"My commission is to do what He wants done. To say what He wants said."

Hey everyone!

This week was wonderful...we had zone conference, which is always amazing! It was President and Sister McKinnon's last zone conference...they'll still be here for interviews, but this was their last zone conference and it was so sad! I'm going to miss them...I'm excited about the new mission president, but I love the Mckinnon's; it'll be sad to see them go. But the conference itself was wonderful with a lot of really impressive trainings.

This week was pretty uneventful...we did a lot of finding at the beginning, but then Sister Leonard got sick at the end and so we didn't do very much the last couple of days. We did teach Liz on Tuesday and it went really well! We taught her the Plan of Salvation which is my favorite lesson to teach, and I think it went well. She had a bit of a difficult time because she believes more in reincarnation and said that before judgment if we haven't learned everything that we need to learn, we just go back to the premortal existence and start over again and we do that over and over and over again until we learn all the lessons that we need to learn on this life. We talked about how agency is so important to God that He's never going to take that away from us. If we don't want to learn the lessons that He wants us to learn, He's not going to force us; He's not going to watch us suffer through this life again, still not learning the same lessons if we don't want to learn it. I think she accepted that a little bit more...we'll see. Then she said that she had had questions and she knew that she needed different answers to them than the ones that she had and so she started looking for them, and that's when Sister Tschumi and I showed up. So then Sister Gelinas bore testimony and said that if she had questions and we showed up right after, maybe she needed to start looking a little harder to try to find the answers in what we were saying instead of just thinking that she knew everything. She agreed and we're meeting with her again next week, so we'll see how it goes :)

Oh, and then it was so wonderful after that! We came home on Tuesday right after the lesson and the zone leaders had come and heart attacked our house! I just love them; they really are so wonderful. We have pretty incredible elders in our district :) Oh, and all the elders came down right before zone conference and Elder Garcia had found out that it was my birthday at the end of this month, so he kept asking me what I wanted and then decided he's making me a cake and they're cooking us dinner...I just love them :) But anyways, so the rest of the afternoon on Tuesday we spent finding...we were going to contact on this one street, but then we saw a guy with a gun, so we decided that we should probably go to a different street, haha. Then the next day that we went and taught a less active, Claire Dion, and that went well. We talked about the 10 commandments and following God's plan for us. I think it went really well...she said that with her boyfriend, they have a really good relationship between them, but not with God, and so we suggested that maybe she needed to invte God into the relationship, and one way she could do that pretty easily was through having a fmaily home evening with him and maybe the Carrier family who live nearby and she said that was a really good idea. So then we called the Carrier's and asked them if they could also call and invite her to have an FHE with them, but they said they'd tried that a year ago and she'd said no, so they didn't want to try again. It was so frustrating...I'm really learning here how important member participation and member support is for the missionary work. Everything works out better when the members are helping and bearing testimony...it's a good lesson I hope to remember when I get back.

I think that was about it for the week though...it was good and I'm looking forward to this next week. I love Sister Leonard and we have a lot of fun together, so it should be a wonderful week. I hope everything is going well for you and I love you all tons!!

Love, Sister Nicole Lindsey