Elder Holland!! (5/31)

Hello Family! This week has been crazy busy with Meetings and such! On Wednesday we had MTE's president Schmitt gave us some awesome training and then I went with Elder Taylor to his area in Poway. Elder Taylor is still in training but he lives in an apartment with another set of missionaries and one of the other missionaries that loves there is Elder Callahan! It was good to see him again and he seems like he is doing pretty well. He has been out for close to a year now and he has been on a bike pretty much the whole time! Every time I see him he never fails to remind me that he is still on a bike haha XD!

Elder Taylor and I had a pretty good day though! We met with one  of there investigators that has been kinda flakey about setting a baptismal date. One thing I love about going on exchanges is that you can be as bold as you want with people because they will only see you one time. So i was a little bold with her and it worked and she accepted a baptismal date! Later that night we stopped by a less actives house and Elder Taylor was like so this Ryan Reynolds. And I was like oh ok and then it kinda clicked in my head and I was like wait like Ryan Reynolds the actor? And he was like yeah that's him. At first I thought he was lying but I guess he is an inactive member. We knocked on his door though and his wife had a bad day or something because she didn't even open the door she just told us how's not a good time. So I knocked on Ryan Reynolds door but never met himHaha.

Thursday we MTE follow ups and we shared the miracles that happened in all the areas and then President gave more training and then right afterwards some other elders in the zone had some baptisms and they asked us to teach during the intermission so that was cool.

Friday we had a mission Conference with Elder Holland!! It was pretty awesome! We didn't get chastised! He started off the meeting by shaking all of our hands and after he shook our hands he thanked us for letting him have a personal interview with each of us. He told us that as he shook our hands he looked into our eyes to see what kind of missionaries we were. It was pretty awesome! I'll put more notes from the meeting at the end of my email. Elder Holland was actually really funny. He told us that he wanted to do a question and answer segment and he turned and asked our mission president if that was ok and President Schmitt kind of shrugged his shoulders and Elder Holland said " Well I guess I can do whatever I want unless someone more senior then me walks in" it was pretty funny. He told us that he has the reputation to go kind of ballistic in some meetings but he said he didn't feel like he needed to talk about obedience or anything so that was nice haha. Elder Hollands final words while leaving the chapel were "Work hard". It was so awesome to be with an Apostle, as a mission we did everything we could to be sanctified and ready for him. We wanted him to be able to feel the spirit by just being with us that day.

Sunday I spoke in one of our wards. They had a youth speaker cancel so I got to be the youth speaker which was awesome haha. I talked about how we can recognize and reject false teachings? Or something like that.

Well I think that's it for this week! This Friday we have another Mission Tour this time with Elder Hamula from the First Quorum of the 70 sot hat will be exciting!

Elder Holland Notes:

• “Joyful but serious” – that’s a good combination in missionary work.
•  “All service in the Church is lateral. It is not vertical. God loves the Nursery worker just as much as He loves President Monson"
• "I want you to love every minute of your mission; to cherish your mission."
• “This is your apostolic moment.” You are “little a” apostles. You are doing work as close to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and First Presidency as you will ever have."
• “The most important thing in the universe is the salvation of a human soul.”
• “Obedience is the first law of everything. Agency exercised in the act of obedience.”
• “You do it God’s way.” and say “Lord, I accept and do it your way.”
• "When you are obedient, that leads to the Holy Spirit. This is the way you work miracles."
• “You are obedient all the time, with exactness, to the extent you can be.”
• "I cannot promise you any number of other converts, but I promise and demand at least one convert – yourself. You are the most important convert."
• “You are to go home and be faithful to this (Gospel/Church) for the rest of your life.”
• “You can never go back to what you were before!”
• “You are God’s investigators and He is teaching you lessons.”
• “There is no going back!”
• “Let’s be persistent.”
• "We need to get the lessons and doctrine from the head to the heart."
• "We want you to have this in your soul!"
• "People do not know how much you care until they know how much you love."
• "I want you to love the Book of Mormon!"
• "Work hard. Love every minute of it."

Love you all!

Elder LaRochelle