Another great day!!!

Hello Everyone,

I'm so glad that everyone loved my letter home. It was kind of creative and I wasn't even able to tell you all the great things going on here in Niceville and in the Mission. Its been so awesome to serve here. I fear that I'm going to wake up and in another area one morning. That's going to be a rough day.

I'm really happy right now because I just saw the beach. Well, to more direct, we had a zone activity on the beach. Almost our entire zone came. We met at Ft Walton Stake Center, then we all hopped in a couple of cars and headed down to Destin. We spent all morning down in Destin playing football and grilling on the beach. We went on Friday to go pick out a beach. Elder Merkley had to go anyway because of his Chiropractor appointment. So we took the Destin Elders with us to go find a nice place. That we did. All of the missionaries played football, we even had a couple members too and a few investigators. Ft Walton 1st had a couple there who just got baptized on Saturday and they brought their friends who are also investigators in Ft Walton. Elder Merkley and I took Brother Booth with us. He is an inactive member who is working on coming back. We invited him to come with us last week and he accepted our offer. Brother Booth is a Nurse in the Air Force and had today off. He is one awesome man. He has a family of his own, wife, 11 year-old boy and 6 year-old boy, they are all active, but he is working on coming back. He actually talked about getting some G's back too!! Cool stuff.

Tomorrow is ZLC. This time however I only have to drive for 30 minutes to get to ZLC. Unlike the 3 hours when I was in Tallahassee. Its going to be nice tomorrow to get a workout and study in before ZLC. Anyways, we are implementing 'Our Standard of Greatness'. Its a new idea to help the missionaries build and hold on to something. It gives us purpose and an identity as a mission. President Summerhays had 'Remember This...', but with President Jensen its 'Our Standard of Greatness'. To help prepare our Zone, Elder Merkley and I had been talking together for a couple of weeks. I have had a couple re-occurring ideas, and decided to implement them.

Here are a couple of clues for you:
#1-On Friday, after we went to the Chiropractor and checked out the Beaches, we went to look for supplies.
#2-We went to Michaels and got a couple of lettering sheets, then we went to HomeDepot to get an eight-foot-pole and a painters tarp.

Can you figure it out yet?

#3-We spent Saturday night at a Part-Member/Investigator home to use their iron and their sewing machine.
#4-We put on wording and cut the painters tarp into a Rectangular shape.

#5-We made a big loop on the left side of the rectangle in order to side our eight-foot-pole through.
#6-That night we took a screw and pinned the rectangle to our eight-foot-pole.

By now I'm sure this is a great image in all of your minds.

#7-This morning we revealed it to our zone and had each one of them sign it.
#8-We had Elder Tidwell hold it while we all took a picture next to it.

Its a FLAG. Yay!! Yeah, Elder Merkley and I made our own 'Title of Liberty', but instead its 'Our Standard of Greatness'. We have commitments from all the members in our Zone to follow 'Our Standard of Greatness' and every P-Day activity we do as a zone, our flag will be flying to help remind us of who we are and why we're here. It was really cool to get the support from our Zone, and tomorrow we will share our Idea with President. I think he should know too.

Now on to our missionary work and the people we are teaching. The Chabot (Sha-boy, yeah I know) family is the ones who helped us out on our flag. Sister Chabot is a member, but her four kids are not. Allie is 17, Seth is 14, Matt is 11 and Zack is 9. Elder Bond and Elder Merkley tracted into them and I've been lucky to teach them as well. Its really interesting. When we were there on Saturday it felt a lot like home. The two older teenagers were playing their music really loud, the mother was ready to go to bed and the two younger boys could care less. They were just happy we were there to give them some attention. Aww, memories from home. Allie has been reading the book of Mormon. A lot actually, she even has her friend Kelsey read with her. Allie has seen a difference in her life since she began to read. School is better, life at home is better, she broke up with her boyfriend but still is happy. She can't explain it, even her Psychologist can't explain it. He/She said that they've never been so happy!! Haha, the Book of Mormon is true! As for the other boys though, none of them are reading. Seth refuses too actually. However, they all did come to church. We are going to be teaching them on Tuesday. Its going to be fun.

We have a few other people we are teaching. The Smiths are awesome. He is a firefighter, she is a stay at home mom with a 2-month old. We taught them in their home yesterday and had a great lesson. The Smiths have all these questions. Most of which come from the Plan of Salvation. Its so hard to be on the other side and see that they don't get it. I know what happens to us when we die. If we die early it is very sad, but its not the end. The Smiths have no knowledge of that, and its so hard to help them see. I know that as they read from the Book of Mormon, all of their questions will be answered. All of them.

I love you all and hope that its not too cold yet. It was about 78 on the beach. ;)

Elder Call