Rainy day on our way to Springfield, IL Zone Conference on Thursday

This week was Zone Conferences.  We love, love yes love being with the missionaries.  On Thursday we dropped off a new four wheel drive truck in Illinois.  The Sisters spent "two and a half hours" cleaning up their old (2015) truck; they did a great job (I think George threatened them that if it wasn't clean enough they wouldn't get the new truck ;-). 

Zone Conference Car Inspections

We can laugh now, but the Tuesday conference location was changed with short notice.  We arrived so early to the original location that we decided to buy Egg McMuffins for the missionaries who had arrived early for car inspections.  When we arrived, there were no cars in the parking lot. We called some missionaries and asked for help and were directed to another area in downtown St Louis, which wasn't' the right place either. We stopped at a gas station in a rough part of town to call again for directions.   While we were stopped, we handed out some of the breakfast sandwiches to some homeless people in the parking lot.  They commented 'why are you doing this?  Can we have some water too? Thanks so much!'.

Zone Conference Car Inspections (cont.)

We finally ended up at the right place, shortly before the conference was to begin.  We had driven around for over an hour, but we saw parts of St Louis, we have never seen and probably won't again!  It kind of went along with my theme, "I can do hard things".

Friday evening we went with our Branch and did baptisms at the Temple.  We had one Sister who has been a member for many years and it was her first time.  Although she found "all that water" a little daunting, today she said she couldn't wait to go back!

We had a special visitor to the Branch today; Elder Gifford Nielsen of the First Quorum of the Seventy and his wife.  And my favorite BYU Quarterback of all time.  He was the quarterback when I was at BYU and really put the BYU passing game on the map.  He was very humble and modest about his sports achievements.  They both gave wonderful messages to the Branch.