Hope you all are doing great! I am doing just dandy. We had Zone Conference this past week which is always accompanied with transfers. I am staying and so is my companion, Elder Veresoni. It is great. I am excited for this coming transfer. It is will be amazing, Elder Versoni is amazing! He said to me on the way home one day, "By the end of the transfer, let's have 60 people in our teaching pool" (teaching pool: how many people we teach). I am excited!! I love having a companion that is driven and motivated! I hope I can be more like that -- optimistic, pleasant, and motivated.
So, Zone Conference was amazing! We had great trainings. Elder Murri from the East Zone gave a training on tracting and good first impressions. It was great! He started with the classic "Sorry I was sick this past week and so I didn't have much time to prepare, but we will see how this goes...." and you could see the attention in the room drop by a good 200 percent. Then he clapped his hands nice and loudly -- giving several people heart attacks and pointed out that saying that is a horrible first impression. He then restarted by doing a rap about tracting, and everyone paid attention very well in his training and we all loved it! It was amazing! Moral of the story: First impressions are extremely important and even if you don't have much time to prepare, don't demean your talk or training or speech or whatever it is that you do by pointing out the fact that it may not be very well prepared or that it may not be of worth. Because the moment we say that, people don't listen. Yep. Be creative and enthusiastic when giving talks or, more importantly, when sharing the gospel. It was a good lesson for missionaries and for everyone else as well. We also had a great training from Sister Moungatonga-Fowler (from the West Zone -- the zone I am in) on opening our mouths. We need to try to talk to everyone. Even those people that seem hopeless and even if people reject us, our goal is to at least leave them with a good impression of the church. We need to smile more, make people laugh more, and share the gospel more (we is an all inclusive pronoun being used here to imply all those that are members of the church, not just missionaries.). I found their trainings to be amazing and inspiring! Zone conference is amazing! We also had Stake Conference. It was good. Elder Sinjoux of the Seventy came to speak to us.
Well, my thought for today is to be happy. Be positive. Be optimistic. From Gordon B. Hinckley's life, we see that he was an optimist. One thing I noticed is that he said he was an optimist. It was not only said about him, but he said it himself. To me, this means that he CHOSE to be an optimist. Just as one chooses the choices that lead them to say "I am a doctor" or "I am a teacher", one also chooses the choices that lead them to say "I am an optimist." I know that people are born good. People are by nature good (any one wants to argue that? Because you'll lose -- we are children of God and we chose to follow Him in our life before we were born, and are therefore good), but life is not quite so good (due to a not so pleasant fellow named Satan). So, we are put in a position to choose whether or not we will be happy in this life. It is all up to us. We can look at a day and say : "Today is going to be a great day" and it likely will, so long as we continue to say that even with Satan whispering just the opposite in our mortal ears. My point is this, we choose to be positive. We choose to be happy. We choose to be optimistic. That is what is so great about agency. It is all up to us. I know that we can choose. I know that we can always choose to be happy because the Lord Christ died and rose for us. He loves us and supports us and blesses us and is our greatest, truest friend. I know He lives! He is real! He is true! He is fact! He has a Gospel for us -- the Gospel of Peace, the Gospel of Joy, and a Gospel of Happiness. I know this and hope to hold true to it. I hope we all continually remember to choose to be happy (choose the right - choose to be happy.).
I love you all! Hope you are all well! Keep on being amazing! I look up to you all and you all make me happy. Thank you so much! I love you!
Choose the Right!
Hurrah for Israel!
Elder Weenig
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| Zone Conference |
