New Companion and a challenge...

Hope everyone had a fantastic Easter yesterday!

I have a new companion - Elder De Leon. He is from the Phillipines (city of Daet) and is really fluent in Tagalog. So we now do English language study. Elder De Leon is getting a pretty big learning curve. His first day, he was already on splits, and invited a mother of a less-active/part-member family to be baptized. It was awesome!! He's definitely having to learn a ton of English a lot faster than he'd planned, but we just keep moving day to day, and many nights are filled with planning, then pulling out a notebook, and going over words and phrases he heard that day, or read in study that he doesn't understand. But, we're both learning how to do this together, so.. we'll just keep trucking along. :D

Me and Elder De Leon

So, this past week has been incredibly busy! With training, lots of changes to our area, both the local congregations and the missionary boundaries, we've been learning a lot (for me, again) together, and just learning about how to work more efficiently with the members. Oi. It's awesome! :D

One of the things we've been doing in the correlation meetings, along with using progress records more and more, was to really focus on giving assignments to people, and holding them accountable the next week. The current assignment for everyone is to find 3 focus families, and see what their status is, why they are being considered a focus family, etc. Many ward mission leaders said that they had 10+ names already thought about. We basically told them to only have three to come back and tell us about. It was fascinating, because as I thought and prayed about it, a lot more of the things President McCune has said about the changing of the standards of excellence made more and more sense. It isn't that the expectations were lowered at all. Instead, (and this is my opinion and what I got out of it) it is helping us achieve more and more, because we can easily reach the lowered standards, and then we'll just keep raising them up. I feel the same principle would help and would work in Eagle Mountain as well. I think many times, the ward mission leaders are just overwhelmed with what they feel they need to be doing. So, we really wanted to start small, and then just help them work their way up.

I'd like to invite everyone to do the same that we're having the ward mission leaders do here. I invite everyone to find 1 focus family, a family you may or may not already know, and to befriend them. Just befriend. :D It shouldn't be that hard. I'd like for everyone who reads this to do that, then send me an email about their experience. (My email address is over to the right...)

I love y'all! Please fulfill the challenge!

Love, 

Elder Conrad Hamilton

Keep Smiling!