Tuesday, November 13, 2018

13 November 2018

The reason for this particular title is also part of why I'm emailing on Tuesday, we had Zone Conference yesterday. This will also lead into a slight rant about miles and how badly we're doing with them. So I'm in the Wilmington Zone now, and we had to go to Fayetteville, a 90 mile trip, and then back, another 90 miles. We only get half back for that, so we essentially just lost 90 miles. We also had our total mile total cut but another 150, and had to drive to and from Raleigh for transfers, another 200 mile round trip that only gets half back. And when I was in the Fayetteville zone, I had to go to Wilmington for Zone Conference. There's only so much you can do with that. So that's the little rant that I have about that, now onto things that actually matter.
The Zone Conference itself was awesome. Elder Costa, the President of the Area Seventies, and his wife came to it. (Which was also why it was a combined Zone Conference.) They talked a lot about the various chapters in Preach My Gospel, with a lot of emphasis on 4 and 10, Recognizing the Spirit and How Can I Improve My Teaching Skills. I came out of it all with a whole bunch of new ideas on how to start working with the members, and might I just say: Please, be the kind of members who do member work. It's so important. Even if the missionaries don't approach you about it, do it and introduce friends to the missionaries, invite them to church, just be friends and good examples. I think the biggest problem is that a lot of the time, members don't know how to do missionary work, and missionaries don't know how to do member work. We just all need to work together, and we can figure it out. Be the model families that the missionaries all love because they help them! We also got to see all of the new #LightTheWorld videos, and they're super good. I'd highly recommend watching them all (there's only 4, and they're short) because they're so powerful. There's also a new calendar thing that has been put up, and it's got a lot of great ideas. 
For just the week itself, it was pretty good. Jay has been continuing to go to church, and is even already answering questions in Sunday School! He really likes church, and is going to be a strong member, especially because he's young. We've been teaching him the lessons again, and he remembers a lot of what we taught. And he's super excited to go do baptisms for the dead, there'll be a temple trip in January. Pray for him! Osvaldo (Ozzie) has also been doing good. He keeps on saying how he's already seeing differences in his life from when we've been teaching him, and wants to continue meeting with us. He's great, but he gets nervous around new people and so church is hard for him. He hasn't made it since our last weekend of service 2 weeks ago. He keeps on saying that he wants to go, though. We also met someone really cool named Oscar. We knocked into him and he let us right in! He's talked with missionaries before, and so he already likes us. He didn't make it to church, but we're visiting with him again tomorrow. I'm excited to see where he goes. And as the last little bit of news for the week, our apartment is smelling good again due to our awesome branch president giving us a bunch of melter things, room sprays, and stuff like that that he makes himself. And some of the honey from his hives in the back. I don't know if they're online, but if you can find Sue's Wicks somewhere, go for it. It's good stuff. We also did find out the source of the bad smell, Elder Escobedo had left a whole bunch of sweet potatoes in a box on top of the fridge, and they weren't doing so hot. On the plus side, I found out that vacuums are a great way to quickly get rid of large numbers of fruit flies that are too small to be effectively swatted!

Until next time!

And these are our preparations for Christmas that we found in the attic, and the world's largest frying pan, which is about 12 miles down the road from us. We were visiting our Branch Mission Leader and decided to stop by the only tourist attraction in our area because it was on the way.


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