At the first of my mission, I must admit, I was somewhat less than enthusiastic about tracting and street contacting. I had always been rather shy, and the thought of approaching complete strangers about the Gospel terrified me. I was willing to teach them, but let someone else go find them. It wasn't long before I decided that I must surely hate door-knocking more than any other missionary in the mission. I even remember faking ringing the doorbell when it was my door a couple of times.

When I approached my companion about my problem, he suggested a rather dramatic remedy. He proposed that since I hated tracting more than any other missionary, I should therefore do more tracting than any other missionary. This wasn't exactly the solution I was hoping for, but since he was the senior I decided to give it a try. What followed was something quite amazing that I still can't explain.

For the next few weeks we tracted practically all the time. By the end of each day my feet would be killing me. We more than doubled the mission minimums for tracting each week. Somewhere in all those slammed doors and sore muscles, I developed a love for tracting. Some of my greatest mission memories are of pounding the streets of England with my companion and of our many doorstep escapades. When I look back on the people that I was able to teach and baptize, on the precious relationships that I developed with investigators and converts, I realize that many of them were a result of door-knocking. This success was possible because of our attitude towards the work and our willingness to do it.

Throughout my mission, I learned from the great examples of other missionaries. One of the greatest examples still stands out in my mind. I was assigned as a zone leader to a zone that had not been having a great deal of success. On the same transfer day several other missionaries were brought fresh into the zone.

After a few weeks I started getting reports from one of my district leaders about a missionary in his district. At that time, we were required to get statistics from each companionship at the end of every week. This particular missionary, it seems, was reporting statistics that were fantastically high. In an area that had been all but dead for a long time, this missionary was claiming to be teaching over forty discussions in a week, including fifteen to twenty first discussions. In addition, this missionary's companion was complaining to the district leader that he was being forced to tract too much. I decided to arrange a split so I could check the situation out.

I swapped companions with this missionary for a day, and what followed was one of the most amazing days of my mission. When I got to this missionary's area, I discovered that he really did have at least twenty people that he was helping to progress towards baptism, and all of them came from tracting.

Before we left the apartment that morning, I asked him how he could possibly have that much success tracting. What he said literally changed my mission. He replied, "I don't go out to knock on doors; I go out to teach. Anybody can knock on doors, but I figure I don't have time for that. I tell myself when I go out that I am going out to teach. That way, instead of knocking on doors just because I have to get so many hours of door-knocking in, I knock on doors so I can teach. When I approach a door, I pause for a second just before I knock, and in that second I tell myself that I have an appointment there. It's all in the attitude."

Sure enough, we taught four new discussions that day, in addition to teaching discussions to about five or six other people that he had found the week before. While we were tracting, we literally ran from door to door. I felt a sense of urgency about the work, and a pervading desire to teach gripped my heart. We ended up having to bring in an additional pair of missionaries to help with the teaching of the investigators this missionary was finding. As it turned out, after two months of twelve and fifteen baptisms, respectively, this missionary was forced to go home because of an existing illness that none of us knew about. He knew that his time in the mission field might be limited, and I guess that's why he refused to waste a minute of it.

I learned a lot from that experience that I was able to apply not only to my mission but also to my life after my mission. That missionary was successful in finding people to teach because he had an overwhelming desire to baptize and he was willing to work as hard as necessary to fulfill that desire. I learned that a good many of life's battles are won or lost before they're ever fought, depending on a person's attitude.