January 29, 2017

So we have some big stuff going on in the mission. I am so excited to say that David A Bednar is coming to speak to our mission on February 23! What an awesome experience. I was so blessed to have Russell M Nelson come last year and now my 2nd favorite apostle David A Bednar (first being Holland) It will be awesome to hear him speak and meet him personally. Also there are some big changes happening with our schedule and rules. Missionaries are now allowed to go swimming! Just kidding that is not happening. But yeah so here in the Philippines we always had to be home at 9 to do 30 minutes planning and then in the morning we have personal, companionship, and language study then we leave the house at 12. But now the whole world is changing it to where there is no more 30 minutes planning at night it will be in the morning (which I love) and now we have more flexibility in choosing how we do our work and taking lunch breaks. So I am excited for the new schedule.

This last week has been pretty good. We had our zone conference last friday. It was a good meeting. It was focused on how to get investigators to come to church, how to give better commitments, and also about teaching the people and not just teaching the lessons. I gave the workshop on teaching the people not lessons. It was alright I think. I talked about how listening is a huge part. We have to listen to the investigator and not just let our minds wander. Which is one of my biggest weaknesses sometimes is that I have a hard time just focusing completely. But when you have the spirit in the lesson everything gets easier, that is why it is so important to have the spirit in the lesson. So Brother Fedi came to church yesterday. He came by himself because all 3 of his kids have chicken pox right now. But he knew it was important to come so he came and he is making some awesome progress. We also have this family that we found. Well they arent married yet but they live to gether and they have 2 kids. We teach them every tuesday, thursday, and saturday at 4pm. They are pretty awesome and they love the lessons and they are making good progress. We had a great lesson with them last saturday about Plan of Salvation and they said they would FORSURE come to church the next day. But Brother has a tough schedule because he works the night shift at his job. So he is super tired in the morning around when church is but he said that he would force himself to go. So we told them we would wait outside the church for them on sunday morning. So we got to church at 8:40 and waited and waited but they didint come:( It was disappointing but its all good I bet they will come next week. 

I have been doing some personal reflecting and I want to learn more about love and patience before I head home. I want to be the most loving to others that I can be, but I am not the best at it. So I have started doing some scripture study on it. But if any of you have any scriptures or talks that you wanna share with me about loving others I would love it.

So this could be potentially my last week in this area and that means that I will be heading off to my last area next week!! Crazy stuff. But we will see it is not for sure yet.

I had a cool study earlier this week. I have been looking into the Atonement on how important it is as an event in the whole plan. So I was reading in Mormon 9: 11-14 and I realized how important the Creation and the Fall is to the Atonement. If there was no creation, there would be no fall, if there was no fall there would be no need for atonement and that means we wouldnt be resurrected and we wouldnt be able to be judged and exalted at the last day. The fall happened because Adam and Eve transgressed. If they did not transgress then there would be no sin and Jesus Christ wouldnt be apart of the plan. So that is a little something that is becoming more clear to me.

I love you all! Thanks for being awesome!