Another week!

Hey,

So like I said, I'm in Fredericton now. It's a good sized ward for New Brunswick, but I got a reminder on Sunday how that's still quite a bit smaller than wards around the world. This woman was visiting from Alberta, and bore her testimony in fast and testimony meeting, and she started out saying how she was grateful for the "branch" and its testimonies.

Most of the members are pretty cool. There's the most young families I've ever seen here. A lot of the members are very funny too! We just got a new ward mission leader, he's from the Phillipines, and he's super awesome. He's been doing a lot of work to increase the members desire and expectation to share the gospel. I really hope I can see a lot of that growth change the ward.

We only have one investigator right now, Jacob, an 11 year old son of a less active, who we're working with to reactivate. He's pretty excited about it, but he didn't come to church this Sunday, so we're going to have to move his baptismal date to another week. It was supposed to be this Saturday.

There's not a lot of French here. There's a recent convert who is French, there's a couple people here who speak French, but it's very much English. I do my best to keep learning and practicing it as much as I can!

I don't live with other Elders. There aren't any more 4 man apartments, and won't be anymore. They decided they don't want 4 man apartments anymore, so I got the last of it.

There are sisters here in Fredericton as well. Next to that, there's Woodstock Elders, they're pretty close, just an hour away. Then everyone else is further.

Elder Olsen is really cool. He's a really good missionary. We've kinda known each other for a while, we would talk a lot at zone conferences/leadership conferences, so I'm excited to be spending more time with him. We've been teaching some straight doctrine to some people, there's been quite a few people who have tried to confound us, but ended up having to admit we're right. They still don't want to learn, but at least it stopped their heckling. I've gotten more hate here than anywhere else, that's for sure. Elder Olsen came out 2 transfers before me, he's from Idaho. 

As a zone leader, basically I help out the district leaders. They come up with plans to train the districts in the zone, and I hold them accountable and help support them in their work. We get the "water to the end of the row" so to speak, so we make sure everyone knows what they need to know. I'm also a part of the MLC, so we work with the rest of the MLC to come up with the focuses for the transfer. Most transfers we help plan zone conference, but this one we won't, because a 70 is coming to visit, Elder Haynie. He's got a general conference talk. We are going to have some q and a sessions with him, so we're going to take questions. If you have any questions you'd like to ask, send me them. 

The companionships in my zone are Edmundston Elders, Presqu'île Sisters, Woodstock Elders, Fredericton Sisters, Freddy town Elders (us), Hampton Elders, Saint John Elders, and St. Steven Elders. There are some pretty cool missionaries in all that, so it will be fun! 

Also, this last week we've gotten quite a few rule changes. We used to have district meetings for 2 hours, now we're losing a half hour, President Low wants them to be shorter. We also aren't allowed to meet with other missionaries for p day anymore, so that sucks. And we're not allowed to add people and start messaging them now. So right now no one knows how the flip we are supposed to use technology to find people. We'll see how that goes.

It's really hard to say what I've been learning, if you gave me a topic it would probably be easier to say something profound with a topic haha. I've been studying about church history, reading the new book Saints. It's really good, you should definitely give it a read!

But yeah, my weeks been pretty normal too. Nothing very exciting. Love you so much!

Elder Marsh