Good Week, Really Good Weekend

It's been a pretty good week and a really good weekend. I loved general conference! All of the talks were so good. And I loved having the speakers speak in their native language. The church is such a global organization and it was really cool to see more of that diversity. It's so funny though, General Conference always makes me a little homesick, just because I miss watching it with all y'all at Grandma's house. I'm excited that I get to do that next conference.

Tuesday we had our ZTM, which at the last minute was moved to Columbia, instead of Windsor Lake, and that building is a maze! It's three stories, and has all of these staircases and doors. We got lost a couple times trying to find our way around. The meeting was really good, the focus was on studying better, planning better, and finding better. I feel like those are the exact things we need to work on in our area to get things moving and so we got lots of good ideas to apply. 

What it really comes down to is just doing what it says in Preach My Gospel. Everything we need to be successful missionaries is in there. But somehow we have a tendency to look to other sources for ideas, or I know I sometimes make the mistake of thinking I know everything in there, so I don't have to study it all the time anymore. But Preach My Gospel is a lot like the scriptures, you can get something new from it every time you read it.

We also had interviews with our mission president Tuesday, and it was good to talk to him some more. The Turners are really great, and I like them a lot. They're definitely very different from the Holms in the way they do things, but their love for us and for the gospel is the same.

After interviews Sister Christensen, one of the Elgin sisters, really wanted to go to Cookout, which is a Southern hamburger place with really good shakes. Well, when we got there, we saw that there was a Panda Express right across the street. I didn't know they even had those in South Carolina. We were all very excited, so we got our Cookout shakes and then went to Panda. It was good. We kind of regretted eating so much, because we had dinner with a member about two hours later and we were still stuffed. We didn't eat very much and I think the member was a little disappointed. I love her. She's a returning less active member, and she feeds us every week. She just started temple prep classes, and I'm so excited for her.

One of the main focuses at the zone meeting was finding new investigators. That's something that Sister Torino and I have been focusing on as well, because we need to find more people to teach. But throughout this week we didn't have much success. 

Sunday came around, and we hadn't found any new investigators yet. But we were able to teach a potential investigator, who opened up a lot to us and was genuinely excited to read the Book of Mormon. So that was one new investigator. And then at 8:30 at night we stopped by a former investigators' house, and were able to teach all four of the people living there, so by the end of Sunday we had five new investigators.

It was really cool that after a long week, that was kind of unproductive because of all the meetings, we were still able to see success in the area that we were trying to improve.

I love you all, and I hope you have a wonderful week!

Sister Mathias, Sister Rudy, Sister Wheelock and Sister Torino