San Fernando Mission 2.0

We did not receive an email last week, so here it is- but apparently this week's  email from her didn't send. So we will have to wait for that one until next week.

Well hello!
I hope everyone is doing just fine and that you are all recovering from what sounds like a most fun adventure in Nebraska! It sounds like that the majority of us have been re-introduced to the wonderful Humidity. It is getting to be really humid here. ;( Oh well, I am grateful to be in a car right now. We haven't heard the official call on whether our area is a car or bus area yet. President Hall did say that if we wanted to try it to go for it. He is also considering having a car fast day, where every area goes 1 day without a car. Cars = anti proselyting bubbles. It will be fun to see the changes happen. Speaking of changes....Today is the first official day of the newly reformed San Fernando Mission. We call it San Fernando Mission 2.0! Sister Scrivner and I have spent 2 days in a row of sitting in meetings. The first meeting was Leadership Training. I was asked to play the piano for it...yikes! Well I didn't murder the songs and everyone seemed to sing it just fine so I think I passed hahaha. The rest of the meeting was very insightful. The amount of leaders in our mission is about half of our mission (approx 70 leaders.) We were informed that by September almost every single missionary will be either training or being trained. We have almost 100 new missionaries coming in by September. ITS CRAZY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I thought and thought of the things I would like to see in our new mission and I honestly couldn't think of anything until Friday night. What I want in our mission is that whoever hears of our mission will know that we are an obedient mission. I want the next mission president who comes in to know that he has a reputation to keep up. I dont want this so that we can gloat. I want this so that people know that because we are obedient we see miracles everyday! Yup thats what I want. The second meeting was Zone conference for the southern most 9 zones ( basically its our whole new mission but we had it before the mission split because you cant have whole mission meetings hee hee hee). Basically we talked about almost all of the same things as in leadership training. The part that was most powerful was at the end of our meeting. President Hall stood at the pulpit and asked us to Covenant with God that we would be exactly obedient to the commandments (and mission rules) for the rest of our missions. Then he made some pretty profound promises to us if we would make this covenant that night. These are some of the promised blessings: 1. Our lives would be eternally changed for making this covenant Thursday night. 2. We would become better wives and husbands. 3. We would raise children that would love God and keep temple covenants. 4. We would be spiritually grounded parents 5. We will see the hand of the Lord very distinctly in our missions and the Holy Ghost would whisper into our hearts that it is because of the Covenant we made with God. 6. We would be successful in our missions...... okay I don't know about you but WOW! I definitely dont want to miss out on those blessings. So I made the covenant, and Satan has tried so hard the last 3 days to make my life miserable. All of us are feeling it!!!!! I cant tell you how much fire we all walked out of that meeting with! I am so excited to be a Pioneer for this new mission. We as leaders of this mission have the once in a lifetime opportunity to change this mission. To make it our ideal mission. To change the culture of it. To make ourselves known to the area of who we are and what we do! Its time that our areas know us by name! So here we come California, Watch out San Fernando Valley the missionaries are coming to you! And you know that you want it! hahahaha. Its quite exciting to be on a mission right now. I am glad that those of you who watched the broadcast enjoyed it! If you felt a small prick of excitement just from watching it, think about all the missionaries who watched it too and maginify your excitement by like 100 times! ;) I have learned alot about the timing of the Lords hand in our lives over the last year. Everything that is happening in missionary work is coming at just the right time. HMMM... what else happened this week? Oh, we asked to get our area boundaries clarified this week because of an incident with some elders who have not made it on my good list. Apparently the Aracadia mission is sending missionaries into our mission to proselyte in a ward whose boundaries apparently cross over into ours? Anyway, we called President and even he had hard time reading the map on the churches website. We thought we got it all clarified. Then yesterday our Stake President informed us that he spoke with Pres. Hall and told him our boundaries were what we thought they were originally. oy....so we are back to square one. It has been super frustrating especially since no one will give us the Aracadia mission number to call and get it worked out with them.
Last night we had an adventure. We couldn't get ahold of our district leaders to call in numbers. We didn't think much of it and waited for them to call us back. Then 30 minutes later our zone leaders called and asked us if we reported numbers. We told them we couldn't get ahold of the Elders. Then we got concerned. It was 10 pm and no one could get through. Lucky for us we live right across the street from them and walked over to make sure all was well. The light was on in the apartment. We threw a soccer ball (lightly) at the window to get their attention. No answer. We got into the lobby of their apartment and throughly banged on the door. Still no answer. We called the zone leaders and told them of the failed attempts. They raced over the apartment to help us. Once it was obvious something was wrong we called President. He told the zone leaders to go look for the Elders. We were to stay there and call if they showed up. We were all very concerned because they are on bike and one had just been hit by a car a couple days earlier. 20 minutes later the Elders finally rode up on their bikes. They said they had a story. They looked worn out and worried. Apparently an investigators daughter is a heroin addict. She needed a blessing. Their appointment was a 7:30pm and they didn't leave until after 10pm. The blessing took 30 minutes! So they made it home safe and I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. We all got into bed way past 11pm. President was very understanding and counseled them on future events like that. Well thats been my week. Lots of Adventures! I love you all!
Hurrah for Israel!
Love,
Sister Cottrell