So this has been yet another week in such a good area! Just so good even though it has been so rough! We have been working just so hard, questioning what we can do differently, what we can say differently, really taking a strong self-evaluation on where we are at, where we need to be and just being so diligent and striving to be exactly obedient.
Lots of ups and downs came throughout the week. We had been able to build some really good relationships with our members but yielding a referral out of them has been like pulling teeth, but we have been able to commit them to do a couple things that will yield great results if they apply them!
This area has indeed been a refiner’s fire. We have been trying to follow the spirit so closely, and we just can’t seem to make dots connect here. I often wonder why that this has to happen. It was this past week that I was finally able to come to the conclusion that this is the hottest, and the deepest depths of the refiners fire that I have ever been in. Results have come at a downward spiral, and all this time I have been wondering what I am doing wrong. Well, I officially was able to come to terms with just having an increase of patience. We were listening to a talk by Elder Jeffery R Holland the other day and something struck in the story he related about the man who got stranded in the desert with his family.
He said "Thirty years ago last month, a little family set out to cross the United States to attend graduate school—no money, an old car, every earthly possession they owned packed into less than half the space of the smallest U-Haul trailer available. Bidding their apprehensive parents farewell, they drove exactly 34 miles up the highway, at which point their beleaguered car erupted.
Pulling off the freeway onto a frontage road, the young father surveyed the steam, matched it with his own, then left his trusting wife and two innocent children—the youngest just three months old—to wait in the car while he walked the three miles or so to the southern Utah metropolis of Kanarraville, population then, I suppose, 65. Some water was secured at the edge of town, and a very kind citizen offered a drive back to the stranded family. The car was attended to and slowly—very slowly—driven back to St. George for inspection—U-Haul trailer and all.
After more than two hours of checking and rechecking, no immediate problem could be detected, so once again the journey was begun. In exactly the same amount of elapsed time at exactly the same location on that highway with exactly the same pyrotechnics from under the hood, the car exploded again. It could not have been 15 feet from the earlier collapse, probably not 5 feet from it! Obviously the most precise laws of automotive physics were at work.
Now feeling more foolish than angry, the chagrined young father once more left his trusting loved ones and started the long walk for help once again. This time the man providing the water said, “Either you or that fellow who looks just like you ought to get a new radiator for that car.” For the second time a kind neighbor offered a lift back to the same automobile and its anxious little occupants. He didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry at the plight of this young family.
“How far have you come?” he said. “Thirty-four miles,” I answered. “How much farther do you have to go?” “Twenty-six hundred miles,” I said. “Well, you might make that trip, and your wife and those two little kiddies might make that trip, but none of you are going to make it in that car.” He proved to be prophetic on all counts.
After recounting this story he expanded upon it and this is what he said that hit me the most. "Some blessings come soon, some come late, and some don’t come till heaven; but for those who embrace the Gospel of Jesus Christ, they come." Just as Joseph had pondered and reflected upon James 1:5, I too reflected on this greatly. "I am doing the best I can, what more can I give?" was what the spirit brought to my mind.
I am so grateful for this area, for the refining process that it has put me through. We may not baptize, we may not teach, and we may not see the fruits of our labors until we account before the Lord, but I know that I am meant to be here. There is a lesson to be learned, and I am becoming more and more grateful for them.
I love you all so much and pray for you continually!
Love
Elder McCown
