#95 July 2, 2016 Last Zone Conferences

Well this week we finished up the last zone conferences! These last 3 weeks have been really tiring! President said we travelled over 1,500 km's! Every time we got home we would just crash!

This week we went to the Tubarão Zone on Wednesday. Tubarão isn't too far but for some reason that day was super tiring! President was totally falling asleep on the way home and sister was always trying to get him to let her drive but we ended up making it back in one piece! That night Elder Stahn had to call him for some reason and he said President answered the phone and sounded like he was totally out of it! haha we crashed when we got home.

The trips have been super fun! We would always stop to eat at these really cool restuarants on the freeways here. Brazil wins when it comes to restaurants that are at the gas stations. They are super nice here! In fact usually nicer than the ones in the cities. Why? I dont know.

But the trainings have been way fun. We had the Rocky trainings and it was pretty legit because President went out and got a real pair of boxing gloves for us to use! We wanted to have real fights but that probably wouldnt have gone down super well.

Anyways we started off the training with one outside of the chapel dressed up as Rocky and then the other was at the Mic. We made a big presentation with rocky music and parts of the movies to go along with each part of the training.

So the one at the mic would tell everyone that Rocky came to visit us in the mission and then did the whole pre-fight presentation saying the weight and all the things he has accomplished and then introducing him. Then we turn a clip on and the music from "gonna fly now" starts playing and then "rocky" would come running into the chapel and do a whole warm up.

The opponent were a bunch of wrong ideas/lies that are going around the mission right now that President wanted to get rid of. There were five being:

We don't need to invite people to be baptized in the first visit.

It is impossible to find new people to teach every day. 

70 contacts in the week is good enough. 

Here is too difficult to bring people to church. 

We don't need to obey all the rules.

So we would get to each topic in the presentation and talk about it with the missionaries and discuss the dificulties they were having with each subject and what we needed to do to change it. Then when everyone was decided that we had "defeated" that bad idea one person had to come up with the gloves and beat the heck out of a homemade punching bag with the face of one of rocky's opponents on it and the words of the lie on it as well. Then we would pass a knockout video after each one showing that Rocky took it out as well.

I think everyone is going to get home and watch Rocky again when they get home haha. I will bring the presentation with me when i get home. I have in on my external drive here.

So we had the morning part of each training and President had the afternoon part. Presidents part was passing a video of Elder Bednar that has completely changed the way I teach here on the mission. President showed Elder Fernandez and I the video back in Dezember and always talked about a training he would like to do with it.

The video is Elder Bednar doing a worldwide CES training. And it is awesome! He talks about, "jumping out of the boat" which seems to be a reoccuring theme in a lot of the trainings he has done. There are a ton of things that we learn from the training. But the biggest thing is how to jump out of the ship, or get out of the comfort zone when we teach. Do things things that we have never done before, or things that we have fear of doing to let the Holy Ghost be the true teacher.

He says that Christ as the teacher invited his students, being Peter, to jump out of the boat and participate in the classes. And we have to be like Peter and be willing to get out of our comfort zones following the Spirit and letting him guide the lessons. The church is really trying to change the way that we teach because it has really been a "show" as President likes to say for a long time. People just create a class that they know will fill up the time. Sometimes we are afraid to really let the students guide the class and use their questions and opinions and input to make a great class because we dont know what it is going to be before hand.

Preach my Gospel was the first sign of the change. Now the Sunday School presidency is talking about the new manual, (i think i am translating it wrong but something like this and its purple) "Teaching in the Savior's Way". We have to teach people. That is something that Presdident has always taught us.

But anwyays found out that Daniel and Leilane here in the ward are the Brazilians that Tyler was telling me about when I was in Pato Branco! What a small world! They are a cool couple here in the ward and loved Tyler so much! I told Leilane the other day that I was Elder McCreadies cousin and she went nuts! haha she said how awesome of a missionary that Tyler was. Way to go TY Ty!!

But love you all so much and hope you have an awesome week!

Love,
Elder Keller