It Feels As Though This Is The Time When The Lord Is Pouring Out So Many Blessings...

Marshall's response to my question, "Can you tell us what your responsibilities are?":

Yes mom I am a zone leader. I have actually been one since the beginning of April. It is super awesome. I feel like I have 22 children that are running around the twin cities all the time and I have to clean up after them but yeah it is a blast. Are responsibilities are :Exchanges with District Leaders, Interviews with struggling missionaries, making zone goals and plans, meetings with stake leaders to discuss the missionary work in the twin cities, collecting reports from the teams weekly, doing training evaluations with new missionaries weekly, accountability calls with district leaders weekly, meeting with President monthly, monthly accountability for the zone, teaching all progressing and date sets within the zone, Leadership conference each month, conducting and planning out zone conference, interviews, and trainings, travel plans for departing missionaries and for transfer day, zone comment sheets that help evaluate missionaries, blitzing areas that are struggling, working out the housing for new sets of missionaries in the zone, and then after all that all you have to do is be a missionary and do all the other work. So it is definitely more than I took on before my mission. Pretty much my responsibilities before included: mow grass, eat food, workout, hangout with friends. So yeah I've grown a bit. But things are awesome and I totally love it. Totally forgot to say this in my other email, but I ate a next to raw bull testicle this last week and almost puked everywhere. Love ya

HIs letter this week:

    It was awesome this week to see that our area has continued to progress after our success last week. It was really neat to see C's family(the family of 7) at church this week. One of the craziest things happened when they came. Their biggest fear the whole time was that when they came, they wouldn't know anybody and might feel left out. But when they got their they found out that they actually had family in the branch and you won't believe who it was... P's family. Turn's out that C is actually P's nephew and they haven't seen each other for around 10 years. It was one of the coolest miracles. I think the Lord has been holding off on P's baptism just so that her and her kids with this other family could go through the process together. Also Sunday after church we went to teach P and her kids about replacing our fears with faith. Right at the end of the lesson her husband walks into the room and sees us. Elder Hardy and I jump out of our chairs and pretty much sprinted over to him (I have been waiting to meet this guy for like 7 months) and started getting to know him. We set a time for us to come back and talk to him about his wife's baptism. He seemed ok with it and so it looks like finally in the next few weeks, P and her kids should enter the waters of baptism, and then in about the next 6 weeks, C and his family should as well. I have been praying so hard for the Lord to help me have the ambition and ability to find, teach, and baptize a family and it looks like He is answering mine and Elder Hardy's prayers.

     It feels as though this is the time when the Lord is pouring out so many blessings that there is not room enough to receive them. It is hard sometimes as I see other missionaries that are really struggling, especially the new ones, and they think that it never gets better. There are definitely struggles in the mission field but I have also seen that the Lord makes it so much more than fair as long as you just keep trying your best to do what's right.

     Had one of the strangest miracles on my mission yesterday at church as well. One of the families brought a young man that I have seen a few times and we went up to talk to him after sacrament and he introduced himself to us. After a few minutes of talking we found out that he is a former investigator that was taught by the missionaries about two years ago but wasn't allowed to get baptized because of his parents. It turns out he has just been waiting for the missionaries to come back and see him so that he can take the lessons. SO AWESOME. The Lord really is preparing these people and has given so much to Elder Hardy and I these last couple weeks. Anyways love y'all and hope that things are well.