Friday, January 23, 2009

This has been a moving week!

We are in our new place in Coral Springs and have just about everything put together. We had some wonderful help moving from Elder Kynaston and the three Office Elders (Elder Ipson, Elder Hamilton and Elder Stanger). We took them out to a nice dinner afterwards and stuffed them full of good food. On one of the runs to our new place, the Office Elders had left the tail gate down and we were following them. While waiting for a red light, I got out of our car and slammed the tail gate shut. They thought we had rammed them in the back and said "Elder Black just hit us, he really hit us." We all had a good laugh when they found out what really happened.
This has been a very spiritual week. We attended the Transfer Meeting on Wednesday, attended a Leadership Conference on Saturday where Elder Marlin K. Jensen of the Seventy trained the Elders on the Mission Culture (the Mission President, the need for worthiness, the need to be able to teach with power and authority and the need to work hard) and also on building faith in investigators and in ourselves. As faith increases, we are brought to repentance regardless of the consequences. We then attended the Pompano Beach Stake conference on Saturday and Sunday, where Elder Jensen spoke on free agency, keeping covenants and on Sunday he spoke directly to investigators in the audience on how they can find out if the church is true. He invited them to look at the fruits of Mormonism and used the Work of Wisdom as an example that shows that Joseph Smith was a prophet, also to live the commandments to know if they are true and to be open to the promptings of the Holy Ghost. His and other talks (including our Mission President) were so uplifting and spiritually motivating.
One Wednesday and Thursday, we visited and took flowers to Sister Griffin (recent convert) and Sister L (a Ward Missionary) from Somoa. Sister Griffin had fallen earlier and requested a priesthood blessing from Elder Black. It was sad to say goodbye. When we went to see Sister L. she gave Sister Black a beautiful fan made in Somoa out of bambo leaves. Her and Sister Black embraced for a long time and Sister L. shed many tears. It was quite touching.
We are enjoying our mission so much and are looking forward to introducing Daily Dose English soon. We also had some success this week with the Mission Reporting (in sending 57 e-mails to the Bishops and Ward Mission leaders using the Data Base program. Finally after a month of failures, we had success. This week we have 4 companion studies to finish up the Ft. Lauderdale zone. Next, week we will be heading to a District meeting in Miami along with companion studies. We are a bit concerned about the traffic in Miami and being able to find our way. We rely a lot on our GPS and Google Earth.

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