December 6th Email

Hey Everyone,

Tis the season!! I love Christmas time in Florida because the weather is perfect haha other than that I wish I was home. This past week Elder Alber and I made a new set of goals. We called it "Project Purification" after a lot of prayer we decided that in order for our zone to step it up we needed to go above and beyond and challenge them to keep up. So far it has worked! And we are exhausted. We have been struggling to have perfect mornings but not this week. We set high goals at the beginning of the week and everyday we don't come home until our goals have been reached. Our mission doesn't have us keep track of numbers of the copies of The Book of Mormon handed out but we decided we wanted to keep track and have the one of our focuses, planting seeds. So this week we taught 40 total lessons and handed out about 30 copies of The Book of Mormon. A guy named Kenny who we worked with a little while ago told us he was going to attend the family ward with his mom until he decided he was ready to be baptized. So he came up to us in the hall yesterday and told us he stood up in testimony meeting and told the ward he wanted to be baptized! How cool is that?! So we are going to meet with him Tuesday to see if he wants to be baptized in the singles ward or his family ward. We are hoping we get to have him in the singles! We have a couple potentials but they don't want to really take anything seriously until after the christmas break which school will start January 10 and that will be next transfer....But in setting that example to the zone we decided to pair everyone up with another companionship to call each other every night and hold them accountable for that day and see what goals they have set for the upcoming day as well as what they are going to do to reach that goal. Sacrifice will give us results, and we are seeing results we started the week with 3 baptismal dates set for the zone and as of last night we have 6! That's right they doubled! Elder Alber and I joked around about it last night saying that we work hard and our zone reaps the benefits which is fine by us because to us it is the same work! I'm having no baptisms for this month if the zone gets a bunch! So with school being out we talked to President about what we should do and this is what sounds like is going to happen. There is a set of traveling assistants right now going around training missionaries in the mission about the new curriculum in the MTC and one of them is going home on 14th and the other on the 28th both will be going home before the end of the transfer. So when the first one goes home Elder Alber and I will be going in a threesome to travel and train and once the other one goes home we will continue to work around the mission until the end of the transfer. I'm so excited!! I love working with missionaries and its gonna be a blast to have nothing to worry about except the missionaries in each area! It's not set in stone but its about a 90% chance and I'm stoked!

I Love you all so much!!

Elder Salmon