Week 59

 

Dear Family,

I hope you guys all got to watch the conference!! Conference is the best time of year, I think as a missionary, I love it more than Christmas. I don't really know what to write you guys about this week, I feel like conference overshadowed it all. And pretty much was what I was focused on the whole week, just trying to prepare and be ready with questions and such. So I guess I'll start off with a few things that happened before I move onto the conference.

So we've done a lot of tracting. We've been doing what President Alba wants us to do, which is find 20 new people to talk to a day, and we've been doing that. And as we've been working hard, it's cool because everyone that we talk to has been super nice. We found a cool young lady whose son has RSV. It was cool being able to talk to her about that and relate with her. We found a different lady who was super nice and told us that she wanted to learn more, so we'll be stopping by them. I think my favorite person we talked to though, was this 75 year old white guy. He had a huge beard, answers the door, so we start talking to him and he says "oh I was just reading my fishing magazine!" So we talked for a good little while about fishing. He wasn't really interested at all in the church, but it was cool to talk about fishing! It's almost that time again.

There is also the problem about tea in the branch that I told you guys about... Well at dinner on Saturday before priesthood session of conference, brother Cruz had a big thing of peach juice out... I poured myself a glass, until Hermana Billat coughed to get my attention, shook her head and pointed at the bottle. It was peach juice with tea! So sneakily, I put it in front of Elder Teran, and poured myself a glass of water. This branch and the word of wisdom... Next thing you know the law of chastity will only be a law from 7AM to 7PM. But I digress.

So General Conference!! I'll send my notes in this email, too. But it was amazing! I feel like they keep getting better and better as my mission moves on. President Alba asked us to fast on Monday to Tuesday. Like you guys know to close our fasts we do an hour of prayer. So in this hour of prayer, I wrote down 6 questions I had on how to improve certain aspects of my mission/ life. By the end of the first session on Saturday, 5 had been answered. I continued to learn and I loved all of it. So some cool things about the people who spoke- elder Aidukaitis spoke to us in the MTC, and then came and talked to us at a conference in Santa Rosa. He's a funny guy. Then there is Carlos H Amado. I have quite a bit of experience with his family. Every Saturday for 6 months, I washed my clothes at his sister's house. His brother was the head chief of security at the Oakland temple for 32 years, and retired while I was in Fairfield, and he drove us to the temple and gave us a an amazing tour. I had a bible bash with his apostate brother. I also was able to give his mother a blessing. She was the second Hispanic member EVER in Fairfield, and every Monday morning she came from Vallejo and I talked to her quite a bit. That guy has a great family!

I loved Jeffery R Hollands introduction and incredibly bold testimony. I loved Dieter F Uchtdorf's talk about being grateful in our circumstances, being grateful people. I loved Henry B Eyring talking about covenants and families. The talk Linda S Reaves gave about pornography was stellar. Neil L Anderson's talk about roods and whirlwinds, and Richard G Scott talking about being tied to God both hit me hard. While I was preparing for district meeting tomorrow, I realized my favorite talk was by D Todd Christofferson about the atonement. It was so amazing.

What did you guys like? What did you guys learn?