December 11, 2010

Dear Family,
This week was crazy!!! We have been so busy ha ha :) On Tuesday we had ZL Council all day long. It went really well. We were able to come up with a lot of good ideas for some Open Houses that we are going to have next month. The Spirit was guiding that conversation. On Wednesday and Thursday we had specialized trainings for 6 different zones. For part of the training we go to a huge park here and start talking with everyone. My companion and I split up with other missionaries to help them apply what we had just taught them. It has gone really well with all of them. It´s weird to me how surprised they are to see us having a conversation with someone instead of coming up and saying, "Hello, we´re missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and we´re here to share about how the Gospel was restored to the Earth again. When can we come and share this message with you?" every single time. The theme that we decided to talk about was truly inspired because so many missionaries are shocked about what we teach even though we have taught it before and it´s in Preach My Gospel. It´s just like President has said, repetition is the key.
On Friday we had a meeting with a comittee that President formed during ZL Council. President wasn´t there. He asked us to run it and solve the problem and that we´ll all present it to him in a week. The problem is that when we set baptismal goals we set them for 2-6 weeks in the future. We have the norm of baptizing every week so planning 6 weeks in the future is almost pointless. Also, the missionaries are still focusing on baptizing every month instead of every week. In the comittee we came to the conclusion that we will set baptismal goals every other Thursday during weekly planning session. On those days we will set goals for the next 3 weeks. We will implement this new process and retrain everyone on the purpose of setting goals with names. We need to retake the right vision on this. The meeting was amazing. It was literally a council where everyone was commenting, bringing up doubts, sharing ideas, etc. The Spirit was guiding our conversation in that meeting too. It was an amazing experience.
So, this week we had an amazing p-day activity. Today was the last p-day for my companion, Elder Morales, and for Elder Duarte. We decided to go to the highest active volcano in Ecuador, it´s called Cotopaxi. I´ve sent tons of pictures of this volcano to you already because you can see it on a clear day from my old sector (I attached an old picture in this e-mail too). I never thought that I would touch snow while I was a missionary :) We had a lot of fun. The van that we took up didn´t have 4 wheel drive so it took us a while to get up. Today the snow was lower than any other day that our guide had ever seen. When we got to the highest point that we could in the van we had already been in snow for a long time. We made a snowman and had a snowball fight. It was way fun. We were all freezing our butts off because we didn´t have anything that could keep us really warm, but it was still so fun. I´ve wanted to visit Cotopaxi since the day that I saw it. We finally went!!!!!!
Well I love you all. Thank you so much for all that you do. I hope that everyone has a very merry Christmas. Always remember the true meaning of this time of year, Christ was born to bring us all back into the presence of God!!!



Love,
Élder Hakes