A Big Week! Here and back home! January 21st

What a week it has been! It sure was a tough week with the new changes but a good week nevertheless. Before I get too much into what happened here though it sounds like back home was a really big week for everyone as well! I think the biggest thing being that Melissa got her mission call! She is going to Ackland, New Zealand! How cool is that? Man that would be so sweet to serve in New Zealand, such a pretty country. I have no doubt she will love her time there.

So this past week here was full of even more changes in the mission, these were more re-adjustments than they were changes though. But we had a meeting with all the leadership in our mission this past Thursday where we had two representatives from the church's missionary department (professional missionaries haha) come talk to us about how to be the best missionaries we can be. It was such an awesome meeting! I learned a ton! The only downside is that the meeting was 7 hours long haha. So it was a very long day. I took about 4 pages worth of notes, one full page is filled with changes to eliminate the "false traditions" of the mission. Things that weren't necessarily being done wrong, but just weren't the official way to do them. things like nightly calls to missionaries within our districts to see how their day was and making sure we use Elder or Sister before saying peoples last names always, just little things. I don't think any of them will be very difficult changes to make. My biggest difficulty I will have now is cramming all 7 of those hours into an hour and a half district meeting tomorrow morning so that the rest of the district knows about the changes as well haha. I'm not sure how to do that, because I felt like there wasn't a spare minute in our 7 hour meeting where we weren't learning something new, so it's going to be really tough to condense. Yesterday we had an awesome Sunday though! The 18 year old guy named Ben that we have been teaching got his answer, through prayer, that the book of Mormon is true! So now he wants to be baptized on the 2nd of Febuary, we are so pumped! I really hope I'm still here for it, it's the Saturday after transfers though so I don't think that I will be :/ but I will be able to come back for it! Plus we had two young women we began teaching last week come to church for the first time this week! Elder Skinner and another missionary (we had to split to cover all of our appointments) got to go with them to the Temple Visitor's center last night and have a guided tour by one of the Sisters serving there, it went really well, Temple Visitor's Center Sisters are always awesome. Well I've got to get running unfortunatelly :/ my hour is pretty much up, we had a really long email from President Riggs today that took up most of the emailing time haha but it was a good email! Well I hope everyone is having a great week! I love and miss all of you!