Lofty Goals...

Hello! 

Just a pretty normal week this week... Looking for people to teach haha. ON Tuesday we had an appointment with the new family from last week and we called the member that invited them (first counselor in the stake presidency) to come with us and we went and they weren't there :( Probably because we got there late but that wasn't our fault haha. But we gave the member 2 Books of Mormon for his family to write their testimonies in and they went over and gave it to them. We were expecting them at church on Sunday because they had told us and him that they were going to go but.... they never showed up :( Welcome to the roller coaster ride called missionary work. But we are gonna go search em out and see what happened and keep working hard with them...

About that talk... Brad actually sent it to me when I was in the MTC but in audio haha so I have listened to it several times already but I haven't listened to it in a few months so I will do that today :) we cant really do anything on P Day so I usually listen to talks or find something productive to do. 

The most exciting thing of the week was the concilio on Friday. We talked a lot about baptism and retention and how effective our work really is. We have been focusing a lot lately on finding and we have found lots of investigators but it hasn't had much of an impact in baptisms. For every 84 new investigators we find, just 1 gets baptized. So we talked a but about how we can really achieve our goal of baptizing every week. That is the vision that we have and it really hasn't ever been done. The most baptisms we have had in one month in the whole mission is 78. No zone has ever had more than 12 in one month. So we put a goal for September to work our butts off, not waste time with investigators that don't progress and just aren't ready, have faith to find those who are really prepared, and start baptizing every week. So the zone leaders in each zone put a goal of how many baptisms we are going to have in September and we prayed to confirm the goals and then we put the goal as a mission and president prayed and it was a super cool super, spiritual experience. We have the goal of 421 baptisms in September. that's half the baptisms that we had in 2014. So its going to be fun. We have to get the rest of the missionaries excited now and help them see that it is possible and help them know HOW we are going to do it. Our goal in the zone is 5 baptisms each companionship in September, which will be 30 for the zone. It is very possible but has never been done before because we have never tried haha. It will be a fun few months. After the concilio we went to the mission home (which surprised me because we though we wouldn't go to the mission home anymore since there are kids there and stuff) and ate and it was fun. President is really great. Very fun and funny and relaxed but he very diligent and very spiritual and he has a great vision for the mission. I am excited. His family we don't really know very well still. His wife is a bit shy and very different than Sister Jordan haha. But I am sure she will open up soon. 

That is impressive that Natalie is a sister training leader already! And she trained already too, right? Wow. I am proud of her :) 

Thanks for the letter! Hope you have a great week! love you all!

Elder Skalla