Zone Conference

April 11, 2016

Dear Family,

This was quite the interesting week. It was better than the last week. One thing I forgot to mention about last week was I was sick. I was getting over this nasty cough all last week and it finally didn't go away until this week. So for a majority of the week, I was still slightly sick which always makes things more fun right? :D

Monday
Sweet glorious P-Day. These are always needed. Especially after weeks where you were sick and not much happened. We cleaned the car out for the Zone Conference that happened on Thursday. And like usual, we "frolfed." This was Elder Salazar and Elder Gardenier's first time playing. Elder Salazar got lucky and nailed a perfect birdie from 200 ft. away. It was crazy to watch because he didn't try to do that at all. He just kinda threw it in the air and it happened to go 200 ft. and land perfectly in the basket. It didn't even touch the chains!

For dinner we ate at the Inman's. They gave us a tour of their home. Bro Inman used to own Eagle Gate College. After dinner, we visited the Quintana's, one of the few Hispanic families in the ward. They had a Jehovah's Witness friend over. Thankfully, they didn't want to discuss religion because JW's are vicious out here.

Tuesday
We started off joining the Wagners at Cheddars on Tuesday. Yes, we have a Cheddars. It was great. Bro Wagner grew up in Mexico City but is not Hispanic at all. He and Elder Salazar talked a lot in Spanish about Mexico City because that's where they're both from. Later on, we helped Ms Valles clean her garage. I found something cool out about her. Elder Anderson was the one who baptized her, and Elder Anderson was the one who trained Elder Lynch. Cleaning her garage wasn't that hard. It was just dusty. Later, I went on splits with the Smiths and visited a few more LA's.

Wednesday
Well, Wednesday started off with a small miracle. We had a new investigator just fall into our laps. We were walking down a street and this guy stopped next to us in our car. Usually when people do that, they want to yell or bash with us. So when this guy pulled over, I was thinking "great, here we go." But surprisingly, he said he had mad respect for us and our religion and asked us to come by his home to talk. So we went to his home and talked. His name was Mr R. He just barely converted to Christianity back in October from a life of... sin, basically... and praised Jesus for saving him. We taught him the first lesson and he liked it. He said he would read and pray about the BoM. In the few months Mr R's been a Christian, he's learned a lot about everything. During the lesson he was asking us questions about Joseph Smith that most people don't ask us. We answered his questions and set another appointment for later in the week. He said the closing prayer and it was actually done properly.

Later on we met with another new investigator named Ms J. She's a younger mom. She has 3 or 4 kids. We taught her the first lesson on her porch while her young kids were try to break down the door. We finished the day with English class.

Thursday
Zone Conference! We spent most of the day in Evansville because of it. It was a really good conference. President Brough and the Zone Leaders gave really good trainings about reaching our goals. A lot of the key indicators are greatly effected by the agency of others but he pointed out the things we can do on our part to do everything we possibly can for the key indicators. I never really thought much about how much is in our control. It was pretty good to learn something new. At Zone Conference our car was inspected. It has a lot of damage from previous missionaries and within the next week or two, we're going to have to put it in a body shop so we're going to be on bikes for a few days.

Friday
We had a long detailed weekly planning session. That was another thing that was talked about at Thursday's Zone Conference; making sure your weekly planning is done properly. After the planning, we saw a man named Mr Ed. He speaks Spanish, so the only one who can teach him is Elder Salazar. Mr Ed is very particular about his beliefs. He's a Saturday Sabbath kind of guy. It's a big concern with him. We read some of the BoM with him and he enjoyed it. Afterwards, we ate at the Gomez's. They gave us fresh mangos to take home. :)

Saturday
We started off with Barry's baptism. It was great. He had a lot of support from friends, family, and the ward. After the baptism, we took Bro Emmert to see Mr R for a disaster of a lesson. He read very little of the BoM and a lot of stuff from Google and attacked us with questions. Bro Emmert took over and basically threw down on him for not reading the BoM much. He is still open to our message, but he has an issue with over-complicating things and giving attention to things that aren't really that important.

Later on, we went to Bro Emmert's house for dinner and missionary coordination. He showed us his bike collection again. That man loves bikes.

Sunday
We went to church. Yay. Church is always a nice change of pace. We had a good Fast and Testimony meeting. We were supposed to have dinner with the Fedor's, but we found out they were out of town. Right when we found that out, the bishop invited us to his house for dinner. It was nice how that worked out. After dinner, we met with Mr El for the first time in a while. He is a Spanish "former." Here's something I learned from him. If you read the Book of Revelations without the knowledge of the pre-earth life, you will be very confused. That's what happened to Mr El. We tried to teach him that but he's very set in his ways. 

And that was this week. I enjoyed it. We're way down on our teaching pool. We should find someone this week.

Bye!

-Elder Benjamin Kohkonen Cox (GKLM)

Bored "Weekly Planning" face. 

Barry got baptized!

Weekly Chick-Fil-A selfie!

We "frolfed" in the rain today!