A Word from President Murray

President Murray posted a blog entry about Mike.  It’s here.

Returning Missionary

Michael returns from his mission Saturday morning, August 15th.  He speaks in Santa Susana II Ward on Sunday, 8/16, at 9:00 AM.  The address is 5028 E Cochran St, SIMI VALLEY , CA 93063.

August 13, 2009 The Final Letter

“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. And again, believe that ye must repent of your sins and forsake them, and humble yourselves before God; and ask in sincerity of heart that he would forgive you; and now, if you believe all these things see that ye do them (Mosiah 4: 9-10).”

“O ye that embark in the service of God, see that ye serve him with all your heart, might, mind and strength, that ye may stand blameless before God at the last day (D&C 4:2).”

“Say nothing but repentance unto this generation. Keep my commandments, and assist to bring forth my work, according to my commandments, and you shall be blessed (D&C 11:9).”

I had a dream last night about these scriptures. I don’t know if that ever happens to you but I get it every once in awhile. I’ve been going over the past two years in my head and reading through my journal and remembering all the wonderful people that I have come into contact with and I’ve had the opportunity to teach. It’s amazing, as I added up all the numbers I found out that I have made contact with over 12,000 people in the past two years and I think I have taught over 2,000 lessons!  It’s incredible!

As I have looked to God for everything in His work I have felt His guidance and my testimony has grown stronger because of it. I love that phrase “If you believe these things see that you do them”!  That is how my testimony has come and that is how I’ve seen others come to know it is true as well. Faith is not just a passive belief but it is an action. See that ye do them!

To the next scripture: It is only when I have served with my heart, might, mind and strength that I have felt truly worthy to do God’s work and know that one day I will have to stand before Him and account for these two years.  Charity, and giving all you have for others, is something that is completely foreign to most teenagers when they  leave home and start serving a mission. Soon after you get into the field you realize that the only way to do this work is in His way, and that way is hard and very different from the way the most of us live our lives. Because of that though, the difficulty and pressures you feel put you in a humbling place that forces change (thank goodness).  Which leads into the next scripture.

I’ve come into contact with over 12,000 people in Pennsylvania and Maryland. Have I said “nothing but repentance” to them? Have I encouraged faith in Jesus Christ and taught them to live the commandments that God has given us? I think I’ve done my best. I love this work and I really have seen all the blessings in my life, and in the lives of those that I have taught, that God has promised.

This Sunday was an amazing day. The pinnacle of all my work here in Rising Sun. Immediately after church we had the baptism of Nick Brown. It took a lot of work for him to get to this point and he still has a long, hard and wonderful road ahead of him. It was an amazing service, with great attendance from the branch. Even President and Sister Murray came to see Rising Sun’s first baptism in a long time. I had the wonderful blessing of being asked to baptize him and then in two Sunday’s Elder Chan will confirm him in Sacrament meeting.

Later on in the day, Erin Snyder was baptized by Mike Strange. Erin was pretty nervous before she was baptized but she was glowing afterwords. We only met her about a month ago through her best friend Taylor Strange. We met her at dinner with the Stranges on July 3rd and then with the encouragement and persistance of Taylor she met with us and had a lesson a couple days later. Ever since I met Erin I could tell there was something special about her. She really has a wonderful future ahead of her. I was blessed to be able to confirm her immediately after her baptism since she is heading to South Carolina for school this Saturday.

I don’t want to leave. I never want to stop doing this work. Seeing the lives of so many people change for the better has been the best blessing I could ever ask for. I am so glad I have had the opportunity to do this Full-time. I opened up the Ensign yesterday and and the talk I opened to was titled “Get On with Our Lives”.  It is now time for me to get on with the next chapter of my life, but I can tell you, missionary work is going to be a big part of it.

-Elder Michael Oakford

August 6, 2009

What a way to close out my mission! Things have still continued to improve and the area is thriving. I believe last week I told you that Nick wasn’t prepared and things didn’t look hopeful but right after I wrote on Thursday things started to dramatically improve and he has put himself right back on track. He is doing great and his interview for baptism is tonight at 7. He has asked that I baptize him and Elder Chan will confirm him the following Sunday. He is really excited and commited to do this and has kept every commitment we have left him to help him prepare for Sunday. The Branch is really pumped as well. It’s going to be a fun day.

Erin had her interview this past Tuesday and is all set and ready to go for her baptism which will be at 6:00pm Sunday evening. She is having it later so people from the Newark Singles Branch can come on over after their meetings. We’re hoping for a great turn out at both of the baptisms. The support for both of them from the members of the church has been tremendous.

Today I did a trial run at packing so I could make sure I wouldn’t have to ship anything home. It really is not very fun packing all your stuff up and knowing that the next area that your being sent to is HOME. I’m not really looking forward to it, and neither is Elder Chan since every time I would pack something up he would be right behind me to pull it out and remind me that he is not letting me leave.

Alright well, I’ve got to run for now. We helped this morning get things ready for a wedding reception for someone in the branch and then tomorrow we are helping set things up at the church in the morning. We’ve still have a lot of errands to run.

I love you. Keep Erin and Nick in your prayers.

I love you!

-Elder Michael Oakford

July 30, 2009

This week has been another full of tender mercies from the Lord. You’ve got to love the roller coaster ride of Missionary Work!!

First the bad news, Nick is not going to be ready for awhile, he’s just not keeping committments and is still having a hard time with smoking. Please keep him in your prayers.

Now for our beautiful miracle!
Sunday Erin couldn’t get off work for church and she tried finding someone to fill in for her for 3 hours. So we set up a lesson at Taylor Strange’s house (she is Erins best friend) for that night. We taught the Plan of Salvation, and the lesson went great! Taylor and Mike Fox were there and helped us teach. The Spirit was very strong and through the whole lessong we didn’t talk about baptism, mostly because the Monday before we commited her to baptism and she said the she wasn’t ready and did want to be rushed. Then we didn’t see her for the rest of the week because Taylor was at ‘trek’ and Erin is a very difficult person to get ahold of. After our lesson on Sunday we went back to the apartment and finished our planning for the next day, when the phone rang. It was Taylor and she told me to get everyone together (Elder Chan was in the shower and thought I was crazy for telling him to get out RIGHT NOW!) We gathered around the phone and Erin got on the phone and told us that she had prayed and had decided to be baptized on Aug. 9th! My last Sunday here! She really had just caught fire the past couple days. I gave her a nice copy of the book ‘Our Search for Happiness’ with my testimony in the front  and she read it until she finished it at 2Am!

Today Erin called us while we were shopping and asked if we could have a lesson this morning even though it was P-day and of course we said yes (we had a lesson with her last night at the Olson’s house too).  I made some quick phone calls and had everthing set up. Sis Simmons and Sis Cloward changed their plans, picked us up and took us to the Fox’s where we planned to teach Erin since she was home alone. She pretty much taught us the Word of Wisdom and all about Tithing.  The really great thing is the branch has just taken her and fell in love with her.  She has already contacted her Institute Teacher and the Branch President down in South Carolina where she will be going to school! You have to love someone who is so fired up about the gospel in their lives.  She has already started doing family history so she can do baptisms for the dead for her relatives!

That has been our week.
I couldn’t ask for a better end to my mission!
Elder Oakford

July 23, 2009

Hey there,

This past week ended with a great day at church, seven investigators, another Rising Sun best! Yay!   We are having a great time and working hard to see lots of progress.

Right now we are looking at Nick getting baptized on the 2nd and then Vanessa and maybe Erin getting baptized on the 9th. Our hopes are high and lots of things have to happen before they can get baptized so we’re working hard to make sure it can happen.

Today we had a really fun day. Sister Cloward and Sister Simmons took us on an adventure to the Herr’s Potato Chip Factory and then down to Turkey Point Light House.  The tour was fun at the factory, warm chips, yummy. The hike to the light house was probably the highlight of our adventure. I’ll try to send more pictures when I get them and Sister Simmons said she would send some to you as well.

Lots of work to do tonight and since we packed our day I don’t have much time to write.

I love you.

Have a great week.

-Mike

July 15, 2009

Howdy,
Well I sat down to write and then tried pondering for a little while but I’m still not coming up with much to report this week.

Things are going great. All the people that we are teaching are doing fantastic. We are working hard and seeing great things from doing so. Last Friday was Zone Conference in Broomall, PA. It was my final Zone Conference! Pretty sad. It was a great meeting and we put alot into it and in turn got alot of great things out. At the end of the meeting they always have the departing missionaries bear their final testimony. It was a pretty weird experience. In the past I had always just sat back and listened as my friends spoke about their missions and how fast the time had flown by and all that they learned. As they would be speaking I’d be thinking ‘wow I’m really sad to see them leave but thank goodness I have a while to go before I’m up there.’ But time crept up on me. When it was time to finally go up and speak it didn’t feel real at all. I really can’t believe it is almost time to go home. It seems like I’ve been doing this for so long and I’ve completely immersed myself in it that I don’t really remember what it was like to be back at home. I’d rather stay here.  Oh well.

Nick is doing great and he is still ready for his baptism on the 26th. Just working through the last couple weeks before baptism and usually those are the toughest ones, satan will do anything to get in the way.  Vanessa, who is the woman in the story I told you last week or the week before, is doing great. She is excited to come to church and continue to learn more. Answers to prayers are the best. Once God has answered your prayer you have absolutely no need to question anything else. I love it.
We have a few more wonderful people that we are working with and this week is going to be really important to see what happens with them in the future. I’ll update you next week.

I love you.

“Every event, every encounter, every disaster, however despairing it may seem to the outward eye, may be met with spiritual success. A temporal tragedy need never result in a spiritual defeat. To the contrary, such “tragedies” have often proven the springboard for a sublime spiritual victory.  One man accepts his deafness by blaming God; another, Beethoven, scores the Ninth Symphony. One woman with loss of sight sees only darkness; another with greater vision, Helen Keller, becomes a beacon to a blinded world. One man responds to his disease with loss of faith; another, Job, declares, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him” (Job 13:15). One man loses his wife and in the process his zest for life; another, Robert Browning, draws ever deeper from the well to pen with compelling passion poetry of divine dimensions.   One man may respond to the seemingly disastrous events of life with vengeance and venom; another may respond with humble submissiveness to God’s will, an appreciation for life as it is, and a firm resolve to be better.  For one, life’s challenges and tragedies become stumbling blocks; for the other, the become stepping-stones.”   From The Infinite Atonement by Tad R. Callister

-Elder Mike

July 9, 2009

Elders Gillman, Chan, and Oakford

Hey there,

Everything here is going fantastic! To show you what a good attitude can do, we mixed things up here last week and because we did we had the most successful week in Rising Sun history.  We are doing better and better as we learn how to function in this threesome. Sometimes its a little tough and you  have to work around some of the normal difficulties that you would have but with three people. Not bad though I really like it.

4th of July was really fun. We had a Pancake breakfast at the church from 8-10AM. There was a good turn out and the weather was beautiful so it turned out to be a really nice event. There were lots of branch members that came and many brought with them friends who had not been to the church before. I think an activity is always a nice way to introduce people to the church and the members without being too pushy. In the evening we went to the Ellsworths home/farm  and went to the party there. Nick and his son Aiden came along and they had a blast. Tons of people came to the party and after it got dark they had fireworks. The party lasted two days the 3rd to the 4th. Fireworks both days.

So here is the miracle for the week. This story starts back about three or four weeks ago. One day when I was with Elder Willes we were driving through Perryville late to an appointment.  I looked out the window and saw this woman sitting on the porch smoking a cigarette and right when I saw her the Spirit hit me “You Need To Talk To That Woman.”  I looked at her again as we were passing her and thought about how late we were to a really important appointment and then I did something that probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do but I prayed and told Heavenly Father next time I see that woman I am going to talk to her… Well. On Friday we were all set to go tracting in this neighborhood and we were saying a prayer before we got out of the car and as I closed the prayer I felt a very strong impression that we should not be here. I asked Elder Gillman how he felt and he told me the same thing. So we started heading towards another neighborhood that we had set as our back up plan. As we were driving down the street  I saw that same woman sitting on the porch smoking a cigarette and it hit me again “Go Talk To Her!”  So I told Elder Gillman to turn around. By the time we got back to that apartment building she was gone! But I was pretty determined since I promised God that next time I saw her I’d talk to her. So I grabbed Elder Chan and told him to come with me. We went up to the apartment building and rang all the door bells and knocked on the door but nobody was answering so I told Elder Chan to just open the door and go in.  As soon as he stuck his head in she stuck her head out and looked downstairs right at us and said “Can I help you?’ When I saw her I walked in and said “Yes, we have been sent here by God to talk to you today. Can we come in?” She seemed kinda shaken when I said that and replied “Well, I was just about to get in the shower do you think you could..” I knew I couldn’t let her get away so I told her “I saw you sitting on the porch and the Spirit of God told us we needed to talk to you right now. Can we come in?” Then she surprised me by saying “Well yes, come right in.”  I hollered out to Elder Gillman, he parked the car and we had a great lesson with Vanessa. She then called one of the members that lives right down the street from her and got a ride set up for church. Sunday came and she was there. She even got up and bore her testimony! She loved it and the coolest thing was in her testimony she said that for the past two weeks she had been praying to God to help her find which church she was supposed to join! I love miracles. Follow the Spirit and you can never go wrong.

I love you.

Elder Michael Oakford

02 July 2009 Letter

Hey there!

Things here in Rising Sun are really picking up. We are teaching some great lessons and we are finding a wonderful new group of people to add to our teaching pool.  We knocked into an old investigator, Nick,  that Elder Willes and I dropped when I first got to the area because he was always at school and never around to be taught. Elder Chan and I first saw him on Friday and taught him the Plan of Salvation. Saturday we stopped over again to make sure everything was good for him to come to church and he told us he was setting out his clothes and noticed he didn’t have church shoes and asked for help to get some. So we called up our branch mission leader who took him to Wal-Mart to buy some shoes! Sunday he was at church, he participated, and he even volunteered to say one of the prayers. One of the members in Rising Sun invited him to his birthday party and another invited him over for the 4th of July. When we were walking over to Brother Kubesh’s birthday Nick said “so I think I’m gonna get baptized in a couple weeks.” Elder Chan was kinda surprised buy his comment and said “Into what church?” Nick gave him a funny look and said “this one, dummy, what do you think?”
Then at dinner he asked the members, “How do I go about scheduling a baptism at church? like who do I need to talk to and everything?”  When we got him home we talked to him and taught him some more (making sure there was nothing that would prevent him from being baptized) and then commited him to baptism on the 26th of July!
The whole branch is really excited for THEIR new convert. I’m sure they will take very good care of him, he already feels a part of the church.

Everything else is going really well. More and more people are coming to church and the excitement is building! Missionary work really is fun. We have taken some great members out teaching with us and there testimonies have added so much power to the lessons we have been teaching. Tonight I get the opportunity to go on a split and go out teaching with Mike Fox, one of the young men in the ward who is awaiting his mission call. I am really excited. I wish I went out teaching more with the missionaries before my mission so I love bringing the young men along with me. I got the chance to go on my ‘mini mission’ before going into the MTC and that helped SO MUCH, but nobody else gets that chance and I think that going into the MTC with experience under your belt helps a ton.

Elder Chan and Elder Gillman are doing great. They are still getting used to the area as well as adjusting to the heat that is coming really soon. This will be their first summer. I am the lucky one that caught the end of one summer, got the brunt of a full summer in Philadelphia last year and then get almost a full summer before going home.

I love it.

I love you.

-Mike

June 25, 2009

Dear Family,
The past couple weeks have been fantastic. Heavenly Father has been stretching me in so many different ways and at times I have really been feeling it.  Rising Sun is such a great branch. There is a great combination of members and investigators and I have really fallen in love with all of them. The momentum is building we can really feel the spirit guiding everything we are doing. I love it!

Elder Willes got moved and is now a service elder. That means he is based out of Broomall but gets to see the entire mission. He helps move the missionaries and set up the zone conferences. If someone needs a car they take it to them. It’s kinda a break from proselyting for a little while but they stay really busy taking care of everything else that needs to get done to help a mission function. He will probably be there for the next 2-3 transfers.

In his place I received TWO wonderful missionaries. Elder Gillman from Lindon, Utah and Elder Chan from Pocatello, Idaho. We have been having a great time being companions, I love it. We make a pretty fun team. President Murray said that we would be together until I went home and then they would take over the area and be here for a total of probably six months a piece. Our area is a big change for Elder Chan who has been out for 7 months serving in areas like South Philadelphia and in the city of Reading, but Elder Gillman is used to the countryside. He is just coming out of Cambridge,MD where he has been for six months and on his mission for a total of nine months. This is also Elder Gillman’s third trio / threesome / tri-panionship so he has lots of experience as to how we are going to need to function. I was pretty shaky myself as to what I was going to do with three missionaries when I had a hard time keeping two of us busy! But I KNOW that
Heavenly Father has placed us all together for a reason.

I have had a couple really cool testimony building experiences the past few weeks and I have been feeling the spirit stronger now than I have probably my entire mission. We have been put in a couple situations where prayer and fasting was absolutely neccesary. They were big time make it or break it moments. The cool thing was after the test and seeing the positive outcome I was given what seemed like kind of a sneak-peek by God. I was shown that if I wasn’t humble enough to do all that I could do and also go to God and seek extra help that the outcome would have been different. I believe myself to be a pretty good, pretty fluent missionary BUT I see that every once in awhile Heavenly Father will put tests in our path to see if we will trust in our own abilities and rely only on ourselves  OR go to Him and trust in Him! That has been one of the greatest lessons of my mission.

You asked about the members of the branch. They are so sweet and I really love them. Each unit that I have served in I have been able to connect with the membership and that has been a great success of my mission. Each ward or branch has each had its own qualities that make me enjoy it, and Rising Sun is just the same.  The members love having us over and many of them are striving to help the missionary work move along. The past week or so we have been in the homes of the Wheeler’s, Kubesh’s, Jackson’s, Cain’s, Ellsworth’s, Simmons, Nair’s, Strange’s and more. They really take care of us and are always asking us how they can help us out. There are a few really incredible families in the branch too. I look at them and I see so many qualities that I want my family to have.

Our apartment is really nice too. As you saw in the picture we live right above a hair salon. The apartment is really nice and was furnished by the members. Brother Kubesh especially loves it, because he is the one that found it nine months ago so they could put missionaries in the branch.

That’s all I have time for today. I’m loving it and working harder and more efficiently than ever before, and thankfully I have great companions who are willing to do the same.

I love you. Have a great week!

-Elder Michael Oakford