October 17, 2011

Dear Family,

This week was super intense. First, bad news. Elder Petersen got transferred. We were both pretty sad. We were hoping for at least one more transfer, but he is needed somewhere else. Gisela was pretty sad to see him go. The good news is that right now I have a mini missionary! No, that isn’t a derogative way to call a really short person, but a program that our mission does with young men who are preparing for the mission. When there is a shortage of missionaries for one reason or another (visas usually), they call some local pre-missionary waiting for their call to serve for a couple of weeks. Mine is really nice, his name is Elder Gomez and he lives on the other side of Jujuy. He’s great and excited to get to work.

Our Friday was quite interesting. So the Area presidency has been working really closely with our new mission president (probably with all the mission presidents I’d imagine, but it just we’ve had an abnormally lot of contact with them). Anyway, they did a special training with all the Zone Leaders, who then taught all us, on the importance of specific planning. Normally we do a 3 hour planning session every Friday morning for the coming week. In Preach My Gospel it outlines how you’re supposed to do it, but we usually run out of time and need to teach before we can completely and thoroughly do it. Well, now they want us to do it completely, no matter how long it takes. We did it on Friday and it ended up taking 7 whopping hours. We were pretty tired by the end, but we did it. They told us that the first time it would take a long time, but as we continued to do it correctly it would take less and less time as we improved. Lesson learned: It is much better to do something the right way, even if it takes more time, than to do it some efficient incorrect way.

The Highlight of the week was finishing it off with a Zone Conference with Elder Aidukaitis of the Presidency of the Area (1st Quorum of Seventy). Incredible. Simply Incredible. He talked some more about goal setting and planning, saying that they are godly principles (See Abraham 4) and that if we don’t learn how to set goals and plan, we will reach a small part of our potential. Then he talked about how to become more powerful missionaries (members, priesthood holders, etc...). I’d tell you how, but that’s one of the secrets, you can’t tell anybody. Haha, just joking. For more read Alma 26:22.

Well, that’s it for today, folks. I love you all so much. The church is true!

-Elder Spencer