December 19th

Hello Family And Friends, It Has Been Another Great Week Here In Shallowford! Also since I won't email again until the 26th, merry Christmas! Thank you all for the cards and especially my family, I got the presents you sent and I'm on day 6 now. I really appreciate the bike lights.

So some good things happened this week. I met a woman who's last name was Roach, except now she's married so it isn't anymore, we had a lot of Christmas lessons, basically every visit was a Christmas lesson in some way. This week we had a zone conference about working with members, so we come up with a plan to get members involved with our investigators. What we did was we inviting all of the members who lived within walking distance of someone we're teaching, and asked them to use the light the world calendar as an excuse to drop off cookies for them. It was pretty simple, and we got about 20 members to commit to visit people. We're really excited, and I really like the whole light the world thing.

So basically there was a huge focus on member missionary work. Basically what I've learned is that 1) no matter how sincere you really are, the gospel means more to an investigator coming from a member, because they aren't called to share it, it isn't their full time job 2) if an investigator is converted to a missionary or really anything but the doctrines of the gospel, they'll go less active and actually hurt their salvation 3) missionary work keeps the members active 4) the desire to do missionary work isn't something that a missionary can put into someone else, it's something that they have to want to do. Just look at Elder Oaks talk from last general Conference, it's really about committing to yourself that if the spirit prompts something you'll do it.

That's really all, and to all, a good night.