Dear Family and Friends,
Every Tuesday we teach Gospel Discussions and afterward, Sister Neeley, who plays the piano beautifully and is practicing to play for the Christmas program, and Edvinis in the branch, who is kind of putting it together, get to meet to practice and figure out the arrangements of things. He actually plays the accordion and brings it to see if he can play it for the program. He is pretty good and it sounds really cool, the accordion is actually a really neat instrument.
We had a Zone Conference and it was with Elder and Sister Klebingat. He felt impressed to talk about Joseph Smith, in the beginning he had a really long and neat powerpoint put together, he didn't go through everything, he said he may stay on some slides longer than others if he felt impressed. He told us that we as a church do not talk enough about the Restoration. Elder Klebingat loves that people have doctrinal questions that need answered because questions lead to answers that we can find and pray for, then we grow. He is always talking about how important they are. Like Joseph Smith had a question, it is okay to have questions because you can make your questions into stepping stones that help your testimony grow, and Heavenly Father will answer if you ask a humble question. "If you can't endure persecution, you can't endure the Celestial Kingdom." Right now our testimonies need to be solid in a living prophet and in the Restoration, otherwise we will falter with all of the persecution that will be coming. Sister Klebingat talked about prayer and how to receive spiritual revelation. She talked about how we all need the gift of prophecy and that gift is how we receive personal revelation. I had never really thought the gift of prophecy as something we could have, but she said of course it is within our own spheres, not for the whole church, like the Prophet. She talked about how we must work for it and it is not going to just fall into our laps. Whenever it talks about people needing answers in the scriptures they have to wrestle with the Lord. Prayers should be a dialogue, it is important that the Holy Ghost will lead our prayers, as we pray by the Holy Ghost he will tell us exactly what to say to receive an answer, we just have to listen. There was a lot more, it was a wonderful Zone Conference.
We had dinner at the Salmon's and we were able to share with them what we learned from Zone Conference, it was really neat, they were able to share with us some things from their missions, it is interesting to compare. Sister Salmon served in Germany and Brother Salmon served in the Philippines. Sister Salmon understands more how our missionary work goes here since hers was similar.
We had an activity for the Relief Society the other week where we made a food called Kibinine, which is just basically a pie crust wrapped around some kind of meat. We made these ones with ground pork. They were delicious and we are going to teach the Salmon's how to make them on Friday.
Love,
Sister Brown
First snow of the season!
