Leadership Training

Wow! This week was so busy I didn't know how to handle the stress. It'll be nice to calm down a bit even though we have 3 exchanges to go on this week. EEK! Our leadership training this week focused all on Preach my gospel and the new teaching methods. The whole point of preach my gospel was to get missionaries to stop following the lessons so exact. The church did a follow-up in 2009 to see what has happened since 2004 and they were not happy with the results. Therefore we have a new training method. Starting in May 2011 the MTC will no longer be teaching missionaries the lessons from Preach my gospel. Instead they will be training on 8 specefic points from preach my gospel such as prayer, church attendence, the doctrine of christ, revelation thru the BOM, and so on. One of the main points they trained us on was teach people not lessons. The training was awesome and it consisted of a lot of MTC lifestyle. Sit, eat, sit and role play. Evaluate and role play some more. haha

It was a lot of fun to socialize with other missionaries as well. This week we have zone leader council again with the mission president and he told Elder Scott and I he'd be making some pretty specefic changes to the individual zones as far as scheduling goes. He actually went out with us for three hours on Saturday night and he brought his two kids Allie and Levi who are 10 and 13. It was a blast and it's still weird to see kids running around our mission president and hearing "DAD!" all the time. It's a lot more fun I must admit.

This blog will have to be short this week due to only 30 min of E-mail time. Hopefully next transfer wont be as busy because I think the stress is causing me to lose weight. yeah... I can't do that. Thanks for all the birthday wishes! I much enjoyed them. Hopefually I'll find time to write letters but I'm not making any promises. I love you all

Elder Bottema