Church Before Baptism

Our area is huge! It's not just our area that's huge. Our whole zone covers a huge area; in fact, our zone is probably 75% of the land area for the Texas Houston South Mission. Population-wise, it's probably only covers about 20% of the people who live in the THSM mission though. It's rather ridiculous. Our area map also doesn't cover the whole Victoria area so we're going to try and rectify that sometime this week.

We actually have quite a few investigators here. But we can't seem to get any of them to church! Why is that always the hardest struggle for investigators. Of all the things Heavenly Father asks of us, coming to church is probably one of the smaller commitments. Which is probably why you have to be able to at least commit to that much before you get baptized - attend church twice. But that's why none of our investigators are meeting their baptismal dates here. I suppose the issue is most people recognize time as their most valuable commodity. It's hard for them to make that sacrifice to our Heavenly Father. Which of course may be why it's one of the main one's that he's asked of us. Look at the 10 commandments. The first four are about reverencing the Lord: "Have no other gods before me," don't worship idols, don't use the Lord's name in vain, keep the Sabbath day holy. From the perspective of the Gospel, time is a valuable commodity in a sense. Afterall, this life is the time that we prepare to meet god/a preparatory state. But if we know that. Then sacrificing our time to the Lord is the only valuable use of that time in the first place.

I've tried teaching this but I guess I'm not an effective teacher because I've only ever gotten 3 people to church. 😥

However, the Port Lavaca elders had a baptism this weekend that we got one of our investigators to. In fact, she drove us! She absolutely loves Mormons and loves everything that we teach. The only probably we have as we teach her is that she doesn't give us straightforward commitments. Even for the baptism she took us to it was all "maybes" and "probably's" and "most likely's" until she texted us at the time that we needed to leave for the baptism that she had arrived at the church to pick us up and go. We're thinking we'll just tell her a date when we're having her baptism and hope that she just shows up at the beginning of the program 😋

Love you all - have safe and be fun! 

Sister Gillespie