What is a missionary?

To start off, a brief explanation of how my week was. This week was pretty normal but in different ways. We have been meeting a lot of new people that want to listen to us and it's awesome. We've had some people that don't want to listen to us anymore and that is the opposite of awesome. Kinda really sucks when that happens. But, we've been able to find people to replace these people so it's all good. I've also completely gotten over my sickness that I had, which is super awesome. I hope that next week or so I will have a lot of information to tell you guys about the people we found and how they are doing. I figure I'll do that when we see them twice, just so I know them better. So yeah.

The reason I titled this email as "What is a Missionary?" because I kinda just realized that some people might not know exactly what a missionary is. So, I'mma explain it.

A missionary is a preacher. Straight up. In our church, missionaries go in Companionships, where there is 2 missionaries together to help and support each other. As missionaries, there are a lot of things we do. Here are some of those things:

1. We teach people about Jesus Christ, our church, The Commandments that God has given us, etc. We do this to prepare them to be baptized, which is the only way that one can be saved and enter into heaven. This is every day from about 11-9 p.m. 6 days a week. Mondays, we get to e-mail our family and friends (that's right now) and just have fun until 6 p.m.; then it is back to teaching and stuff.

2. We find people to teach. We do this in a lot of ways, like have members of our church tell us which friends they want us to see. But that isn't always how it happens. We subsequently turn to other ways of finding people. One popular way is to do what is called Tracting, which is going door to door and seeing if people want to learn. Not too effective, but It's not a waste of time. We try people that past missionaries were teaching but stopped for whatever reason. We find people on the street and talk to them about our church and stuff. We do this when we aren't teaching, cuz you can't teach if you have nobody to teach.

3. We study every morning. We have from 8-9 a.m. to read the scriptures and lessons personally to learn more for ourselves. Then, we have from 9-10 a.m. to study with our companion and to prepare lessons for people, help ourselves become better, etc. This is all to prepare ourselves for the day. For me and my companion, we have another hour of study from 10-11 a.m. to study Spanish, cuz we were called to our Mission to speak Spanish and we need to improve always.

I felt like I needed to summarize what I do as a missionary. So now you guys can know what I've been doing these past 8 months. Yeah, it's been about 8 months. 

Hope you all have a great week!

Elder Cox