What a spiritual feast this week has been! President Callister was here this week and we had the opportunity to hear from him on Thursday at Zone Conference and again on Friday at Zone Leader Council. AND I got to have an interview with him after Zone Conference. President Callister is a very smart man, and he definitely carries the spirit with him on a full-time basis. When he walked into the room on Thursday it was just like, we were 100% separated from the world, it was a great feeling. I remember driving home from it as well thinking it was weird to be back in the world with people all around us that sin and don't have the gospel in their lives. It was kind of the same feeling I had driving from the MTC to the airport. It's just like.. "wow, there's actually a world out there, I just thought everybody felt the spirit this strongly all the time" It was pretty crazy. President Callister talked about some really good stuff in both of those meetings. In Zone conference he spoke on more general subjects such as how to become a consecrated missionary, how to have a celestial planning/celestial day, how to build/develop faith in us and our investigators, and how we can better understand/learn the doctrine. In ZLC he spoke more about how to be a better leader and things like that. It was more training than a council this one, but I was OK with that, that was exactly what I needed. He taught us the role of a zone leader, shared some good scriptures having to do with that. D&C 93:43,44,50 say we must set in order our own lives before we can help others, so in other words we must be good examples in obedience. He spoke about how to be better problem solvers and that was probably my favourite part of the whole training. He compared mission rules to the Mosaic Law and mission principles to Christ's Law. So we must teach people the principle behind the rules if we want them to understand why we have the rules, or commandments. He said if missionaries could live off of principles alone, the white handbook would only have to be about 5 pages long, but we can't, so we have rules. Our responsibility as leaders is to teach principles, not tell people the rules. President Callister actually said something really interesting that the Lord won't help us when we can help ourselves. So for example, if we're having heaps of headaches or something, we can't pray to have our headaches taken away if we're not getting up on time, not eating healthy, etc. We can only ask for the Lord's help when we know we've done all that we can do to solve the problem ourselves.
In my interview with him he asked pretty simple questions such as, what is the most important thing you've learned on your mission so far, what are you going to do to be a great zone leader, do you stick to the morning schedule, etc. But we had a pretty good long chat. Just getting to talk to a General Authority one on one like that was a great privilege. And the last thing he said to me was that he could feel a great amount of the spirit in me, such a compliment coming from a Gen. Auth. Oh that's another thing he told us, which I kind of already knew, that being a Zone Leader or any kind of leader in the church isn't a privilege, it's a sacred trust. The Lord trusts us to do the best things that we can for those that we lead.
So the rest of my week doesn't even really compare to those two days in awesomeness, but I'll tell you about it anyways haha. Friday and Saturday were good. On Friday after ZLC we went to the Shelley area to do a blitz with them, just tracted with them for about 90 minutes. So that was good. Then we got to go city contacting. City contacting is still one of my weaknesses I feel, but I definitely want to turn that weakness into a strength before the end of my mission. It's just really daunting walking into the city centre being surrounded by hundreds of people that are all in a hurry. But once you get into it, it's not too bad.
Really there isn't too much else to speak about this week other than Elder Callister's visit. No real progressing investigators at the moment which is a bummer. The two that are the closest to progressing didn't come to church yesterday which was a bummer. Just need to keep trying though.
Until next week, sorry for the short email. I hope you all have a great week and I'll talk to you all soon [as you write/email me]. haha.
Love you all!
elder Tanner
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