The Spirit Delivered The Mail

The Spirit Delivered

As parents of a missionary currently serving, we look forward to Wednesday’s as that is our son’s P day and we should be getting an email from him. Occasionally, we will also get a letter in the US Mail, so when we do, it is an extra bonus. A recent email and a US Mail delivered letter was truly a bonus and one I felt was delivered by the spirit of the Holy Ghost. I normally write a letter to my son on Sunday, mailing it on Monday. I had done so recently. There was nothing significant about that, simply that I had mailed my normal letter. He emailed us on Wednesday as normal,however, he told us in his email that his area was struggling and asked us as a family to pray specifically for his area. They had recently had transfers and he was with a new companion, which he was completely excited about. He had such a great experience with his trainer, who he really loved, and now had a new companion, anative of Equador, who would be able to help him with his Spanish. He had also indicated to his mission president that the past week was one of the most discouraging of his mission because of the challenge with the area and lack of investigators. That Wednesday evening, I felt prompted to write another letter to him. I hurriedly wrote it, offering him words of encouragement, and then asked him specific questions and offered him some ideas. Are you working closely with your ward mission leader? Are you asking the bishop for names of people to see? Less active members, part member families, prospective elders. I also told him to see if they could get a list of unbaptized members over nine years old. I then suggested that maybe they could have a member missionary fireside, and also suggested that maybe they could have the mission president and the temple president come and speak in their ward. Just some ideas that I could offer. My experience as a former bishop had helped me with what I needed to write. I then mailed my second letter off to him on Thursday. Well, on his Wednesday P-day, he had some extra time at the library waiting for computers to be free so that he could email us. Well, he used his time wisely and wrote a personal letter to each of us here at home. I don’t know if he realized how significant his letter to me would be. In this letter, he wrote, “Things here have been going great. But I need your help! I need some ideas of how we can better work with the leadership of the ward. Sometimes they don’t see the importance of missionary work(from his perspective). Any ideas? Well, unbeknownst to him, my letter written on Wednesday evening was enroute to him, and his letter written on Wednesday would be enroute to me, and on Saturday, I, his father, had a sweet experience with the spirit witnessing to me that the Lord was indeed aware of His missionaries and through the Spirit’s prompting for me to write that second letter I was able to offer him some ideas as he had asked for. I knelt in prayer that afternoon and thanked our Father In Heaven for that experience. Carl Ames