So, Drew, I know better than to only write once every six months, but whatever. It is what it is. I hope you know that we all love you and think about you and pray for you often!

I don’t want to bore you with boring details of my life that won’t help you a lot as you are out in the mission field, except to say that I have started graduate school at BYU and it is kicking my trash.

Anyway, it’s actually been a really great experience so far and I want to share a few little spiritual tidbits that I’ve gotten from going to school at BYU (and being open-minded and not hating all of the BYU zoobies).

First, Sheri Dew came and spoke to us and it was amazing. There were a couple great quotes that I loved from her talk.
“Everything doesn’t deserve your best effort; some things just need to get done. Some things demand your best effort.” I love this quote. I often get caught up (and I’m guessing you’ve experienced the same thing in the mission field) in wanting to do everything perfectly. But that’s not what the Lord asks of us. And in fact, He doesn’t even require that we do our best in everything. We just need to do our best in the things that matter most.

“A leader enables the greatest number of people to help the greatest number of people.” This is what you are as a missionary. You are a leader, and your job right now is to enable people to help themselves, members, investigators, and companions. You can’t do the work for them, but you can create the best environment for them and give them the tools that they need. This is something that I am trying to focus on with my classmates. Creating an environment and a relationship with each of them (or as many as possible) in order to help them “be all that they can be.” Ha ha ha.

And finally, and probably my favorite, “It is easier to motivate someone to do something hard than something easy.” That may seem strange, but it’s true. I have found it in my own life when I’m dealing with myself. My decision to run a marathon last year was a classic example. Running three miles would have been easy, but the motivation just wasn’t there all the time, but knowing that I was going to run a marathon, suddenly I could do three miles, and then six miles, and then 10, etc. This is just something to think about with your members and investigators. Trust them to step up. Ask them to do hard things. They can do them.

Okay, is that enough preaching from me? Seriously, I think about you all the time and hope that you are doing well. And just remember, we all have bad days, when we aren’t motivated and we just don’t care. Don’t get caught up in the guilt of not being the best possible missionary you can be for an hour, or a day, or a week even. Just commit to do better when you need to and move forward. I know that you probably know just how useless guilt is…in fact, how detrimental it is…but it always helped me when Alicia would write to me and remind me that it was okay to have bad days.

All right. Drew, I love you! I hope you are doing so well. Remember more than anything that Heavenly Father loves you and He and your dad are both there with you, cheering you on. We are all so proud of you!

Love,

Chloe