Conference=Christmas

Hello, hello :)

How is everyone?? This week we had Christmas!!!! Conference was wonderful! A lot of the things, well most of the things that they talked about, we have been talking about in my mission for the past couple months. This week actually in my email from President he wanted me to pray to receive a vision for my new area, and to find out what Gods plan is. So I've been studying like crazy and really, really getting deep into the scriptures, and everything that I studied is exactly what they talked about in conference. I love receiving personal revelation, especially when it lines up with revelation that others have received.

This past week has been super good. I have yet had a week that something crazy hasn't happened. I got to go on exchanges to my last area on Tuesday and I had Hermana Groves and Lister with me who were MTC companions and brand new....so I was a little nervous, but SUPER excited! I got to see a lot of my old investigators and got to show Hermana Groves how to get around in the Ghettos ha ha. We had a blast!!

This past week we have had some really interesting OYM's which means Open Your Mouth... so basically talk to everyone! My favorite most memorable one was with Taisha, who was this nice black lady smoking on the stairs of one of the apartment complexes we go to. Turns out she's Jewish and has actually been called to be a prophet..... and they were having their disciple meeting that night. I actually learned a lot from her. She is very educated with church history, and she knew everything about our Gospel too, except the fact that it's the ONLY true church. She wanted to give me her correctly translated bible, and I wanted to switch it for a Book of Mormon, but she was just a little hard hearted. She was very sweet though. I was just very broken hearted to know that someones heart could be so hard :( Hopefully one day her heart may be softened.

We had an awesome Zone Meeting this week and President and the Assistants will now be part of them. A LOT of things are changing in the mission field. They talked a lot about them in Conference. We get iPads, smart phones, and facebook probably by the end of this month. We will now have two sets of missionaries in the church at all times to do church tours, tutoring, family history, English classes, piano lessons, culture classes from members, addiction recovery classes... you name it, were doing it!! I'm really excited to start doing it, and seeing the progression in the church. I was asked to give a presentation on how to receive a vision for your area and what needs to be done. I actually love giving presentations now and sharing the knowledge the God has blessed me with. I'm learning so much in the scriptures!!!! We also had our interviews with President and we were asked to teach a lesson in 3 minutes to him, we also had a 20 minute training with the zone leaders and assistants with our companionship and we would write down all the names of our baptism dates and then we went through a step process like the president does when he does transfers to see if it's Gods will. So we found that only two of our baptismal dates will be getting baptized this year. I can't even explain how spiritually powerful it was to have God reveal to all of us in the room that, that specific person was to get baptized that year. So we get to find 5 other people that God has planned to be baptized. I love learning how to have more specific prayers.

Conference was amazing. I watched all the sessions in English except for the first one on Sunday I watched in Spanish. 

I'm pretty sure I could write 20 more pages about this past week. One last thing. Junior got confirmed last week. He was baptized before I got in this area, but hasn't been able to make it to church, but this past week he received the Holy Ghost and became a member of the Church. YAYYYYY!!! I love you all so much!1

Hermana Watkins