Immigration

This week started off with Zone Conference Tuesday. (I said Saturday in my last email, that was wrong) It was great. A lot of food for thought. The big announcement was the Area athourities' expectation for the number of baptisms per month by our mission. 100 per month. Right now we are doing 26, so just a four times increase. When I first heard it I thought it was crazy but President Lyman walked through the numbers and if we can just improve a little bit in a couple of different areas it should be easy! After zone conference we had exchanges with some elders in our district, but since zone conference was for most of the day it ended up being only 4 hour of working with a different missionary. This week I think I have exchanges 3 times so if I missed anything I will learn it this week.

On to what I mentioned in the subject of this email, Immigration. Thursday night me and two other greenies went to the secretaries house, to sleep, so we could get to the mission office early Friday morning to meet everyone else going to immogreation. There were 8 of us immigrating, 6 elders and 2 sisters. We took a one hour car ride to the immogration office which is a more metropolitan part of the city, which is not in our mission. It is the Mexico City West Mission. It supposedly can take 5 hours to do immigration so I was not expecting the most fun day. The experience is best compared to the DMV. A lot of waiting. We first spent a while waiting while our paperwork was checked, they then gave us a sheet of paper which allowed us to go to another office that entered our information, we then were able to go upstairs to wait until we were called to have our picture taken and our green cards printed. In total it was about 3 hours at the office so it could've been much worse. We then returned to the office and had pizza for lunch. 

Sunday we had in-person church for the first time, It was great we invited one of our investigators and he came! The only downside was that they talked a lot about seminary which confused him, so we had to explain it to him after. Also before Sacrament meeting  started one of the sisters pointed out Popocatépetl (a volcano 40 miles east of the city) was erupting. It had a big ash plum coming from it, which was super cool. This was the first time I have seen a volcano eruption in person. (The eruption wasn't dangerous, it has been erupting since 2005 which is confined to the ash plums.)

During Zone conference I found a new Hymn that I had never seen before (there are actually a lot of those) Number 281 "Help me Teach With Inspiration" The words struck me as it is exactly what I want as a missionary, the spirit with me as I teach. Later this week I then read a talk Elder Packer gave "The Candle of the Lord," in it he gave this great insight "that any ordinary member of the church, sustained by the spirit, can do the work of the Lord". I know that when we have the spirit we can teach the gospel, we might not be the best teachers, but the spirit will make up for what we lack and help us teach the message that we need to. I know that it has for me. 

Sincerely,

Elder Neilson 

 pretty volcano (not Popocatépetl) we see on our walk ot the church

PDay breakfast at IHOP