9/4/2012

Whew! What an interesting week!! Full of exchanges, interviews, and
crazy P-Day activities lol!

I guess I will start where I left off last week. First, that Monday,
we went to the Capital building...It was amazing! We accidentally walked
into 2 different tours, so we just hopped in with them...It was very
interesting. We got an opportunity to see the House Lounge, as well as
the place where the House meet together and vote on certain things. It
was pretty cool. I took a lot of pictures, but as you know...that
pretty much means nothing until I can get to a computer that is
capable of uploading those up. We may try to use the Centralia library
next week...supposedly they have better computers, but it's about 20
miles out of our way to get there, so we just have to work out there
afterword :)

After the capitol, we went to lunch at a place called Zenos. It used
to be Quiznos, but the owner(who is a member) took down the Qui and
added an Z, E, and you can still see the old Quiznos markers on the sign.
It's pretty funny.

We then went to this awesome Ice Cream place, called Central Dairy.
They only take cash their, but the ice cream is really good. After we
went to some pawn shops and Goodwill...It actually was a lot of fun to
go shopping again lol

After we left, I took Elder Miles with me on Tuesday and Elder Payne
with me on Wednesday, and we had a lot of fun. They are both great
missionaries and I learned a lot from both of them when they were
here...hopefully they can say the same :)

On Thursday, I had interviews with President Clark. We talked about
the areas a bit...Mostly we talked about Mexico(Missouri...wouldn't
that be weird if we were talking about the actual Mexico lol). He has
a lot of confidence on me, so I hope I'm doing a good job. This week
has proven to be very rough, seeing any real success, but we are
slowly handling bigger challenges everyday, and I do think that with
some help from the ward, we can start to see some great progress here.

Friday, Hurricane Issac hit...My destroyed planner and sopping wet
shoes will attest that it was a nice storm, even this far inland. We
had rain jackets on but there was so much water that it dripped
through the rain jackets and we ended up coming back home completely
soaked. I haven't heard about how Louisiana is holding up post-storm,
but I heard they were out of power for a while. The storm wasn't
enough to do that here in Missouri, but we sure got a good taste of
what the storm was like.

Anyway, it's been raining on and off since, which I think means that
the prayers for more rain here, have been answered :)

Yesterday was Zone P-Day. We started it off with glow-in-the-dark
volleyball, which was way cool! It has been a really long time since
I've played volleyball(MTC I think) and I miss it. If there is any
sport that I can claim I'm any good at, it's volleyball, and I proved
that yesterday ;) We also played indoor soccer. It was fun...I don't
remember why I didn't like it much in High School, but I enjoyed it a
lot yesterday.

We then had DLZL Counsel. All the District Leaders in the Zone and the
Zone Leaders got together and talked about how we can be better
District Leaders, and I really feel like it helped a lot. It's felt
like I've been taking swings in the dark on how to be a District
Leader, but we really came to a very obvious but clear indication on
how I should be upholding the calling, and what changes I can observe
and make to be a better leader and servant to those I serve. It just
gave me a whole lot of perspective, so I hope to be able to spend time
looking at that and revising my decisions.

I guess lastly, we did teach some pretty interesting lessons this
week. We extended a baptismal invitation to Rosaline on Tuesday, which
she asked for time to pray about it; we also taught Chad, and learned
a little bit more about why he's stuck where he's at. Also, Helen has
been solidly attending church every week and has home-teachers and
visiting teachers; the members have gone out of their way to help here
with her current situation, and I think she has confidently found a
new family. :)

Anyway, we are going to really make some big efforts to find new
investigators. President wants us to do door knocking, 3 hours a day.
It's going to difficult, but hopefully we will start sifting to those
who are prepared to hear our message.

I Love you all! Have a wonderful week this week! :D
Elder Tyler Robinson