The End of an Era

Malo Soifua!!!

Today on the Elder Hill Show:

• We made a large push in this mission to "adjust our mindset" about finding people, so I'm excited to see what kinds of progress we can make in the next bit
• Pride Day here was wack
• We had our last testimony meeting with Pres and Sis Teuscher last night. (They leave tomorrow morning 😭)

We had a large zoom meeting with everyone in the mission during the week, and it was really interesting. Elder Money (what a name, right?), one of the APs, gave a powerful training on changing our mindset about finding. Our mission has done really well, but our expectations for finding have decreased over the past few years, and it's high time we bring back that fire for finding people. We made a plan as a mission to try and find a LOT of people this transfer, and I think we can do it. It'll be a grind, but I'm excited to see what blessings come out of it.

Pres Teuscher also spoke during the meeting, and he showed us how the work in the NYNYC Mission has improved in the time that he has been president (he never credited himself. He only pointed to us as the reason for the growth). He told us that we are now about 3x as efficient and successful in our finding, teaching, and baptizing than we were three years ago when he came in. He strongly encouraged us to keep that trend going, and to keep improving with time.

Last night (Sunday), we had a testimony meeting for the miracles we've seen in the past month. At the end, Pres and Sis Teuscher opened a gift from the mission and let us see it. We had all sent in memories or messages to the Teuschers, and they were all compiled into a beautifully made book that was given to them. They were visibly emotional when they read through it, and they shared a brief but sweet testimony of the work (they also invited us all to visit them when we each get home lol). 

The Holmes' arrive today into the mission field, and they'll be meeting a bit with the Teuschers. Tomorrow the Teuschers fly home, and Pres and Sis Holmes will conduct a mission tour to meet all of the missionaries. I'm grateful for the Teuschers, and for all of their love and work to help me grow personally, and to help this while mission and city grow as well. I'll miss them a lot, but I'm also very excited to meet President and Sister Holmes tomorrow and start working with them!

Last note, on a very different topic haha. Pride day was wack in Manhattan. Now I'll say nothing on the topic of Pride itself. It sufficeth me to say that this city has been a liiittle wild the whole month of June (Pride Month), but yesterday (Pride Day) was absolutely crazy. There were TONS of people on the streets from noon til like 8pm. Nothing specific or bad happened, it was just wack seeing so many people out and about, in various stages of revelry. Good times. Elder Wall and I kept our heads down so to speak, just being careful in our walking to and from the church building throughout the day.

Mafaufauga faaleagaga: Something that Pres Teuscher told us during our big Zoom meeting earlier in the week was that at the beginning of 2020 this mission was at a standstill as far as progression was concerned. Things were going really well, but there had been no improvement for about six months. And then covid hit. Instead of rolling over and giving up, this mission, and all of the amazing missionaries serving in it, took covid and turned it into a means to find and teach new people. As a result, during 2020 and into 2021, we broke through that wall and saw a very large improvement in finding, teaching, and baptizing converts. That really just confirms the words in the Standard of Truth that "no unhallowed hand can stop the work from progressing." Despite covid, despite all the trials and tragedies that we all faced, the work of the Lord moves forward, and it always will until "the great Jehovah shall say 'the work is done'."

Alofa tele lava atu ia outou,

Elder Hill

Ata:

• There was a really beautiful sunset on Tuesday (so I took an appropriately large amount of pictures hehe)
• My comp on the subway 😎
• Made some awesome new friends the other day, we met them under weird circumstances a few weeks back, and just met them again a few days ago. They are super nice and have "adopted" us for however long we're in Manhattan 😂
• Pres and Sis Teuscher in their last mission zoom meeting 😭😭