March 11th, 2019 Letter #70

The conferences were really good, I feel like my faith was greatly strengthened and that I truly benenfited a lot from what was discussed this week. My favorite part of the 4 zone conference was being able to talk more about how important it is to find new investigators and how we can do it. We talked about several other subjects as well, but the 4 outstanding subjects were brought back in the leadership counsel. The missionaries ourselves basically chose the topics of the entire meeting, Elder Valenzuela just guided us to make our own conclusions. The 4 topics that we as missionaries chose to discuss were 1. High Expectations 2. Attitude 3. The Prominence of Baptism in the Doctrine of Christ 4. Love. We were split into groups and asked to give presentations on the subjects. I was half chosen-half volunteered to give the presentation on Attitude. 

I didn't see any of the people that were in the accident in Vega because they live in another town outside of Vega. We do service projects every once in a while, but it's not as habitual as it perhaps should be. The planning is typically done by the missionaries from the area of the project and the zone leaders. 

We had very little time to teach in the week, but we ended up having a good number of people come to church so I'm alright with that. We weren't able to have the confirmation due to the Stake conference, but we'll have it next week. Stake conference was good. We have a new Stake President and one of his counselors was my Branch President in Vega. We ourselves weren't involved in much. 

In Mexico they used to do the time switch, but the new government just barely changed that so we didn't switch this time. 

One tender mercy was that even though we had very limited time to work, we were able to see positive results in our area. Something that made me smile was that when we went to Poza Rica we got to stay the night with some other missionaries. The lucky two happened to both be former companions of mine, Elder Shoemaker and Elder Castillo. It was fun to see them again and chat a little bit. The best part of the week was being able to have a meeting of relatively few people with the Area President, Elder Valenzuela. It really gave an extra boost to my testimony about the sacred mantle of a General Authority.

Love you,

Elder Finlinson

This is a picture from his previous area.