-cuff sort of way. At one point he said it was his dream to pass away in a high priests meeting. " It would be imperceptible! I wouldn't notice, they wouldn't notice either! A few weeks ago a high priest in my ward went into cardiac arrest. The paramedics arrived and did mouth to mouth to 5 high priests before they got the right one!" So it was funny….But also intense.

He talked about the need to have truly converted missionaries, and that the cost of discipleship is real and we must pay a price to be converted and have that change of heart. "The path to salvation always leads through Gethsemane and upwards towards Calvary." The main thrust of his meeting with us was that we needed to "explode" the work! He talked about getting our water to 212F (the boiling point) and keeping it there! Splitting an atom, releasing incredible latent power, getting to that burning desire and mighty change of heart. It was really powerful because he was teaching by example; we could feel the power of those words because of the way he felt about it - True emotion and desire. Then he walked up to the pulpit and bore his testimony. And I don't think I will every forget that. The words he said, and the power and truth behind them, I could feel. And I am sure that as I watched him there was a mantle, or an aura, an actual glow about him as he bore his testimony. Really such an incredible experience.

I know this work is true! I love it!

Love

Elder Wright

The Atonement

Missionary Do's and Don'ts

Mother's Day

Found an old missionary flowchart...

And here's some Amish folk.

Their buggies just clop along on the sides of the roads and cars swerve around them. It's pretty regular here,once you're out of the city of Lancaster. Though occasionally I have seen an old Mennonite dude zipping by on a little motor scooter.

The Elder Wright Times: How to be a Missionary

Hershey's Kissmobile (1998, 2002, 2014)

We found the Hershey Kiss truck! We were so excited! We had to get out of the car, and duh, we got pictures with it!