Zone Conference

Boy, I'm super tired right now. So today I had to drive to Kalispell, a 2 hour drive, to get our windshield replaced for our truck, since the previous Elder cracked it. Then we did our shopping and I drove another 2 hours back, so we could do our email. So I am super tired from the drive. Anyway, I did some more cleaning this week... but I feel really accomplished. Just as the Garage we live in in T-Falls was nasty, our Camper in Plains is nasty also. So we have been spending an hour everyday in the morning cleaning the place up. Had dirty dishes, disgusting toilet/shower, and cleaned/organized/rearranged our study room. So, it is very much more clean and nicer. We live in a camper/trailor, whatever you want to call it. I call it a camper, and the members built an add on of a 8' by 8' room for our study room. We have a ton of food that we have been cooking and eating all week, bacon, sausage, hashbrown, and some member gave us $90 worth of Cod fish from Alaska which was delicious and we finished that yesterday. This week has been good. The members are very supportive and we received 24 referrals this week! We have been busy trying to contact people.

On Friday I gave discussions for our Zone Conference. They broke up into four groups of four people and I had to teach 4 times. I was supposed to give a 10 minute discussion, 10 minute role play as example, then have everyone else give a 10 minute role play. I ended up giving a 15-20 min discussion, oops, but it was really good. I talked about the Doctrines of Christ or the missionary purpose. "To invite others unto Christ by first faith in Jesus Christ through the atonement, repentance, baptism, receiving the Holy Ghost, and enduring to the end. I used an analogy of a dirty dish. It takes faith to put the dirty dish in soap, and we must repent to get rid of the grime and dirt of the dish by washing it. Then after we repent we take the dish out but still have bubbles, so we get baptized, by dipping the dish in the water to get rid of the soap. Then we have the Holy Ghost as a towel to envelop the dish to dry it off.  Then another analogy  of a game. If we want to play through out a foot ball game we must condition ourselves by repenting, keep washing the dish every time we use it. We must go through the cycle of repentance and renewing our covenants from baptism by taking the sacrament. When we condition ourselves we can be ready for playing the whole game on the field. The Holy Ghost guides us, so it is the boundary on the field, we want to stay in and not go out of bound. But if we don't condition ourselves, we get tired and sit on the sideline, outside the line, and if we stay there it is harder for us to get back. I feel like I could explain it better if I actually said the analogy, oh well. So I had to teach that 4 times. I also taught out of 2 Nephi 31.

This has been a good week and I love Elder Bishop, he is a very hard worker and is amazing. Hope you have a great week.

Elder Ashcroft