The Voice of Saruman

A lot of stuff has happened in the past two weeks, hasn’t there?! We had the passing of of our beloved Prophet, President Nelson, General Conference, I had Zone Conference, and many more stuff!

So, General Conference. It was some busy days for me and Elder Witbeck. We helped a member move in for the Saturday Morning session, we had lunch with the second councilor for the Saturday Afternoon session, and we watched the Saturday evening session with Mama Pat. For Sunday we watched both sessions at the Branch President’s house and had some lessons in between sessions.

Most every missionaries’ favorite talks in this mission were “The Eternal Gift of Testimony” by Kevin G. Brown and “The Good News Recipe” by John D. Amos for a variety of reasons. Elder Amos mentioned that he was from Opelousas which is less than an hour away from where we live in New Iberia and is in my mission. The coolest thing is that he was the last mission president of my mission. One of my favorite parts from Elder Brown’s talk was that he mentioned that a testimony is not temporary. When we have our experiences with God they are added to our testimony and those experiences will always be with us.

The day before Zone Conference me and Elder Witbeck had the opportunity to go through the temple! It was a wonderful experience and it prepared us spiritually for Zone Conference as well.

Zone Conference was awesome, I got to see some familiar faces and catch up a little bit. we had a bunch of good presentations and some missionaries gave their gospel home testimonies to and by the end of it a lot of people were tearing up. The spirit was felt strongly in the chapel that day.

A funny experience from the past week was at the Gumbo festival where as we walked down Main Street to get there at the first stall that we see someone waves us down so we walk over and find out that they are members from Shreveport which is four hours away and one of two places in Louisiana that we don’t cover in my mission. (the other is Lake Charles) They gave us some good Gumbo.

One other thing I did that I thought was funny was that I built a fence by ziptieing it to another fence. It was interesting but it was to make sure that the member’s dogs didn’t go through the fence.

I’ll end with probably my favorite quote from conference from B. Corey Cuvelier. “You can count the number of seeds from one apple, but you can not count the number of apples from one seed.” This quote struck me because you can count how much service you do, the number of times you smile at people, and how often you talk about church. But you can never count the number of lives you change by just being a disciple of Christ. You are literally life-changing.

Here is the link to all my GooglePhotos: https://photos.app.goo.gl/UgjtCpwxCiYakMVX8