Week 10

We had Zone Conference on Friday and Elder Zwick of the 70 and his wife came for that. They are so amazing and I was so inspired by them and just love them to death! He's going to fight for us to go to the Orlando temple at the end of our missions, which I'm so stoked about! Everyone was freaking out when he said that so hopefully he'll get that for us! It was so fun to see so many people from the MTC and meet so many more missionaries! It was the best!

Elder Zwick talked a lot about how inspired Preach My Gospel is and is very involved with the missionary department for the Church so here are some Elder Zwick fun facts of the day:

-As of last Wednesday, there are 81,000 missionaries and 12,000 with calls! What?? He originally told us that there were 93,000 missionaries and we were all freaking out (that escalated quickly) but then said he adds the ones with calls too, but we still be a'growin!

-In May 1995, President Hinckley read Mormon 6 to all the General authorities in their temple meeting and with tears in his eyes told them that they needed to do something more and it was then that he got the inspiration for Preach My Gospel. 

-It took 9 years to write PMG and apparently each one of the 15 of the First Presidency and Quorum of the 12 were desperately needed in that work because not one change was made in those 9 years. Even the oldest of them worked on it and lived to see its publication. The oldest member of the Quorum was Elder Haite (don't know if that's spelled right) and he passed away 2 weeks after PMG was published. He was needed for that work. 

-The only missionary committee of the Church is the Quorum of the 12 Apostles. It's their main priority and to me, that's just saying how important this work is. Pretty dang important. 

But we're still working hard and we just got special permission to have more miles, so we're going to be able to get a lot more done! Elder Zwick held a devotional Friday night for the ward councils that was absolutely amazing! Our ward is insane and we were just praying that our Bishop would come, but the Bishop, and 4 other members of the ward counsel and some of their wives came too! So that was a miracle in itself!

The ward is super not unified, there are three "tribes" as we call it, in the ward and we've been trying so hard to make the Bishop see how much we need to unify everyone. He's finally seeing it and the stake councilman over our ward has been helping us out a ton too. So on Thursday, we were brainstorming and we decided to kill like 3 birds with one stone and have a Proselyting family activity (In Carr language, a cookie night thing) every other week to get the tribes to bond, have them invite their friends to it, and have our investigators meet some of the ward members, just easy fellowshipping. so we're hoping for the best with that. 

We had a youth activity "Bring a hot dog, Bring a friend" on Saturday. We had way too many hot dogs, not a ton of friends brought, and the youth got a lot of "no's" with that. But it was super fun. The youth learned pretty quickly that Sister Carr is a bomb volleyball player and is super hard to scare (...and it's really hard to be sarcastic via email) - quite opposite. I was the main focus of all scaring and attacking for the night, and  it became the running joke during volleyball to yell at me whenever someone messed up. Whatever, I'll take it. And if I get called a "Yank," one more time, I'm going to lose it. Actually, I don't know what I'll do cause i have to be a nice missionary. The South is just a weird place. But, the activity was super fun and we had a couple of less active members of one of the tribes that came out helped and the youth just love us - so success! I absolutely love the leaders and youth of this ward and feel so blessed to get to be apart of the Starke ward.

We had a mission fast yesterday that we invited the ward to do too for more baptisms and for the members to be more involved in the work. And from Friday, the ward's been inspired to be better member missionaries.President Craig is coming in December to speak in the ward and get them moving - so stoked to have him whip them into shape! We are so desperate to have the members fellowship our investigators so they'll feel comfortable coming to church. That's been our biggest challenge. And no one in Keystone has a car, so that's also another major issue with church, but we'll tackle that challenge later. So we'll be seeing miracles with that! Love you all!

Sister Carr