11/8/10

pic from zone leader conference at mission home this week

Hola familia!
Everything here is great. Not too much new has happened. We did have zone conference this past tuesday which is also inspiring and uplifting. The message was again centered around improving ourselves as individuals to be more effective missionaries. We learned alot about sacrifice, consecration, and the process of perfecting ourselves throughout our lives.
We also had a zone leader council meeting on friday where we talked a lot about plans for changing the culture of belief in the mission. President Archibald owned car dealerships in Utah and so he always had some neat stories about selling cars that he related to how we let our minds limit ourselves and what we're able to achieve in the missions and throughout our lives.
We had some neat experiences this past week that we're excited about.
My testimony was strengthened this week of the 7-day challenge. We extended a challenge to a young family that had recieved several 7-day challenges in the past, and had started to do small acts of missionary work from them, but hadn't been able to yet invite someone to their home. We decided to simply share a mormon message and ask some basic questions about their feelings. Afterwards, we extended the challenge in the presence of the spirit, and they both thought of the same person to invite. They recognized this as revelation and called her on the spot. They set up a family home evening for this evening, only 5 days after the challenge was extended. I've learned more about the purpose of the challenge and how to make if effective. We just stepped back and let the spirit animate and inspire the family as they testified of Gospel principles and then invited.
We also had an appointment cancel this week an hour before we were to have it and felt inspired to go to visit a member family. The father of the family had a friend from high school over and after a brief message with the family, the friend told us that he had always been interested in learning about our church and asked if he could start learning. The family and us were both excited and we were able to refer Andy to the wildwood elders to begin teaching him. I could tell that the family was very shocked and humbled by the interest that he showed in recieving the lessons. We're hoping that it'll help inspire them to keep doing missionary work.
We're excited for two baptisms in the zone this coming thursday. It's of a yougn family that i taugth for the first 7.5 months of the mission and they've always been some of the investigators that i've been the closest with. He called us this past week to invite us to the baptism and i asked him why they had decided to get baptized about so long. He said that they felt more and more that something was missing in their lives and so they knelt down as a couple and prayed and the things that we had shared with them and what they had felt kept coming back into their minds. They started coming back to church about 2 months ago and meeting with the elders again and are ready for the baptism! He told the elders that he's always felt like a fish that was hooked and knew he was goign to get reeled in, but was fighting it all this time.
Nothing else is really new other than the fact that another senior couple just arrived from Provo to work in the mission office and they also moved in the floor below us in our apartment building. We now have two senior couples directly below us and so I don't think we're goign to have to worry about being taken care of.
Thank you for all you do! I love and miss you!
Elder Dunlap