25/26 September 2011

Elder Rowe, celebrating a full year in the mission

Dear Family,

It is beautiful outside today! I hope you're jealous.

It's been an interesting week as I've done many new different things as a zone leader. Elder Stratford and I did a fair amount of traveling this week for meetings. We went to Wellington on Thursday for Zone Leader Council, which was pretty neat. I got to see a couple of Elders who I haven't seen for awhile and that was fun. I was able to learn a lot of different things that I never really thought of as being a part of missionary work. I went away from the meeting with a strong and anxious desire to accomplish all I can and make our the Palmerston North Zone the best in the world! Which will soon happen of course.

Then on Friday, Elder Stratford and I drove up to Wanganui with the District Leaders to teach them everything we learned from Zone Leader Council. Then I got more "pumped up" as we "counseled" and discussed what we planned and hoped to do this transfer. The weird thing is, I still don't feel like a zone leader. Even though I've been doing heaps of zone leader things, like meetings and phone calls and such, I still feel like I'm just the zone leader's companion. (But that's not because I'm letting him do all of the work.) Hopefully it will hit me soon enough. I'm going on exchanges to Levin with Elder Kim this week, so that will be awesome to see a few familiar faces.

Zone leader life, however, seems much different than what I'm used to as a missionary. We seem to have to do so many other things than just teaching and finding, and there often seems like we don't have much time for those things. But the Lord is still blessing us in different ways with wonderful people that are put in our path to teach.

We've been teaching a 12-year old kid named Keoni who really wants to get baptized. He's been coming to church by himself for a while now and we've been teaching him and he's getting baptized on the 8th of October. His family all went less active a few years ago, but for whatever reason he's come to church and his mom is really excited for him to get baptized. She'll hopefully be getting active again soon. Keoni's older brother, who is on home detention has been sitting in on the lessons, and of course, he's become interested in the gospel as well. He'll be taking a bit longer to work towards baptism, but it's just been amazing to see the change in his attitude towards the gospel as he has listened and participated in the lessons. I mean, c'mon, how could anyone NOT be interested in getting baptized? Keoni's mom is working on getting her 3 other kids interested in the lessons. I'm sure all they'll need is one lesson with us and they'll want to get baptized. Not because of Elder Stratford and I, but because of the Holy Ghost--the Comforter and Testifier of the truth.

I burned my shirt on Friday night to celebrate my year mark. It was the shirt I brought from home that I wore for too many years and that I never planned on wearing as a missionary, so that worked out fine. I'll try to send a picture, but the USB doesn't seem to be working.

One year doesn't seem right. I feel like I've been out so much longer than that, yet only one year left seems like way too short of a time. It's not enough to accomplish all I want to.

Happy Birthday again Dad. I'm glad it went well.

Gotta go! I love you!

Just remember:

"True happiness comes only by making others happy"---David O. McKay 

Keep doing what is right, and praying day and night! 

Have a wonderful week!

I love you all so very much!

Love,

Elder David John Rowe