Week 49: Teaching the gospel, parenting, and missionary work

Wello, (went to type well hello and that’s what my fingers typed instead so that’s what you get)

Scripture of the week: Alma 26:35-37

I must admit.... we were talking with the Polls last night and I could not take the suspense anymore, so I made them look up the outcome of the state game for me. Kind of a bummer that they weren’t able to pull it off, but it sounds like it was really a hard fought battle.

It’s officially cold here in Vermont. We got our first snow that actually stuck and today its 16 degrees out. I’m working really hard at being positive about how I feel about cold weather, but you all know how much I just hate it, so it’s a battle trying to be positive about it.

Twas a fantastic week though. I had the privilege of being here in Essex on exchange with elder jessee, you met his parents at the wilkeys homecoming. It’s kind of interesting, he and I have never served close to each other and we weren’t even in the same district in the MTC but he is probably one of my best friends in the mission, we pretty much just had a party the whole time we were on exchange. While we were together we hit our 11 month mark so it just gave us even more of a reason the celebrate. It was really nice being on an exchange that I could just kind of relax. Most the time on exchanges I am spending the whole time correcting elders and doing training, so this was a really nice break.

Hmmm what else happened this week?.... well it is officially really really cold here in Vermont. It’s pretty bad, the whole mission has caught on to the elder zilles being stuck in Vermont jokes. Every time I call president or the assistants they have to make some crack about me being stuck here for life. I’ve decided I’m good with it though. I will for sure be here for my first year. Found out this week that I could totally apply for in state tuition and stuff for the state of Vermont cause I haven’t left the state in a year.

I spoke in sacrament yesterday. It was just me and the high councilor so I had to take half the time. It went really well though. My topic was "teaching the gospel" At first I thought I would totally just teach about missionary work, but as I was preparing my talk I got the feeling I needed to direct my talk to parenting. So I titled it "teaching the gospel, parenting and missionary work". I will send my notes to you and you can check them out. Sounds like nacho did a great job speaking as well. GO LOU! I based most of my talk off of the story of the stripling warriors!

So for thanksgiving we are eating with our bishop and his family. Up till late this week we didn’t have an appointment, cause most people are going out of town, so we had decided that we were just going to take ourselves to the Chinese buffet. But we lucked out and don’t have to do it. The ward is having a turkey bowl but unless something changes we won’t be playing in it cause president stoker doesn’t want anyone getting hurt, kind of a bummer but important to be obedient.

I hope dad’s surgery goes well this week. Always scary to know that kind of stuff is going on when I’m not around, but all will be well. I won’t have any time to hand written any letters today. We are going bowling with our district, and then we are going on a tour of the Ben and Jerries Ice cream factory, then I am going on exchange to Montpelier, so it’s a pretty crazy day and a start to a really wild crazy week. Gotta love it though.

 Hopefully I covered everything, sure love you guys.

Love ya

Elder Zilles

Week 48: "Let your shoes tell you the story of your mission"

Hello my dear family,

Scripture of the week: Ether 12:18

 

 I forgot my zone conference notes at the apartment so I don’t have anything to give you insights from it. Sorry I guess we will just have to go off of my memory, which can be scary at times. But anyways zone conference was incredible. The spirit was just absolutely amazing the whole time. The day started off with my interview with Giff Neilson. He is an incredible man. He had so many great stories to tell. He came in to interview me and was like "so why are we meeting today" I said "I don’t know you tell me" he had no idea either, so we just talked about the gospel and gospel leadership the whole time it was a really special treat. The whole conference was just so wonderful. I really wish i had my notes with me though. You know how I like quotes. There were so many good ones from this conference. Elder Neilson talked a lot about the atonement and the infinite power that it has in our lives. It was very neat. some of my favorite quotes from him were "You were not sent here to be AVERAGE" "Let your shoes tell the story of your mission" "let the savior be the editor of your life story" and there were so many other amazing ones that my bad memory can’t think of right now.

 

Elder Quinton Joseph, conversing with the Prophet Joseph

 

The more time I get to spend with president stoker the more I grow to love him. I loved president wilkey, but president stoker is definitely supposed to be in this mission at this time. He is a wonderful ,wonderful man.

 

we got the privilege of taking an investigator  on a tour to the JSM on Saturday, that was a very neat experience. The spirit is always so strong at that sacred place i hope you get to see it someday. We are teaching another family tonight so details about that will have to follow next week. But we did however find another awesome family, they referred themselves to us when they were in Hawaii a few weeks ago. They are the only non members in their family. We had dinner with them last night, and out of nowhere they asked “do you give blessings to non members?' We of course said yes. So it was a really neat experience.

 

Each Monday morning we have to do zone reports. And every other week we report to president. This week was president. At the end president was like "wow your zone has a lot of issues right now, I now see why you two were assigned to that zone". It’s pretty cool to have him say stuff like that but at the same time it’s no fun to have to do all of the dirty work in the zone. But somebody has got to do it and I’m not going to complain because this is where the lord has called me to serve at this time.

 

Good luck this week Pirates. I’ll have to make sure I wear my west side football shirt to do service on Saturday. Hope they all know they have people cheering for them all over the world. So cool. I hope they win this one for coach Eb.

 

 

Sure love you guys have a wonderful week

Hold to the rod

Elder Zilles

 

Week 47: Birthday Goodness

Hello Family,

Scripture of the week:

Acts 27:23

What a week! where did the time go? weeks go really fast when you spend all of your time either in a car or in meetings or on the phone correcting disobedient missionaries. The good news is we have a full pday today so i have more time to email and i hope to even get some hand written letters replied to. First off thank you so much for all the birthday goodness. It was a great day. Sister Poll made me dinner that night and we played cards with them as well, it was just wonderful, i missed you guys but we will reunite in no time. sister poll made me chicken enchilades and then asked what my favorite desert was... i couldnt decide if i wanted cheese cake or pumpkin chocolate chip cookies. So sister poll being the awesome mom she is got on line and found a recipe for pumpkin cheese cake and then put an oreo crust on it to make it pumpkin chocolate. It was so stinkin good. I love the polls.

Before i tell you about last weeks meetings and stuff i want to tell you about our new investigators! Lets just say the members of the essex ward have really caught the missionary fever. The fellows family had their friends  over for dinner and they asked if they could learn about their church. so of course the fellows said yes and called us right away. Well we were in manchester so couldnt go over so we called the polls and they played pinch hitter for us.They came to church yesterday and stayed for all 3 hours. They are like the ultimate golden couple.

So the meeting last week was great. Very cool to be in a meeting with president with just a small amount of people. like 24 missionaries or something very awesome. We discussed a whole bunch of stuff, but spent most of the time preparing for zone conference which is wednesday. Its a big deal cause we have a visiting general authority coming. Gifford Neilsen is gonna be in the NHMM. He spoke in conference and gave the awesome talk about the lords game plan. Guess who gets to have a personal 15 minute interview with him???... Yup i do. At each conference he is having a personal interview with 4 missionaries, and president chose me as one of them. I asked president what on earth i did wrong to have that ha. He just told me he wants elder Nelson to get to meet the best of the NHMM, im stoked. I think ill probably ask him how many touchdowns he threw when he was at BYU!

Probably my favorite part of the meeting last week was getting to see missionaries i havent seen in forever. I got to see elder hales for the first time since we got to the mission. Also got to see my buddy elder walker, they both just got made zone leaders as well.

Well i cant think of anything else i was really dying to tell you.

Love you guys

Hold to the rod

Week 46: Busy...

Hello family,

Scripture of the week: Romans 8:28,31

Well hello there. Sounds like all is going well at home. I am sorry for the short email last week, and also sorry for the lack of hand written letters, I won’t have time to write any today either I am very very sorry. Being a Zone leader keeps me really busy, between zone leader stuff and regular missionary work i really have no time. Maybe one of these Mondays I will have time to write some letters. So please don’t give up on my I promise I still love you all the same, I just really am so swamped right now. So I’ll try to reply to the email and the letters in this email but I am sure I will miss some stuff.

So you asked some Questions about the Zone leader stuff. We are both Zone leaders. Its kind of cool there is no such thing as junior comp and sr comp we are both just zone leaders. We travel a lot and go to ALOT of meetings. We go to two district meeting each week, and every first Monday and Tuesday of the month we have to go to Manchester for Mission leadership meetings. So yes that is today and tomorrow so I really have no time today we have to leave to Manchester at 3. I’m excited to see how that all works though, so more details to follow next week.

So you say Essex doesn’t look very big, well compared to a city in the west it is not very big but for what i am now used to it is HUGE. And yes it does help to have Burlington 10 minutes away. We cover Essex, Essex jct, Jericho, and like 3 other small town. The polls really only teach classes so they don’t do much actual proselyting. Over in the Burlington ward they have a set of elders and sisters. Fletcher Allan med school is over in Burlington so that’s why we have all of the med students.

I must say i love this ward. They are so good at doing missionary work. We had 9 non members at church yesterday, and all but two of them were brought by the members. Things are really going to start to take off here in Essex, I’m super excited for it. its really cool having the polls right across the hall, and it was so funny you called right when we walked into their apartment, ha what a treat. Elder poll gives us sports updates and other necessary things like that.

Elder Simkins and i get along great. He is doing really well at not being trunky so that makes things really nice.

well i am sorry this is so short, but i really gotta run and get other stuff done before we have to leave to Manchester.

Love you guys

 Elder Zilles

Hold to the rod