Motivated by fear, motivated by love

Hey Everybody,

This week was pretty cool. A nice highlight was that we had a mission meeting from 10:00-4:00 on 

Friday with Elder Craig A. Cardon of the 1st (I think?) quorum of the seventy. It was pretty cool, because at the beginning of the meeting, they asked us to think of a couple of questions that we wanted answered by the end of meeting, and both of mine were answered really well! My questions were how can I be a more consecrated missionary, and how can I work better with members. It makes sense that the first one got answered, it being a missionary meeting and all, but then Elder Cardon spent like 2 hours on how to better work with members, and how to make sure we are not a burden but a tool for the members to use. It was pretty cool :)

We had two investigators and one less-active come to church on Sunday, so that was really cool.

Last Sunday's Sacrament meeting was pretty fun. I forgot to talk about this last week, but the Priests who were blessing it got it wrong like 8 or 9 times :) Like all three of them tried a few times, and they were all getting it wrong :) Almost each time, they just replaced the word "That" with "And."

So we're trying to work with a recently reactivated member's, non-member brother. He's about our age, and he comes to church, but he does have some Autistic tendencies, so he can appear to be a little obnoxious at church at times. But I always sit next to him and try to keep him calm and quiet. I've finally figured out how to do that (Just rub his back a bit) and it's been going a lot better. Yesterday, I did the same thing, and after Priesthood was done and we were putting up chairs, the EQ president told me as he was walking by "You're incredible!" And you know, that made me feel really, really good. It was interesting to feel the difference between motivation from fear, and motivation from love. It's not very often when a member just out of the blue tells me something like that, but it felt great. So my commitment to you all is to try to find something the the missionaries in your unit do well, and just give them a sincere, genuine complement. I promise that doing so will help the missionaries feel happier and more motivated. :)

Thanks for reading! 

 E. Roderer is third row, furthest right

"This was a picture of half the Michigan Detroit Mission taken during our recent mission tour with Elder Cardon of the First Quorum of the Seventy."