When Obedience Trumps Revelation: A Controversial Personal Missionary Experience involving Healing the Sick

This Sunday during our Sunday School lesson we discussed receiving personal revelation where our instructor asked us to share a time when we received one.  I immediately thought of an experience I had as a missionary in my first assigned area Ragusa, Sicily but I didn't share it because it would have been negative in that setting. I want to share it here because I think it has merit in discussing when obedience might trump revelation depending on your perspective.

Jasmine's Baptism

Sunday, December 27, 2009 11:32 PM

This week has been fine, not a whole lot to update on. This week has not exactly been the most productive and we have the lowest numbers of my whole mission, but when I got here my companion was SUPER sick. She felt really bad about being so sick, but the thing about a missionary, is if you go out in the wet and cold when you can't even talk in the first place day after day, it never gets better. Which, is what she'd been doing for 2 weeks and kept getting worse. We went and saw a doctor who put her on a lot of drugs and stuff, and now, a week later, she's a lot better, so next week should be a lot more busy, at least I hope so...I'm not sure what it is, but a lot of times I move to areas that aren't exactly dead, but they are in transitions, so I get there and it's a rare investigator or 2 that are coming to church or progressing.

Missionary Cheer Slide Show

Transfer 7 Week 1: Moving to Danshui (near Taipei)

Monday, December 21, 2009 2:53 AM

Okay, not a lot of time to write this week, especially because I'm MOVING IN................Yeah. So I have quite the news to tell you all this week. That is, my area is being whitewashed! Okay, well half way, because both my companion and I moved.Sister Chen Shuting stayed in the area to take care of it. Sister Olsen is her new companion. They are going to do great, My area was not REALLY white washed, Chen Jiemei was in half the area, but she is a little stressed because she wasn't teaching a lot of our investigators, but she has met them, so it's a little better than white wash, and they are doing great! President Grimley is the best and he gave me permission to go up to my area this Saturday for Jasmine's baptism, especially since Sister Kunzler went to Xinzhu's Jubei, so she's too far away to come back.

Speaks at Zone Conference in Chinese

Hello, Hello from Keelung City, Taiwan.  This week has been going really good!  Yesterday we had Zone Conference and it was very touching.  Not even kidding.  I think it was my favorite zone conference with the new President.  President changed his method of people giving talks.  In the past, you were usually called on the phone and told you would give one, then there was one person who was surprised every time and asked to give one on the topic they asked us to prepare.  However, Elder Watson came and did a Zone Conference a couple weeks ago, and he picked names from a hat, and he had anyone on a mission longer than 6 months give their talk in their second language.  Well, this zone conference, we all had an assignment to read one of the four gospels studying how Christ taught, what kind of questions he asked, what revelations we received reading it, and record it in a study journal.  I had the gospel of Mark.  I had just finished Matthew when the call came telling us the assignment, so it was perfect.  The talks were to be on what we learned in the process, or what we learned because we were studying the Savior.  Well, I wasn't expecting to have to give the talk in Chinese, and in my personal opinion, the old language in the Bible is a little more complicated of vocabulary.  So, I was a little scared of being called.  But, well!  I was!  Haha, actually he said "Elder...well, this says Elder Bruno, but we don't have one!  So we will hear from Sister Bruno!"

Thanksgiving Report from Jilong

Gigi, thanks for giving me Nena's address, I actually finally got her letter yesterday with the address on it.  haha.  But the thing is I wrote her like 3 transfers ago, and keep seeing the letter sitting there every week, so I kept asking.  Yeah, I realize there are a couple people I'd like to write I don't have addresses for every now and then...but my opinion on writing letters has changed completely from when I first started a mission.  I used to want to write people I was used to communicating with often...Not sure why, probably because I wanted to still feel an attachment to the outside world or something...Now as my time is more pressed (the older you get on a mission, the more responsibilities you have to take on) I focus on taking the time to write those I know are wondering how I am, so I put the letters I get in a pile, and slowly work on responding.  It is nice to hear that a large majority of my friends keep up on my blog from time to time.