Conferences and the Reconnection with Old Friends

 





(photo of Summit/Wyoming Zone missing)

Between zone conferences and stake conferences, it seems there was at least one conference every week this past transfer cycle. Following our typical format, we held two combined zone conferences down in the Salt Lake valley and one for the Wyoming zone up in Evanston, Wyoming. A wonderful spirit of camaraderie and learning was felt throughout each of the conferences.

Additionally, the many stake conferences Anne and I attended and participated in were each full of the Spirit and were so uplifting and edifying. The most recent stake conference was held in the Murray North stake. Elder Matthew R. Clarke was the presiding authority. During my talk, Elder Clarke realized that we went to high school together and were in the same graduating class. Then, afterward, Lisa Nordgren Hansen came up and said hi. She too was in our graduating class from Skyline high school. It was fun to reconnect with both of them.

And Tracy Burger, one of my coworkers at CATIC in Connecticut came to Salt Lake for the Roots Tech genealogy conference. Anne and I were able to meet her for dinner one night and catch up on everything going on in each of our lives. It was so fun to see her and spend time together.

Brother Ahmad Corbitt taught us in Utah Area Mission Leader Correlation meeting that the two most important things in missionary work for mission leaders are:
  • Seeking revelation to know God’s will in His mission field; and
  • Teaching the missionaries to unitedly exercise “Book of Mormon faith” (exceedingly great faith – Alma 5:15-17) in accomplishing what was revealed.
    • This type of faith is defined as looking forward with faith in Jesus Christ and having such confidence in God keeping His promises that, when God makes a promise (or reveals something to us), one views or sees the world as if that thing as already been given or occurred (see 1 Nephi 5:4-5 and Revelation 12:11 – two instances where the writer suggests something as having already occurred before it did, in fact, occur).
The highlight of every week though has to be seeing people come unto Christ through the sacred covenant of baptism.


And the highlight of every transfer is attending the temple with the missionaries.





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Celebrating One Year!

Image
It seems impossible that Anne and I are celebrating one year as mission leaders! (The picture above shows our first day feeling very inadequate to fill the shoes of David and Lisa Prier who preceded us as mission leaders of the Utah Salt Lake City mission.) One-third of our mission experience is over. So much has occurred over this past year that giving a summary will not seem like a summary. Therefore, some of the highlights of the past year include: being set apart for our assignments by President M. Russell Ballard, the presiding Apostle of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles and Elder Kevin W. Pearson, the Area President of the Utah Area of the church; going to the ER on my first day because of an episode of Transient Global Amnesia. attending four days of training at the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah with entire First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles (the senior leaders of our church); starting our official service on June 28, 2022 and so began the adventure of s...
Read more

"Sorry, it's been a while between posts."

Image
 Sorry I haven't posted for the last two months. I'll do my best to get caught up ... In July, we welcomed 54 new missionaries to the mission. The church is integrating service missionaries into existing missions. Previously the young service missionaries were not part of an organized "mission" but, rather, served under their stake president and a couple of senior missionaries called to be Service Mission Leaders (SMLs). The SMLs still work with the service missionaries on their day-to-day service assignments, trainings, etc. But now the SMLs operate under the Mission President of the mission in which their service missionaries live instead of the multiple stake presidents where these young service missionaries live.  We had our first “integrated” zone conference on July 11 th . It was wonderful. We had most of the service missionaries from the Salt Lake valley in attendance. One of the sister service missionaries did a musical number that was one of the best I have e...
Read more