Transfer 11, Week 2 .... October 13, 2014

Dear Family,

This week blazed by. I love being a missionary. I've never felt so in the swing of missionary work as I do now. I realize that now is that great middle period of my mission. Always work like its the middle.

We went to Lyon on Monday and had Leadership council on Tuesday. It was probably my favorite leadership council thus far in my mission. Really great spirit, and I left feeling very motivated and excited to go to work. We really are trying to push the vision of teamwork in our mission. That the entire mission is a team, and that we succeed or fall short together, and that miracles will come to the mission if we ALL have more integrity in our work and do our best to be Preach my Gospel missionaries. Its an interesting concept, that feels right to me.

The week after we got back was hectic. We planned and prepared our zone training on Wednesday and then held it on Thursday. It went quite well. We created a zone Title of Baptistry (play off of Title of Liberty) and discussed the principle of Power in Unity. We finished by making sure that everyone in the zone received a priesthood blessing. Once again, there was a great spirit of commitment and desire present. Now it will be essential to follow up. After Zone training on Thursday we had an exchange with the assistants, I was with Elder Beyer, who I've been great buds with for a while now. We taught two lessons back to back. Then had dinner together with my comp and Elder Elvidge. Its always fun to be with them.

Friday morning I conducted the baptismal interview for a lady named Eliane who was gladly baptized later that same day. She has a wonderful testimony and it was an interesting and edifying experience to do the interview with her. The baptism went well, even though there was a lot of stress over it because it was put together so quickly and everything seemed rushed.

Saturday was crazy. We spent an hour at a family's home that we had met on the road a week ago. The husband, Francois wanted help with his english and we offered to come over. He is so nice. They had us over to there home and we spent an hour getting to him and his wife and their two kids. Super stereotypical french family. Incredibly kind. He is kind of catholic and she doesn't believe in God. But she really warmed up to us at the end of the visit. In the car ride back he started asking us questions about why we don't drink tea and coffee. We suggested to explain why we don't do so the next time and he gladly accepted. Exciting!

Then Saturday afternoon we were knocking doors in a tall apartment building and we taught a young Japanese man at his door step for about 30 minutes about who God is and how to pray, it was quite an interesting experience, and a fun miracle lesson! He said he'd be happy to see us again but he is moving soon.

Then Saturday evening we taught our ami Sevane who loved general conference so much that he sent links to elder christofferson's, robbins, and Uchtdorf's talks to a friend of his. We had a very spiritual rdv where he expressed a lot of desire to be baptized and showed a lot of progression. It was fun to see.

I'm excited for this week to come. We'll finally have some time to work a lot in our own secteur. We have tons of new possibilities opening up to us which is such a blessing as certain people begin to slow down in their interest level.

This morning in personal study I read this from 1 Nephi 17:40, "He loveth those who will have him to be their God." It struck me how happy God is when we decide to give Him the importance He deserves in our lives. Sort of how Fr. Robbins said it, who do we face? What do we love the most? How much God loves us, and how much more favored we do what is right. This led to another reoccurring thought that I've been having this week. Righteous action conquers guilt and discouragement. Thats really what faith is, if we have faith it pushes us to act. And Righteous action is the final sealing step of the repentance process. As PMG says it in Ch. 11, Genuine repentance is best demonstrated by righteous action over a period of time.

Lets all change a little bit this week!

I love you so much!

Elder Montgomery