December 14, 2015

Dear Family,

 Transfer news came in and Elder Worley and I are staying together in Rio Zion! We are super pumped! There is a ton of work going on and a ton of work for us to do so this transfer should be a super good one! Thanks a ton by the way for the package! I love the alpha smart and not only does it let me have better journal entries, but I can type my weekly email up in the mornings so that they can be longer! We have also decided to do a twelve days of Christmas thing with our zone. Each day we are going to leave a note and some treat or something on each companionships doorstep leading up to Christmas, and we are going to use the wal-mart gift card to buy all of the stuff for it. I am going to buy a santa suit as a disguise so we don’t get caught, it’s going to be sweet! But thanks for all of the things that you sent me, I love you guys so much!

 This week was pretty sweet! We were able to baptize Kristina and Desiree! The baptism was awesome and a ton of people showed up to support them! They are so solid, and once again are going to be kingdom builders! We also had three confirmations yesterday because last Sunday was that conference so Emily got to get confirmed with them yesterday which was awesome! I got to do Emily’s confirmation and our ward mission leader, and a seminary teacher did the other two girls! It was so sweet to have three confirmations in a sacrament meeting! And they are all friends too so they will be able to fellowship each other throughtout their lives!

 We had a sweet Zone Conference/MLC/Zone Training this week. Elder Randall K. Bennett of the Seventy was able to come and teach us! All of the zone leaders got to have a pre meeting with him before the zone conference, and he told us that he had prepared by studying for weeks what he wanted to train us on, and he said that he didn’t have anything written down and that he was going completely by the Spirit for the conference, and throughout the conference you could definitely tell that he was going by the Spirit! He taught us so many things that the mission needed and that I needed personally! Then after the conference we had a special MLC where all of the zone leaders got together with Elder and Sister Bennett and President and Sister Miller, and Elder Bennett said that we were going to go around the room and say one thing from zone conference that we feel like the mission needs most. So we did that and the AP’s wrote them up on the board. After we did that President Miller got up and talked for a little bit, and we all counseled together on how we can narrow it down to one thing that we can focus on. Then President Miller just stared at the board for like a solid 1-2 minutes, the Spirit was super strong, and then he said “There is one thing that encompasses all of these things, and that’s conversion.” So then we all counseled together about conversion and Elder Bennett talked about it and gave some last comments and MLC was over. It was one of the most Spiritual experiences of my life!! He is my new favorite seventy haha! 

 Then later in the week on Friday we had our zone training where we were supposed to review zone conference and train on what we learned in MLC. So Elder Worley and I took Elder Bennett’s advice and studied the whole week about conversion and reviewed our notes from zone conference and when we prepared our training we wrote down a few things as kinda topics for discussion but the whole rest of the training was going to be by the Spirit. It went SOOO well!! While we were up there training thoughts feelings impressions and scriptures kept just coming to my mind and heart like things I had studied and experiences I had, and I would say it and it would be straight from the Spirit! We asked a couple of the missionaries what they thought about zone training afterwards and they said that it was the most spiritual zone training that they had ever been to! I know that it is because the Spirit knew what the zone needed to hear and Elder Worley and I were just the instruments that were used in relaying that to the zone! It was so incredible though! 

 We have applied the things we learned in the meetings with some of our investigators and we have seen sweet results. Robert accepted a baptismal invite so we hope to set a date with him soon! More of our other investigators are also keeping their commitments that they weren’t before. Things are going great in the area right now and we are pumped for the new transfer! Anyways, that was my week, and now I’m gonna go take some people to the woodshed in ultimate Frisbee! I love and miss you all! Talk to you later.

 Love Elder Summerhays