Sister Kirsten Leslie: Slidin' Into Home Plate!

Okay, not literally. That comes at the end of our lives on this earth. But! This week was quite fun. :) Very crazy, and a lot of adventures, just like all the others.

First off, we had Zone Conference this week, and it was AMAZING!! There was a LOT of stuff to do in order to prepare for everything, especially our training that the Zone Leaders and I did. I don't want to try and explain it to you, but parents, today I will buy a 16 gig flash drive and put a whole bunch of stuff on it, because we ended up recording a part of our training, so you could watch the Zone Leaders and I in action! So I will get on that. So for the first couple days this week, we didn't get a whole night of sleep because we were so busy preparing for Zone Conference. Wednesday night, he night before ZC, we didn't leave the Church until 10:15pm!! But such is the life of Zone Leadership I guess. But during Zone Conference, we NAILED it! And it was awesome! I was SO terrified the whole week preceding it, but it was so worth it and so awesome. We were able to be vessels for the Spirit in order to help our zone see the vision of how when we don't have faith in Jesus Christ, we are holding our investigators back from fulfilling their full potential. So, it was awesome. I really enjoyed it a lot. And it made me feel very happy that President and Sister Anderson were very impressed and loved it as well. I would count that as a great thing!

Also that day, Sister Woodbury and I went to go teach Jessica with Sister Anderson! It was so fun to go teaching with her! I have always wanted to! And it came true! Yay! Jessica was so cute, she went a bought a pie for the occasion that the 4 of us had a slice of after the lesson. :) Jessica really loved Sister Anderson (because who couldn't?), so that was neat. We taught about the Law of Chastity, and Jessica is pretty much already living it, which is awesome. The more I speak with her and stuff, the more I see her as a "dry Mormon"--one who is living all the standards of a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints without actually being a member. She continues to LOVE learning about the Gospel and to progress towards baptism. :)

We went on exchanges the night right after Zone Conference finished, and now I am starting to think that was not very smart. BUT! It was great! I went with Sister Mower, a brand new missionary (just hit her 1 month mark!), and I felt kinda bad because I crashed into bed as I was EXHAUSTED. But it was a really fun exchange! We got to do some service raking up dog poop (she has 6 dogs, 2 of which are Great Danes) and I was falling asleep doing that! Now THAT takes some talent!! We also got to teach a lesson to a 10 year old investigator, which is always fun, and have a dinner appointment. We walked to all these things, so it was nice to get out in the sunshine and all. It actually has cooled down in the last few days, and currently as we are here in the library, the Zone Leaders (Elder Parrish and Elder Edwards) are wearing jackets. Haha. But it kinda feels good. It's just worrying us a bit that it's going to be an awful winter. So I guess we will see. It can't be worse than Minot!!

Sister Boudreaux went home on Saturday. :( The Zone Leaders, Sister Woodbury and I, and her companion Sister Bentley were there with her. She has to have her gall bladder removed, so our prayers go with her. It was SO weird being in an airport again! I haven't been in one since I left on my mission. It definitely did NOT feel like my time to go. So I am here still. :) But it was nice to be there with her. The next adventure that we're on is that Sister Bentley will be with Sister Woodbury and I until next transfer, which is next week. She'll get her new companion either on Monday or Wednesday of next week. But it's fun to be with her, she's a great missionary! She came out with Sister Burt, so her time is soon coming to an end. So it's fun to pick her brain a little bit.

This week, we went back for a return appointment with an investigators family, the Soler's. The dad let us in to tell us that the Book of Mormon has a lot of historical inconsistencies in it that invalidated it. His concern was that Nephi talks about how there were bees and horses when they get to the promised land, but records show that the Europeans introduced these things much later in the history of the world. Well, THAT threw me off! He also went into how a restoration is when you let your right brain take over your left brain and the Spirit makes it manifest to you or something. He goes to the church where they have Anti-Mormon classes. I felt like he was just regurgitating whatever his pastor had told him to tell us. But because the gospel is perfect, we found the answer to his concern just after we left. In the Book of Ether, chapter 2 verse 2, it talks about how the people of Jared brought bees with them to the Americas. In Ether chapter 4, verse 6, it tells us that they brought all sorts of beasts over with them, meaning horses. So we are going to go back over there are explain how the Book of Mormon is not written in chronological order, the Jaredites brought over honeybees and horses in like 3,000 BC. Nephi and his family got there in 600 BC. So, the moral: read the Book of Mormon, all of it, before jumping to weird conclusions!! And the Restoration has nothing to do with the sides of your brain, it's about how Jesus Christ, through the Prophet Joseph Smith, brought again to the earth the fullness of His gospel and Priesthood authority. :) If anything, this experience made me realize how much the adversary is trying to prove the Book of Mormon wrong. he knows it is the evidence that this is Christ's Church, and he wants to discredit it. But he will NEVER be able to do that because THIS is Christ's TRUE Church!

But enough about that.

Brother and Sister Kler, the Winterton's, the Watson's, and the Mackenzie's all continue to be well and to progress!

I love you all! Thanks for everything!

sister leslie.