Hello once again to all of my family and friends out there! Once again I hope that you are all found having good health (does that make sense in English?), and that you are still going strong on your New Year’s resolutions! Things are going very well for my companion and I, and we are still very happy to be together. Let me tell you about my week, cause I don’t have too much time.
We have been getting pretty serious about our singing practices for the Elder Ballard conference, now that he is going to be here this Saturday! We are actually getting pretty nervous for the whole thing. We haven`t had a whole lot of time to practice since everyone is in different zones and everything, but we are doing the best that we can. Today in the morning we had a practice, and President Flores showed up to make sure everything was looking good. I am going to be sitting on the front row since I’m in the choir, so we’re starting to get way nervous! In the practice though, I did my best to give a surprise to Elder Sinclair. Today is his birthday, and so before practicing, I whispered to Elder Tingey to start out by playing Happy Birthday, and everyone knew about it. So right when Elder Sinclair thought that we were going to be singing the song, we all screamed out the Happy Birthday song and scared him to death! It was a funny moment for us. Anyways, today Elder Sinclair and I went to get our hair cut, and we sent our suit to the dry cleaners to make sure everything is looking spiffy for Saturday! It’s only once in a lifetime that you meet an Apostle.
Even though last week Elder Sinclair and I had a great week, the zone didn’t do so well all in all. So, this week we tried as hard as we could to up the energy of the zone, and helping them to become the great missionaries that we know they can be. So we had lots of small activities for them. On Tuesday we held a Zone Meeting, and discussed the points that we thought were lacking in the teaching, and obedience and all that. We also went to a couple of the Elders houses during the week in the mornings to go and study with them. We asked them what types of goals they had as a companionship, what they wanted to accomplish together, and how they were going to do it. We also asked suggestions on how we can improve, because we know that we aren’t perfect. To make a long story short, we feel really great because the zone had an awesome week this week!
On the other hand, in our own area it was a little bit more difficult for us. We have been really trying to keep up with all of these 17 new investigators that we found last week, including the 9 we had this week, but it has been quite a challenge. Some of them aren’t really turning out to be that positive, others are nearly impossible to find, etc. We are going to do the best we can to select the chosen ones out of that group, so that we can focus on the people that are going to become our next baptisms.
Speaking of baptisms, we had to reschedule Michael`s baptism to next week. We still need to teach him a couple of lessons, and it turns out he had a small problem with coffee, but the things are under control now, and he has been more than 2 weeks without drinking coffee! We even met with him on Saturday so that he could plan his own baptism, with the talks, music and everything. We are going to hurry back from the Ballard conference to have his baptism that night!
This week I was able to go on interchanges with the new district leader in our zone, Elder Davis. It turned out being great! We walked blissfully around talking to everyone we saw, and we also were able to put a baptismal date of a man named Walkyier who has had a complete change recently in his life that led to him accepting the date.
This week I have been immersing myself in the Conference edition of the Liahona, and have learned a lot of things. I especially enjoyed reading the talk from Elder Christofferson about living a Consecrated life. I’ve been trying to set goals in order to follow the counsel of the apostles. Today I finished reading the talk from Elder Hales about Agency, which is also one of my favorites as of right now. I encourage all of you to continue reading the words of the prophets, because as Elder Costa said in the conference: The words of the modern prophets are more important than the scriptures, and the dead prophets.
I know that this church is true, I know it with all my heart. I love all of you and hope that you’re doing well. I’ll talk to you next week!
Vaya Pues!
Elder Tinkham
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