May 23, 2016

Hi all!

It was another great week out here on the East Coast.. Elder Jorgensen and I are so busy it is ridiculous. We try our best to squeeze in time to focus on our area and do missionary work.  But at the end of the day I am always happy to know I helped the missionaries in the zone to do their best work. Like the scripture you shared last week Dad, it's by the small and simple things, that we do everyday that will end up creating the great things.

Sounds like it has been a good week for all back home. It has been super rainy here like back home. I check the weather app in the morning and it's been raining about the same here. We have had about 5-6 days of rain this past week!

It was a pretty good week, we had our regular meetings on Tuesday. Then Wednesday we had to work on moving in more senior couple apartments. We have a big turn over this summer of senior couples so we have been taking about a day a week to start moving them in and get it prepped for them to show up.

Thursday was our last interviews with Pres Cooke! He leaves in about 4ish weeks, it's so crazy!  Since it was his last he took FOREVER with people. The Zone Leaders kinda run the interviews for him so we had to be there the whole time.  So we were at the stake center from 11:30-5:30.  Only like 2 hours over schedule haha. But I am so grateful President puts in that sacrifice to talk to all of us. It was great to sit down with President, he talked a lot about my responsibilities the next year and how he has a group he's selected to really be the group Pres Johnson can lean on and how I'm part of that group. It was super humbling and exciting but also a little nerve wracking. But it's going to be fun!

Then I spent a good portion of the rest of the week plunking away in spreadsheets for a Stake Coordination meeting that was held yesterday.  It's a monthly meeting where we go over the missionary efforts in the stake with the Stake Leaders and display numbers, progress, stuff like that. It's pretty labor intensive for us, but like before. Anything that helps the zone keepin on!

Also getting ready for Zone Conference this upcoming week. We are combining with the Rockville Zone so I'm giving a workshop (lesson) with one of the R-Ville ZLs on the importance of using the Book of Mormon as missionaries when we teach. He's another young guy like me (1 transfer older) so we kinda got hazed into having to do the ZL workshop haha But it's all good. I'll have to send you it next week after we put the finishing touches on it. We will be using just the normal paper back copies we pass out for free as we teach trying to help missionaries see that it is simple for us to teach out of the scriptures. We are super excited of how its pulled together.

Well I hope you have great weeks! It's so crazy how soon you'll be down picking up Garret, he has served a great mission! I'll look forward from your next email coming from Argentina! Tell the littles not to party too hard while you're gone 

I love you guys! 
Love,
Austin

Only one picture from the week.. There are some benefits to driving a mini van haha. 

We can load it up into the party van! After meetings on Tuesday we loaded 

up the zones elders and went to get papusas (spell check?). It was a great time haha!