Good afternoon my beautiful family!
Thank you for all of your inspired letters! I love hearing all the success stories. Never thought I would say this, but I miss the cold! Christmas is coming up soon and the snow is what makes Christmas beautiful not coconut trees and ting haha! Mom please don't count the days and months of my advent return haha! I just want to go back in time when I was still a greeny! Sadly I am now in the single digits of my mission. Also Mom please send another belt to Lawrence, the Nike belt he is wearing takes away your image as a representative of Jesus Christ, you're not representing a Nike.
Just the other day I sat down with a new Elder and corrected him WITH LOVE not to wear his big flashy zelda belt (zelda is a cartoon character). I also had to correct him on some other obedience issues. Something exiguous shows a lot of you and who you represent. So please send Lawrence a new belt!
(Lawrence reaction to the Nike belt: "Yes I got the letter and read what Alton said about the belt...I laughed about what he said, I feel like he shared something like that before I left...Ok!")
I hope all our youth who chooses to serve a mission have a sense of pathos BEFORE their mission. A lot of the youth go out hard headed and when they hit the mission they start to "tremble and quake" and are "harrowed up by the memory of my many sins" (Alma 36:17) then come back home to make amends.
This past Saturday we had the baptism and confirmation of Betty and her son, Joshua:) it was a great success to see a lot of the ward members came out and support them! Prior to the baptism, we had a two day conference for all the Zone leaders in the mission. Man these meetings are the BEST meetings I have been on in my mission! I have definitely grown a lot these past few days, my teaching skills and my role as a leader has been sharpened! As I have said in my last letter, our meeting was focused on balancing our efforts to achieve real growth:
1. Baptism and confirmation
2. Retention
3. Reactivation
These are the things that the brethren wants us to work on. So the plan Elder Guzman and I have come up with is better and effective planning. We will be teaching this to our Zone tomorrow morning and will be skyping this meeting to Tobago!
Something profound that President Mehr mentioned in our MLC I want to share with you all: As we were talking about the first area of focus (obedience) and after calling out missionaries and bluntly asking them, "how obedient are you on a scale of one to ten?" Later he said, "only the Gods are obedient to immutable laws." His statement raised my level of obedience, so I will ask the same question to all of you on a scale of 1 to 10, "how obedient are you?" (obedience to the commandments, scripture study, prayers, hold church calling faithfully etc).
Well family my love goes out to all of you. I sure do love this work that I am engaged in. It's such a great feeling to know you are working full-time for the Lord everyday! I have in my scriptures a sticky note that says, "treat everyday like it's your last day on your mission." I look at it at times when I need some motivation.
Keep up the great work everyone and keep eating good food for me!:)
With love,
Elder Brown
