Smiling Faces, Beautiful Places: Week 60 - Latta, SC

Hello Family and Friends! Happy Tuesday! I'm always Feeling Good when I get to email on Tuesdays, although it completely throws off my week! I hope everyone had a good Labor Day though :) I know I sure did! We didn't do anything too eventful but I did get to take a nap! Pretty exciting day, huh?

This week has been amazing! We had a ton of members come out with us this week and it has really made all the difference in our missionary work! One of the families that we're working with completely opened up after we brought members to the past two lessons! I think since I've been in a branch and haven't had a ton of members available to come out with us, I've forgotten how big of a difference that members can truly make... it's amazing!

So we had some big news this week! We had Zone Conference and President Turner proposed an idea to us - he wanted to lower our annual goal for baptisms and confirmations from 1000 to 720! He said that in the past two years, we have baptized around 600 people so he thought that we could make our goal a little more realistic for us to hit. He showed us the numbers of how we could reach our new goal of 60 baptisms a month and it all made sense! It was actually relieving to me for our goal to be lowered. It suddenly became more attainable for us to hit that and it's helped us as missionaries a ton! We're super excited to be goal setters and goal hitters!

Sister Parker and I had a lot of teaching opportunities this week! We were asked to help teach seminary (but none of the kids came, unfortunately...), do a training in Zone Conference, and teach the Restoration with the Elders for a member fireside! It's been a little bit stressful but a great experience! I actually haven't had to give a training in Zone Conference or Zone Training Meetings (ZTM) since my very first ZTM so that was exciting to do! It was also just a 4 minute training on Teach People, Not Lessons. It went really well! We were proud of ourselves!

Then our fireside on Sunday was great! During church, President Cabaniss told us that he was thinking about cancelling the fireside because no one was coming. We told him that Brother Josh was planning on coming so he decided not to cancel it. Well, that afternoon, we were preparing to have a discussion with Brother J, but then we got to the building and we ended up having about 15 people there! It was amazing! The turnout was great so we were really happy with that!

Well that's about it for this week! It's been a good one! And guess what? I survived July and August! Although everyone says those are the hottest months, it's still in the 90’s plus the humidity this week... Just keep me in your prayers ;) I love y'all! I hope you have a blessed week!

- Sister Amy Christensen