Christmas for Missionaries

The highlight of this week was General Conference! As you can maybe guess from the title of this email, we discovered that General Conference is a lot like Christmas for missionaries, at least here. We get to sing hymns about the prophet during companion study the whole week, we spend the whole day with other missionaries and members (and sometimes investigators!), and we also eat and are spiritually uplifted for most of the day. It's so wonderful! We watch the Saturday morning session on Saturday evening from 6-8, then on Sunday we watch Relief Society or Priesthood in the morning, Saturday evening in the afternoon, and then Sunday morning in the evening. We miss Sunday afternoon, but that's what the Ensign is for. :)

On P-day today we are going to the Dead Sea Scroll exhibit in the Drenths museum with our district.

The weather has been crazy. It was cold last week but warmed up this week. It gets quite chilly with all the humidity, even if it stays dry (which is a huge blessing; it has been dry lately).

Highlights for me from conference: all of the talks! I especially loved the talks from the First Presidency, and of course all the ones about missionary work. Exclamation Point! Also...one of our investigators came to conference! (She was referred by a member who is still very much involved in helping her, which is so exciting to see.) She really enjoyed it and she also told me how much our lesson helped her, and how she's now praying morning and night, which is something that she had never done before.

I learned so many things this week. One of the lessons came originally from district meeting, a quote from Elder Holland from when he was in Apeldoorn as saying "Don't think for an instant that Heavenly Father isn't working with one of His children." I love that becasue it's such a good reminder that we're not in this alone. We're the Lord's servants, not the other way around. It's not that we're here worrying about all these people and the work and everything while the world and all the forces of Satan are combined against us and boy, what a lucky thing it is that we have prayer. Oh no. What it really is is that Heavenly Father and other sources are working very personally and individually with every person on this earth. Some of them are currently refusing help. Some are pushing aside the work done with and for them and are using their agency the way they originally hoped they wouldn't--at least for right now. But some of them are prepared and when we exercise our agency and "wait upon the Lord" and work hard and exercise faith, the Lord grants us the blessed privilege of being a part of HIS work. This principle was confirmed to me in Conference from Pres. Eyring.

I love being here, I love being a missionary, and I love love love the gospel and the Savior and his Atonement. The gospel is true, and I love you all!