February 1st, 2016

Hey guys!

So this past week was pretty good. We did a lot of service again so that was how a lot of the week was spent. So our apartment manager had surgery on his shoulder so he can't do much and he needed a kitchen and carpet torn out of one apartment so we didn't that for him. Then we went down to Tucarora to help some members and their daughter in law who is a non-member. One cool thing is, they live in a yurt so it's just like a giant tent but it looks like a house on the inside. They have to use wood to heat it. They don't have running water, so they get water from the river and put it in bins and it’s gravity fed. And they have a little farm. So we went and spent a couple hours taking water from the river to the storage in the yurt and stacking a lot of wood.

Wednesday, we had district meeting in Warsaw and a lot of the usual stuff. Thursday we had a really cool opportunity. We just recently got a new stake presidency and they have a vision of how they want the missionary work and home teaching to work in the next several years while they are called. So we had a meeting with all of the missionaries from the Rochester stake and all of the priesthood leadership from all of the wards and branches; so the bishoprics, high priest group leader, elder’s quorum president, and a couple others. It was really cool to see how they want to change things. This area is really struggling the past 15 years. The number of members has gone up by about 1400 but the number of active people in the stake has gone down, so that's not good.

Also home teaching and visiting teaching is really low, so they set a goal to get that up to 75 percent and it’s at less than 20 now. And over the course of the next 10 years he wants to have a new stake in the area. And with missionary work, he wants to make it so the missionaries don't have to do any finding and the members do it all and the missionaries just do the teaching. So he's got a lot of good plans going on. It helps that he is the smartest man in the mission boundaries member or nonmember, and he's only about 45! He was also talking about how he realized that now that he is stake president he has to watch over and take care of a lot of people and he realized that that goes for non-members too! As a stake president he takes care of the members of course but he is in charge of the missionaries and they work they do too and all of the non-members in the stake. He is in charge of getting the gospel to them and making sure they are getting prepared for when Christ comes again. So, its a pretty daunting task a but he has a good plan for it which is awesome!

It's a lot different than a Utah stake where you have 4000 member and 5000 people living in your stake boundaries. He has 4000 members and nearly 2 million people in his stake boundaries that he is given stewardship over. Anyways it was a really good meeting! As for lessons this week we had a couple with Marissa and Steve, and we went to the family history center in Rochester with them, and also a couple of less actives.

I wish we had some more snow around here. Its just kinda brown here. 

That's awesome that you got to go to the temple. I'm going tomorrow because a girl in the ward is getting her endowments out. 

I helped teach young woman's with the first councilor in the bishopric and boy was that interesting! ;) haha

Anyways have a great week!

Love you!


P.S. I've been reading this book and there's some pretty good stuff on these pages take a look!