Mission Tour

Elder Olsen and his wife Julie came to visit our mission. Elder Olsen is a General Authority Seventy and is in our area presidency.  It was such a good visit.  They are such kind and loving people.  They made us feel so special and appreciated.  It was so good to be with them and visit with them.  We had our multiline conference with them today with the 7 zones near the city. They came to the stake center that the mission office is at on Wednesday morning.  We took a group photo and then started the zone conference.  I had been practicing my talk about charity all week because I was going to give it in Spanish again.  On our drive to the mission office that morning we were listening to General Conference talks, the talk by Elder Gong, and I got the strongest impression that I needed to give a different talk about mission culture.  I was super nervous because I'm not very good about talking without written notes, but it went pretty well.  We had had an incident in the mission this week where missionaries were bullying each other and I really felt prompted to address it.  Kirt talked about mission call letters and patriarchal blessings.  Julie Olsen talked about planning and how important it is to have an invitation, promise blessings and to testify with every lesson we teach.  Elder Olsen talked about how important it is to recognize what we learned, what we felt, and what we are going to do (aprendir, sentir, hacer) with the things that we learned about at zone conference.  It was a really good zone conference.  The spirit was so strong.  We had our meal after the zone conference.  Elder Olsen talked to a few missionaries while we were eating.  Then we had a MLC meeting with the ZL's from the 7 zones and 1 Hermana companionship that are on this side of the mission.  We discussed things that we can implement in the mission based on the things we had learned at the zone conference.  They we got in the car and drove to La Ceiba.  All 4 of the AP's squeezed in the car with us.  It was a fun ride.  They are hilarious and they always have lots of questions.  They are all about finished with their missions so they had lots of questions about careers and dating and marriage.  When we got to La Ceiba all 6 of us (Kirt, me, Elders Dick, Milla, Paredes, and Rivas) had dinner with Elder and Sister Olsen.  We had a very enjoyable evening.  Elder Paredes even asked Elder Olsen to trade ties with him and Elder Olsen graciously did.