"Stay on the Covenant Path"

Today is Sunday, June 14, 2020

Happy 3rd Birthday to Peter on Wednesday, June 17th!!

Happy Baby Blessing Day to Liesl Anne Low!!! 

Gardening really does have missionary application!! Planting seeds is what we are about…many, many seeds are planted in the CMM in such a variety of ways..but right now we pretty much do all our planting through Facebook posts, and through teaching virtually. Some of our teams are so busy they can’t teach everyone they have…others aren’t quite as blessed…Exciting to announce that four people were baptized this week!! The work goes on….

I know I raved about Maritime gardeners last year, and they were impressive,  but these Quebecois take gardening to an entirely new level!! Boulevards in Mont Royal are spectacular with maybe a dozen graduated beds - (each is probably 8’x40,’) along our main feeder Graham Boulevard.  Student gardeners transformed the beds in a day…layering up..a border of reddish begonia on the outside followed by dusty miller, strawberry fields - red gomphrena, and a tall leafy row of centrepieces.  Mont  Royal has a town centre like the centre of a bicycle spoke with many roads or boulevards coming off, and every main boulevard has a different colour scheme. Just incredible!! Driving around neighbourhoods ooooh’ing and aaaah’ing is such a fun relaxation activity!!  Can’t complete this gardening paragraph without mentioning a new favourite hedge… ‘Spirea!’ Stunning lacy white hedges with delicate white blossoms grow everywhere, and I am determine to find a corner to plant one next year!!  Zone Six is the perfect gardening zone!!!  Yony, our FM gardener came yesterday with a load of topsoil/manure mix and filled our new hydrangea bed; after our visit to the gardening centre, we planted perennials; veronica, lupine and sweet woodruff. To add a splash of colour I raided a few bubble gum pink petunia and added them to the new bed. 

Our Sunday evening Devotional tonight I’m feeling inspired to teach about the importance of making and keeping covenants, and creating our own well worn covenant path. Following is what I’m thinking about presenting…. President Nelson has reminded us about staying on the covenant path. As missionaries, it is what we strive to do everyday!  Our handbooks for being effective missionaries include The Scriptures - all the Standard Works, Preach My Gospel, Adjusting to Missionary Life, Safeguards for Technology, and Missionary Standards for Disciples of Jesus Christ. These handbooks teach us everything we need to know to stay on the covenant path. - everything!! How are we doing? We have been taught to read from these handbooks everyday. Just reading is not enough…we must apply what we are taught. We have heard many times: “Obedience brings blessings, and exact obedience brings MIRACLES!!” 

We so desire to be blessed with miracles….but we need exact obedience…

As we follow with exactness the standards set for us we will see miracles!  The greatest miracle we will see will be our own transformation ..our very hearts will change.

And I love the Marlin K. Jensen quote: “When obedience ceases to be an irritant, and becomes our quest…God endows us with great power.” Isn’t that powerfully motivating…not for just as we are missionaries, but as we continue on our mortal journey. 

Page eight in our Missionary standards reads: “God invites you to dedicate yourself to Him throughout your life. Mission standards such as personal study, goal setting, and the righteous use of technology will bless you on your mission and help you for the rest of your life. Let the commandments in the scriptures and the principles in Preach My Gospel: A Guide to Missionary Service and the missionary standards become lifelong guiding principles. As you follow God’s commandments and standards, He will direct, bless and guide you throughout your life.” 

We love hiking… any where in the world…My favourite trails are where the forest floor is soft soil covered in evergreen needles, where there is elevation gain with fun switch backs, and where tree roots or rocks are easy to maneuver around. But we have done some hikes where the entire route was granite boulder climbing, and for me…that was the hardest hiking ever.… BUT..We kept saying to ourselves…we can do hard things..and continued pressing forward. The well worn paths are easier to follow, and we know it took much effort to create the well worn trail or path. That is just like a mission culture - our mission culture.  To create a trail or a path, much work is required clearing trees, digging out roots, moving boulders, building footbridges etc. etc.

Likewise, covenant paths for generations of missionaries to follow takes great effort.  This is our task - each one of us;  to establish, and maintain a mission culture of complete obedience; we must remove or take away anything that will detract from 100% obedience, and that is our challenge and invitation. Do you have anything that detracts you from being 100% obedient? Think about how we each can contribute to our goal of 100% obedience in the Canada Montreal Mission. 

Daily we make choices…so many choices..when to get up, what to wear, to be cheerful or grumpy.  After almost two years as mission leaders we have come to know that the most important role we have is to help motivate, to teach, to show, and to help YOU learn and experience the great JOY of life on a covenant path. It means to feel the JOY of obedience…of happily obeying Missionary standards of Jesus Christ…music, dress, schedules, and p’day activities.  obedience brings blessings, and exact obedience brings miracles.  Establishing a life on a covenant path requires hard work, desire and commitment, but it is oh so worth it. PEACE, HOPE, JOY, TESTIMONY, and ETERNAL LIFE are the rewards of a life on a covenant path. I know that.  Let us each have our feet firmly planted on our own well-worn covenant path, standing, walking, skipping, and running in holy places, all day, everyday is my challenge for each of us..It is the right way, and the only way to find true happiness. 

Four new missionaries are to arrive tomorrow, so we are excited to do another Airport run!! And this week our schedule indicates that we have Longueuil Zone interviews as well as their Zone Conference. It will we great to have lots of visiting with these amazing missionaries..One of these days maybe I’ll make myself visit with them in French!! 

Missionary service is exhilarating and so motivating! Our testimonies of the Restoration, and the beautiful Plan of Happiness is what the world needs NOW!! And so we work. Everyday we have such purpose and such drive to help the work move forward.  

We love when our sweet missionaries share lovely miracles, and below are a few for your enjoyment!! 

Missionary Miracles June 14, 2020

Hawkesbury sisters:

We had a really great lesson with Rocko this week and taught him the restoration. It started out as a complete mess- we had a very hard time helping him and the members present get settled into the video call and all three of them had a bit of a hard time focusing, jumping around from story to story or from principle to principle. It was also Sis Mendoza's first time teaching the restoration so it was an interesting balance to help her feel confident teaching while also trying to help Rocko understand what everyone was saying. Finally, Sis Mendoza started telling the story of the first vision. As we recited Joseph Smith History to him, all three went completely silent and the Spirit was so strong it was almost tangible. Rocko then bore testimony that he believed what we were saying was true and that he really wanted to read the Book of Mormon - when he was on date, he had only read about four pages. It's moments like that that make the hard days all worth it. 

Lasalle sisters:

An actual crazy miracle! There was a young woman who sent a message on the Disciple of Jesus Christ in Montreal page that wanted to learn more about her purpose in this life. This young woman is a Spanish speaker, so they asked me to message her. We asked if she wanted to hear more about God's place for her and she said yes. We clicked on her profile to see where she lived and we noticed that she is friends with Sister Mendoza on Facebook! During our call with the Hawkesbury Sisters, we asked Sister Mendoza if she would like to do a Spanish lesson with me with the young women we wanted to learn more. Sister Mendoza just said yes with a huge smile! She was so excited and just happy!! We asked her who this person was since they are friends on Facebook. Turns out that she is her sister’s friend from Mexico! What a wonderful miracle! 

Dartmouth sisters:

This week Sister Murray and I were looking through the Area Book trying to figure out who to call.  She passed me the phone and I  started to look through the names. One stuck out to me and I turned to Sister Murray and said I think we should call her. I had such a strong feeling about here and felt like we needed to call.  We did and a few moments  later she reached out to us.  We did not talk long but apparently she had been longing to hear for the sisters.  It was good to reach out to her and meet her needs. She does not like to be pushed but hopefully with a little time and love we will be able to become her friends. 

Ottawa zone leaders:

As far as the area goes we've started to have some big success as of late! We found one person through area book finding, and we've been getting some good member work done. In fact on Friday after Zone Conference we had to go pick up some weights that the STL's and Sister Hall had found while cleaning out the Chapel Hill Elders apartment (which from their report was nasty) and we had all these weights in the bed of our truck and we were thinking of how we could get rid of them. Instead of taking them to Value Village we decided to ask the ward if there was someone who wanted them and we added a post on the Ward FB page. We got a call a few minutes later from the Bishop's son who serves in the Canadian Armed Forces and he has been looking for weights all during quarantine to keep in shape. He said that he'd come by right then! So he and Bishop Graham swung by and picked them up. While we were talking with the Bishop he was telling us about how his other son, currently reassigned to the Toronto Mission, has friend who wants to learn more, and had asked him if the missionaries are good ones. He told us that he felt we were good missionaries, and it felt SO good to hear that! It's awesome when the Bishop starts trusting you! So we have that referral that we're currently trying to work with! So that's been the exciting things in our area this week. We're doing our best to find and add to our teaching pool, as well as keep working with those that were being taught before we came in.

The Gospel is true. I again finished reading the Book of Mormon yesterday, and accepted Moroni’s challenge, and silently prayed to know if what I had read was true. Immediately I was overcome with the sweet assurance that it indeed was. As Joseph Smith said “The Book of Mormon is the most correct book of any book on earth, and the keystone of our religion, and a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other book.”  I know this to be true. There is POWER in the reading of the Book of Mormon…..DO IT!!

I’ll send this off with much love…RIchard and Gayle, Dad and Mom, 

      Grandpa and Grandma…..Keep Smiling!!!!