Having a Great Day on Your Mission
by
Ed J. Pinegar
Every day can be a great
day on your mission. You can choose to have a great day on your
mission because Heavenly Father and our Savior will help you. You
are responsible and accountable for your life. The consequences
and rewards are yours. And the Spirit will direct you so you can
have a great day today. So let’s get started with how to do
that.
BE SINGLE-MINDED
The first thing to remember
is that we came to this earth to do the will of our Father. In the
premortal councils we agreed we would come and do our best to return
to God’s presence by doing His will. To accomplish this, we
cannot have one foot in the world and one foot in the kingdom. It
is impossible. Our eyes must be single to the glory of our Father.
We must be single-minded.
We must leave our cares at home in the hands of our Heavenly Father
(see D&C 100:1–2). If our eye is single to His glory,
our whole body will be filled with light, and the light is the Lord
Jesus Christ (see D&C 4:5). That’s what gives us power.
If we ever, ever lose the desire to do the will of the Father, we
will have a very difficult time on our mission. Like Nephi of old,
He will prepare a way for us to accomplish the things He commands
us to do (see 1 Ne.3:7). Ammon knew where his strength came from:
“I know that I am nothing,” but “in his strength
I can do all things” (see Alma 26:12). Yes, if we agree to
do the will of the Father, our Father will strengthen us.
I love Abinadi. To me,
Abinadi was the epitome of the great missionary because He practiced
the doctrine of doing the will of the Father. As you recall the
story, King Noah was leading his people astray. Abinadi was sent
there to preach and they tried to kill him, but he said (I’m
paraphrasing here), “It mattereth not what you do to me and
my body, but I will do the will of the Father. I have come to preach
the word, and after that, do whatever you will” (see Mosiah
13:3–9). They burned Abinadi at the stake. He was a martyr.
His validation wasn’t a name-brand clothing label—or
any other temporal thing—that said, “I’m OK, I’m
important.” His validation came from the Father because he
did the Father’s will. We probably won’t be asked to
die for the Kingdom, but rather to live for it.
The only validation
that matters is our Heavenly Father’s approval of what we
have done. Doing the will of the Father is the first great step
toward having a great day on your mission, for He will validate
you and give you strength, and you will feel good. If our mind is
not single to His glory, and if we have our own agenda, we are in
trouble whether we’re a missionary or not, because our own
agenda dictates our behavior. That’s why we pray to Heavenly
Father to direct our paths. Lead me, guide me, walk beside me. The
Liahona—the word of God—is our director. The word of
God is a representation of Christ. Yes, everything ties in to doing
the will of the Father. Once that is entrenched, every day will
become a great day.
LEARN
TO PLAN
How do you begin to
have a great day? You have to plan. You’ve heard the old cliché,
“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Organize every
needful thing (see D&C 88:119). When using the commitment pattern,
it is imperative to plan well. If you do not plan well, it is very
difficult to have a good day. Too often we just put out brush fires
because we fail to make an overall plan. The principle of planning
is eternal. The principle of organizing is eternal. Joseph Smith
taught that Genesis describes the creation of the earth with the
Hebrew word Barau, meaning “to organize” (The Words
of Joseph Smith: The Contemporary Acccounts of the Nauvoo Discourses
of the Prophet Joseph, eds. Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook [Provo:
BYU Religious Studies Center, 1980], 397). So organizing means creating.
You can “create” a wonderful mission.
Create a great day by
planning. Have a vision of what you want to be, and how you plan
to accomplish that. Do you have a vision of what you should radiate?
Have you made a mission statement about what kind of missionary
you’re going to be? Do you have a plan as a missionary to
find souls every day? Every moment of every day is a finding moment.
Do you have a plan to teach with power by the Spirit? Do you have
a plan to help your investigators progress by making and keeping
commitments? Do you have a plan to help keep them active? Do you
have a plan to help the less active? Do you have a plan to not only
place copies of the Book of Mormon, but get promises to read them?
Do you have a plan to serve your companions—to be nice to
them and say, “I’ll make breakfast today,” or,
“Your shoes look a little tattered, why don’t I polish
them for you tonight?” You are thinking I’m crazy, nobody
does things like that. But there are missionaries who are like that.
There are missionaries who care because they have the love of God
and they make a plan that shows they care.
If you do not plan,
the river of life will just take you any way it’s going. And
so will your mission. Whatever is happening, you’ll just follow
the flow. You need a plan. Plan to always show love. Four hours
a week are designated to give service, Christian service, to go
out and do something to help somebody else. That’s part of
the plan. Isn’t that interesting? The Prophet says that missionaries
in the full-time service of the Lord should be sure to take four
hours a week and give unsolicited Christian service. Oh, I love
the Prophet. He reveals truth to us, and every thing we receive
from him is literally a plan from God.
Be a planner. Be administratively
sound so you can be spiritually in tune. I like that. Be administratively
sound so you can be spiritually in tune. If your apartment is dirty,
and your clothes are hanging all over the place, and there are pots
in the sink and your clothes aren’t ready for the day . .
. then you just kind of feel yucky and that means you’re not
administratively sound. If everything is in its place, you’ll
be surprised how easy it is to be spiritually in tune. Organize
yourself, then you will never be rushing around inefficiently, for
you are prepared for the day.
PRAY
Plan to pray. Pray with
all your heart, might, mind, and soul for direction, for strength,
for courage, for your investigators, and for people to love and
to serve. It’s a key to a great day. Prayer is so powerful
that all of the great gifts of God—revelations, faith, humility,
charity, and so many more—come as a result of prayer. Remember
James 1:5, “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God.”
Joseph Smith asked Heavenly Father, and what was the result? The
first vision. Lehi received the vision to leave Jerusalem when he
asked Heavenly Father. Section 138, that glorious vision about the
redemption of all who have died without a knowledge of the gospel,
was a result of Joseph F. Smith asking about the scriptures. Joseph
Smith, reading the Gospel of John, asked Heavenly Father about the
resurrection of souls. The result was D&C 76. If we don’t
ask in prayer, we take away one of the greatest blessings of our
lives—revelation and direction from our Heavenly Father.
I’ll never forget
a conversation with Truman Madsen as I was coming out of my Book
of Mormon class; I looked at him and said, “Tru, what is the
greatest need in the Church today?” And I just wondered what
he would say, because he’s so wonderful and kind and sweet
and brilliant and bald, and all those wonderful things. And he said,
“Ed,” and he took about one second, and finished, “prayer.”
You think about prayer. Without it we cannot have charity.
You want to have a great
day on your mission? Be full of love. “Pray unto the Father
with all the energy of heart, that ye may be filled with [His] love”
(Moro. 7:48). When fast Sunday comes around next month, what are
we going to do? We’re going to pray and fast for charity,
for faith and for our investigators. Fast and pray for things that
will make you a better instrument in the hands of the Lord.
More next
time on having a great day on your mission. This taken from the
book The Ultimate Missionary Companion by Ed J. Pinegar. For books
and tapes on missionary work go to www.ldsleadership.com.
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