Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord

William James Jones has been called to serve a two-year mission for The Church of Jesus Christ ofLatter-day Saints in the New York Rochester Mission from November 2012 to November 2014.





Wednesday, August 14, 2013



Hill Cumorah Pageant saturation!

22 July 2013

This past week has been pretty awesome.  We got to go and see pageant every single night.  It was crazy.  I've pretty much got the entire thing memorized.  I got to go and meet up with a lot of people from Freedom that I hadn't seen in a long time.  I wish I could  all the many pictures I took.   We went with a recent convert in Fairport called Don a few nights.  He seemed to really like pageant.  We also went with Brother Penner and Cynthia one night.   The pageant is so much fun I really enjoyed going to it.  We also got a few referrals from it so hopefully those referrals will work out and we'll get a couple of new investigators from them.  We are badly in need of investigators.  Also transfers are coming up next week so there's a very good chance that I might get transferred into a new area.  I gave a talk in sacrament meeting yesterday.  The topic I was given was missionary work in the Fairport area and the atonement of Christ so I kind of fused the two together and talked about how certain Christlike attributes make us all more effective missionaries.  

Spiritual thought  

In my talk I talked about the Christlike attribute of Hope and how important it really is.  In Ether 12:4 Moroni talks a lot about this Hope and we should have hope of a better world. So I made the point that if Moroni, the man who watched his entire nation get wiped off the face of the earth,  can still have hope,  then I can too even though it can be really hard at times tracting for hours and not having a single person listen to you.  You still have to have hope that someone will let you in and listen to the message that you have. 
  










15 July 2013

This past week has been pretty awesome.  I got to go up to the pageant this past weekend both on Friday and on Saturday and it was a lot of fun.     On Friday we went with Don Harter (a recent convert) and then on Saturday we went with Brother Ben Penner and Cynthia.  They all seemed to really enjoy it. Also this past week we were able to finally teach this one lady called Deborah that me and Elder Erekson found though our efforts tracting and we were able to finally meet with her.  She is so golden it's so awesome.  She asked all the perfect questions and showed so much interest in what we believe in.  She also respects everything that we do and just everything she said she's looks perfect.  We will meet with her again in a couple of weeks.  We also  had good meetings with our regular less active people.  We had family home evening with one less active family. Also this other long term inactive called Jeff is opening up more and more to us.  We're getting close with him.  He's been inactive for 10 years but is definitly not the normal case of less active. He served a mission and was in the YSA branch presidency for eight years and then dropped off.  We read the scriptures with him every week and just hope that he''ll come back.  He got pretty emotional as well last time so hopefully he'll open up more.   



Hill Cumorah


Met President Arthur Francis, new mission president

8 July 2013

We had a pretty good week last week.  I got to meet the new mission president, President Francis, and he's a really cool guy.  I have a feeling he's going to be a really great mission president.  

Also this next coming week is going to be the pageant.  I'm so excited.  The rules for attending pageant are that we have to being either a less active, part-member, or investigator to the pageant in order to go so we hopefully should be able to go most days as we have a lot of people to go with.  

Anyways we had a great fourth of July holiday which we spent most of with Brother Penner and his girlfriend.  We were able to teach them a mini restoration lesson which was really cool and were able to answer both of their questions about the church.  

We also got a truck this week so we aren't on bikes anymore.  Thank goodness!  Those mountain hills were pretty challenging.  I guess the real challenge now is to figure out how to keep the weight that I've lost off. 

I didn't realize that upstate New York got so hot in the summer.  It's really similar to Virginia except it's even more humid because of all the lakes.  Anyways I've got to wait 16 months before I can even consider swimming.  I love you all and you are in my prayers continually.




President and Sister Francis



New mission president coming

1 July 2013

For this week things went pretty well.  We're still on bikes and my legs are getting ripped.  Biking up massive hills will do that for you especially when you live 4 miles out of your area.  But yeah big things happened this past week particularly with the ward.   Bro Silva our Ward Mission Leader is stepping up to the plate.  The missionary broadcast seems to have touched him deeply as he really is making some big changes.  It's so awesome.  The online area book he created is a really fantastic idea and has really helped with communication issues.  He also sent out an email to all the members to encourage them to do member missionary work and is a lot more enthusiastic about missionary work in general.  Hopefully this will continue.  Bro Penner and his girlfriend came to the ward friendship night last Friday which was really good.  Also he keeps saying that he's glad to be back in the Fairport Ward which to me gives the impression that he's planning on becoming permanently active.  He wasn't there yesterday (I think he overslept)  but he told us his girlfriend has pushed him to go which is AWESOME.  Hopefully we can really start to get to teach both of them.  They also want us over for the fourth of July so that will be fun.  Last Wednesday a family called the Clawsons had a non-member over to eat with us.  Their daughter is dating an English guy and so they were like lets have him meet Elder Jones.  So we got to meet him and share a spiritual message and next time his whole family should come over too.  We invited everyone we saw to pagent this week and just did a lot of street contacting.  Street contacting is generally more effective then tracting.  We also are really striving to find some more investigators.  Also President Francis arrives sometime today so we'll see what happens when he gets here.  

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