Elder Murray New York New York
6/22/2016-07/11/2018
Another great week! We had some cools experiences! My favorite this week had to have been when we went over to the Maravilla family's home. We taught them more about the plan of salvation. Apparently there was a recent incident in our area where a moher killed her child and it really bothered one of our investigators. He told us that he couldn't believe that God would let such a thing happen. So we helped him understand more about the plan of salvation. At the end of the lesson we invited his daughter to pray becuase she has been having some cool experiences with prayer. This family used to pray to their deceased mother and we explained to them that she didn't have the power to answer their prayers but God did. One day the daughter was getting pretty mad as she thought about how her mother left her and she said it just hurt. She prayed and asked God for help and she said that she just started realizing all the good that came from what had happened. Her dad had since remarried and now She has 3 awesome siblings, is happy, has a great job, and she said her mood totally changed! It was awesome! So she said the closing prayer and during it she was tearing up and at the end she was fanning her face with her hands and kept saying "sheesh! It's so hot in here! It's so hot!" We taught her that it was the spirit! Being a missionary is the best!
This week was pretty intense. We usually have a little correlation with President before meetings like zone conferences and MLC so we can make an agenda for the meeting but for this MLC President was unable to meet up! So we planned out the meeting and gave him the agenda the night before and it went pretty well! I have a testimony that in any class or meeting in church we can receive revelation as we all participate and get involved. When the facilitator asks questions raise your hand and answer them! Not only will you be taught but everyone in the class will be taught! Even the facilitator! It's awesome how it all works out. We had a nifty member lesson this week too! We invited everyone who served a mission to recite the first vision in their mission language. It was pretty spiritual. Memories were brought back and they loved it! One in Spanish one in English and on in Japanese. 2 Nephi 19:6 For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder; and his name shall be called, Wonderful, Counselor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. This is the scripture of the week. As I read this the spirit taught me again that Jesus Christ is my savior. He's yours too! He was born for us, He was crucified for us, and he rose again for us. He did all of this so we can return home and experience everlasting happiness with our families. How awesome it is to go out and share this with the people of New York every day! I love you all! Elder Murray Pics will come later hopefully!
0 Comments
So fun fact of the week. The only reason it is easy for me to wake up and get out of bed in the morning is because all throughout the night I practice. Practice makes perfect! Elder Norton told me that I'll wake up at like 1, open the blinds, get on my knees, and kneel to pray. Then check the clock, see that its 1 am and get back in bed and sleep until we wake up at 6! It's pretty funny! I do this quite often haha.
On that note we had an awesome week! We went on 3 back to back splits started it off with going on splits with the West Point Elders, then went up to Kingston NY, and then to Stamford CT. We have Iona College in our area and the students there are super open minded. So Elder Lewis and I set some goals and made some plans to go out and achieve while we were there. It was solid. We did it. It took us longer than expected but we did it! We set a goal to teach like 10 New York minutes which is basically 10 short but solid conversations, and to get 8 peoples contact info so we can follow up with them and we found miracles! On our way back to the car we were just talking to everyone when we met Norman! He was wearing these big ol headphones and he definitely wasn't going to hear us if we waited until he got to us so we just started waving to him at a distance he waved back and we just stopped and asked him a question. He quickly took off his headphones and listened to us. We found out some of his concerns, interests, and needs and asked when we could meet again to share more of our message with him. He then told us he had some time right then. It was pouring rain so we asked if he'd be down to take a sit in the nearest Dunkin Donuts. So we did! We started with a prayer, taught the restoration , and invited him to baptism and he said yes! It was a pretty cool miracle. He was so thankfull for us! We'll keep you updated on his progress. I love going contacting at college campuses around the Mission on splits. We've been to UCON, SUNY Orange, SUNY Sullivan, SUNY New Paltz, Iona, Colombia, NYU. The prophets have said one of their main focuses are on young adults and I can see why! A couple cool thoughts from the Book of Mormon. Last Sunday was an amazing spirit filled sacrament meeting. We sang Hymn 270. That hymn is very special to me. After that hymn was sung I was looking for a scripture that correlated with the hymn "I'll Go Where You Want Me To Go". I turned to Omni 1:26 it reads: And now, my beloved brethren (or sisteren😊), I would that ye should come unto Christ, who is the Holy One of Israel, and partake of his salvation, and the power of his redemption. Yea, come unto him, and offer your whole souls as an offering unto him, and continue in fasting and praying, and endure to the end; and as the Lord liveth ye will be saved. I absolutely felt the spirit as a read this verse. No doubt about it at all. Jesus Christ held nothing back. He gave us His all. We are here to learn to do the same and oh the joy that comes from it. Easier said than done but repentance is the plan not the back up plan. I love this wonderful work and the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is all so true! I love each of you! Elder Murray This week was awesome. we had a really cool or correlation meeting with our ward mission leader and we talked about our investigators and his family. there's a couple of his kids who are falling away from the church so we talked about them as well and he asked us what we did to get on our missions, how we really desired to be there, and how we desired to use the atonement in our life. It took me back to all the times before the mission when mom or dad would tell me something was important and I would say something like "ugh. I don't care." Looking back on that I think wow how lame! I was such a poop. So I am so thankful I have had so many experiences that have helped me change and actually have the desire to improve. The reason why I say you are such awesome and amazing parents is because no matter how many times I said I don't care you kept at it! We are teaching a 16 year old that just doesn't care and sheesh I'm looking at it in a parents perspective and holy moly I don't know how I could do that. It's insane the amount of patience you need!
other than that we have had a breakthrough with one of our investigators moms. She is Jewish along with her son Thomas. She hasn't accepted a single thing that we've taught this entire time teaching her. However, we taught her about the atonement and about how Christ can help us change. She had been studying the book of Mormon with Thomas and in this lesson she completely accepted everything accept for that Christ was the son of God. Which is kind of huge but She accepts him She just doesn't realize it is him. Thomas said he was the same way. She explained to us how before she and Thomas had met missionaries she had this desire to come to find out who Christ was. So we asked her at the end of the lesson "what do you have against being baptized and becoming a member of the church of Jesus Christ of latter day saints? She said she couldn't find anything wrong with it. Thomas was so excited. There are a few things we need to work on with her but we plan on setting a date soon. It was awesome! This work is not ours! I love you all! Elder Murray This morning in my studies I read Mosiah 4:9 it says:
Believe in God; believe that he is, and that he created all things, both in heaven and in earth; believe that he has all wisdom, and all power, both in heaven and in earth; believe that man doth not comprehend all the things which the Lord can comprehend. I loved this because there are things that we just comprehend but God has given us things that matter for our salvation and there are things that just don't matter for our salvation! It's pretty cool! We had an awesome lesson with a couple of our investigators. He's a 16 year old kid and has all these questions about the law of chastity. So we turned right to Alma 39. It was a good lesson and I feel more prepared to teach my kids someday! Fun fact! Thank you for all the pictures and emails this week! I loved them all! I love you all as well. Thank you for all the prayers and support! Elder Murray So this week was AWESOME! First of all tramsfer news! Elder Aurich got tramsferred and I'm back with Elder Norton. Round two HERE WE COME! We welcomed eight new missionaries to the NYNYN mission they are all awesome. My trainee Elder Brown got called to train which is super exciting. He received elder Di Deodato from Italy. It just so happens that Elder Massimo De Feo was his stake President! We had a bunch of people come to conference which was great! Thomas, Thomas' mom Liz, and her boy friend Matt, as well as JeanMarc, Wanjiru, Rob, and his two daughters Ashley and Maria! It was a really good turnout. Liz had a rough day the day before and she got in a really big argument with a close friend and she said she was just overflowing with anger when she came to conference with Thomas. Then she listened to the talk by Elder Massimo De Feo and she totally applied it to her life! It was sweet! Ok so General Conference! I could type an entire 5 pages about all the details I loved about it but I will just do top 2. I loved how President Nelson made it to the podium before the camera did 90 percent of the time. It looks like we need to pick up our pace to follow the prophet! Until Seventy Times Seven by Elder Lynn G. Robbins. I loved this part: “Success,” it has been said, “isn’t the absence of failure, but going from failure to failure without any loss of enthusiasm.” We never really fail in life when we are trying to be better! That was such an awesome thing to hear! Then I loved the talk by Elder Durrant too! We talked to a lot of people at the airport and nobody was super interested. We talked to this guy who was picking someone up and he was from India and we told him about the temple. Then later on the lady (who was holding a little dog) he was picking up walked past President and President commented on her cute dog and then later she came up to us and started asking all these great questions like what do you think of blacks in your church and we pulled out 2 Nephi 26:33 and she was like "oh wow that makes so much sense! We just moved to Connecticut and we are looking for a church! I remember when I was little the Mormons used to come over and study with us. And I loved it!" So we sent her up to the sisters in Connecticut and the sisters say she has time of potential! It's pretty awesome how it all played out! We found d a family who came to church this past week! They are the Maravilla family. The dad has a Catholic background but none of the kids have a background at all. They all have random beliefs. They loved church though! There are 6 of them and 3 came to church. Thomas is doing amazing. It's crazy how converted he is. Ahh he just needs to get baptized! He loves the atonement. He's been studying that a lot lately. Thomas' mom is still pretty set in her ways. Reynaldo got evicted again and I haven't been able to get in touch with him in a while. Elder Lusk and i sent him a voice recording not too long ago when we were on a split. We are working on transfers this week. It's pretty cool stuff!
This is from my letter to President: This split was probably one of the best I've been on. Elder McNairy had a rough week and we were tracting up in the middle of nowhere. Not fun at at all, nobody was answering their doors and we were in the wilderness. So we decided there had to be something better to be doing with our time! We checked on Google maps to see if there were any universities with campuses we could contact on. Pace University popped up and we headed over! When we got there it looked like an old rundown place that was shut down. So we were bummed and put in the next look up's address. Well, on the way to that we found the actual pace university which has a super big and nice campus to contact on! So we park the car, say a prayer and get to work! We walk around for a bit and nobody seems to be out but then we get to the campus map. There were numbers labeling where everything was at on campus. We said a quick prayer and told each other what number came to mind. 1, 2, 3... He said 11 and I said 13. There was big walkway in between those two numbers and we headed over! A few steps later we met a kid from queens named Kobe. He told us a missionary a while ago just gave him a Book of Mormon! We invited him to read it and pray to know if it was true and grabbed his number so we could meet up again. Then we met Kevin. Kevin is prepared! We talked about what the purpose of life was and shared a scripture from the Book of Mormon. We set a solid return appointment with him and man it was just so cool to see how the Lord directed us right there. Another really cool miracle was we finished with doing a look up which lead us to a train station no houses or anything around it. We were sad because there was nobody on the platforms to talk to or anything! We figured there had to be a reason we went here and then went forth with faith. As we drove around to get out of the parkinglot we saw this guy chillin in his car. I turned to Elder McNairy and asked him if he felt to go talk to him. Elder McNairy said yes and I was like same! So we pulled around and pulled up right next to him and rolled our window down. As soon as he rolled down his window Elder McNairy asked "what do you think the purpose of life is?" And got a conversation started. Apparently he just had a kid and he has recognized so many signs that he needs to go back to church. He told us that it blew his mind and we set up a time to meet again. He was excited and pretty shocked! He thanked us and said he would see us on Monday. I love being a missionary! Sometimes it's super hard but always worth it! I love you all! Elder Murray This week was a good week! We got to go on some more splits up in Connecticut and even one in Yonkers! A LOT of the Elders we have been going with have been in the Spanish program so I'm slowly learning Spanish! It's pretty cool! Other than that we had a really cool dinner appointment with the Sena family the other night. We helped Brother Sena be ordained to the office of priest and that happened on Sunday! It's so cool! He's changed so much. Also one of our investigators is so integrated with the ward it's awesome. He gave a talk on Sunday and it was legit! I love you all! Have a great week!
Elder Murray So, life has changed since moving to new Rochelle. How? We get to take care of a lot of office stuff such as putting everything into the mission calendar like interviews, meetings, baptisms, and so forth, we don’t get as much time to proselyte in our area due to the amount of splits we go on, it’s just us living in the apartment, we have not been up on the grassy roof yet. Idk if that even exists (it is winter) in the photo of the exhausting day we did zone conference and went on a split after and it was a party. Fav part of mission life right now is adjusting to the new assignment. It’s an amazing learning and growing experience. People rarely feed us but it’s because we haven’t been too good at asking, it is a ward. New Rochelle 2nd ward, it’s a possibility that I will get transferred again. President said I would be serving in the Morristown new jersey mission the last 2 weeks of my mission. The New York New York north mission is combining with the nyny south mission and all of the Newburgh stake (the zone I was in when I served in New Paltz and West Point) will be merged into the Morristown new jersey mission. And president said I would be going back to that stake for my last 2 weeks. Yes mom I will be saying that at my homecoming talk you know it. It will be hilarious because I know you love me and care about me. I just think it would be awesome for all my sisters to go on a trek! It will be awesome! 2 weeks is nothing! Well it seems to go by really fast out here! It’ll be fun. Being an assistant is awesome. And this question answers thing doesn’t have to be in the weekly report. It was kind of hard to teach with him at first, but we’ve been doing role plays every day to be better at that. It’s been sweet. Also I like being an assistant because we get to go on so many splits with elders all around the mission. My companion is a stud. He even helps me pick all the raisins out of my granola.
So just to expound on the miracles this week! I have a little bit more time this week to write! Miracle #1 So actually, last Wednesday it snowed like crazy yo. So much so that the whole mission was not to drive their cars. So we got dressed nice and warm grabbed a couple shovels and went out and went and helped people shovel their walks talked to some people about the book of Mormon and then we walked over to the church and started shoveling the walks there while we were waiting for the member who was going to come to our appt with us. Well we saw this guy walking in the cold and we stopped him and asked him “what are you doing out here in the cold?” in a nice way that made him laugh and he then told us that he was going to grab some food. He was a super nice guy and said hey if you had an extra shovel I’d help you brothers out! So we said we did and went and grabbed one from the church. 10 minutes go by and we are just shoveling with this guy and talking to him about baptism and he ends up wanting to be baptized again, our member shows up and we talked him inside the church and give him a chapel tour and everything. He said he’d be at church this Sunday, but it was just awesome how everything just lined right up! Miracle #2 Today we had a mini miracle. We went shopping at Costco after playing some basketball and it cost like 10 dollars for 2 gallons of bleach, so we felt to just grab a gallon of bleach at the nearby CVS. After getting our smoothie stuff and granola with raisins (ew) we headed over to CVS and our cashier was a super humble guy, we started to ask him some inspired questions and we asked him what he thought the purpose of life was and then this was the money question we asked him what he though was missing in his life. He then just opened right up and said, “you know, I really think gods priestly hood is missing.” Elder Aurich and I just look at each other and are like WHAT? Legit. So we asked him when we could meet up and we have an appt with him today at the chapel! He just barely moved here from Connecticut. Splits (aka companion exchanges) So, we went on splits all over the state this week. First one was in Connecticut with Elder Kirkham. Its been a blast getting to go on so many splits with him. We had a few solid contacts and then went and looked up this potential investigator and he let us right in and we got to teach the whole restoration invited him to be baptized and he said yes. Next split was down south in Harlem, the next one was in Connecticut again with a brand-new missionary. It was a blast. Nobody was answering their doors, so we did a role play right there on someone’s doorstep and it was sweet! We opened up to preach my gospel and started reading from chapter 9 in preach my gospel where it says teach when you find, find when you teach. Such a solid section. It explains how to most effectively get someone to listen to your message you just have to jump right in to teaching! So, we tried it out. It was pretty awesome. Nobody wanted to get baptized but we did get a referral for the Spanish elders so that’s always good. Then I got to go on a split with my old trainee elder Lusk! We actually serve in the same ward now and everything. He is a zone leader now and man he’s such a stud. We got to experience the power of the book of Mormon together. We went to check on a member who hasn’t been to church in a couple years and as soon as we walk down her street she just so happened to be getting out of her cab. She called out to us and said hey I’m LDS too! We got to talking and it was kind of going nowhere until we pulled out the Book of Mormon. We felt to share Helaman 5:12 with her and as soon as we handed her the Book of Mormon for her to read it she got super emotional and started to remember a lot of things from when she was working towards being baptized. She’d read a few words and then would say “oh my goodness I need to tell you all something after this” and then she’d read a few more words and say the same thing. After she read it and cried some more she told us she knew it was all true. She then gave us a referral and invited us to a get together with her family. We went by the persons house she referred and got to talking with him. He was cool, and we set a return appt but he didn’t seem super interested. We will see what happens! in my studies this morning I came across 1 Nephi 11:1 and it is a three-step formula for receiving revelation. Thus, the subject line. it is an awesome scripture!!! I love you all! For it came to pass after I had 1 desired to know the things that my father had seen, and 2 believing that the Lord was able to make them known unto me, as I sat 3 pondering in mine heart I was caught away in the Spirit of the Lord, yea, into an exceedingly high mountain, which I never had before seen, and upon which I never had before set my foot. The New York Minute This week Elder Murray sent us a voice recording and not much of a letter. His new assignment has taken up most of his writing time. Here is a little piece that we got form him, Hey Matt when is your release date? It is the June 27th but if yall wanna go on trek then you can pick me up on July 11th. To explain... Elder Murrays original return date was on June 27. That is also the same date of our stake pioneer trek. He wanted his sisters to be able to go to trek so he arranged with his mission president to transfer to a nearby mission in New Jersey for an additional 2 weeks so they could go on trek. What a nice brother (:
Funky week. No time for anything. Have mini councils with President like 2 times a week, have to make time for studies otherwise we don't get them, make time for planning, forget about having time to eat, haha it's crazy awesome! Probably what real life will feel like! We have a goal that is the deepest desire of our hearts. It's to bring a family of 5 into the waters of baptism and help them become covenant keeping saints! Anywho we have 3 progressingish investigators. David, Wanjiru and Thomas. Thomas' mom won't let him get baptized. We got to go to the temple today! It was awesome. My companion and I did initiatories. First time since the first time I did mine. They are actually way cool. Something I was reminded of today is that we have living prophets today! They are true messengers. As we listen and act on their guidance our loves will be filled with peace and joy. I love you all!
Elder Murray |
MissionariesElder Murray called to serve in the New York New York North Mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints 6/22/2016 through 6/22/2018 Write to Matt
Elder Matthew Murray New York New York North Mission 700 White Plains Rd Ste 315 Scarsdale, NY 10583 Archives
July 2018
Current and Last Area Monticello
6th Area New Rochelle
5th Area
The Bronx 4th Area
West point 3rd Area
New Paltz 2nd Area
Yonkers 1st Area
Manhattan 100 Day Book of Mormon challange
|