The ABCs of MLC

Hey Mom!

Looks like you had a fun trip to Moab, although you're right: I didn't feel bad missing the bike riding or camping. And that's brutal that you took Landon through IKEA...I went there for the first time on my mission when I was in the YSA Ward (a couple of the members took us to dinner there), and I can see how you can be in there for hours.

To explain the acronym for you, MLC stands for Mission Leadership Council--it's where the Zone Leaders, Sister Training Leaders, Assistants, and Tech Elders get together and receive training and council together regarding different topics. For MLCs, the zone leaders are usually in charge of coming up with a few positives and a few struggles their zone has been seeing over the past month (since MLCs occur the first Friday of each month), and you present on that for about five minutes.

Our zone had a training meeting this week, and Elder Bennett and I had a good training on working with the bishop to make missionary work more effective. We also repeated a demonstration from last zone conference where we had a missionary from each companionship go out in the hall and write down the monthly goals that they set (after taking away their iPads to make sure they couldn't cheat), to see if they knew what their goals were. It was really rough last month (which was the purpose of the activity, because we were training on goal-setting and planning), but the missionaries did much better this transfer remembering their goals.

We never did hear back from Bri in Normal, but we had two lessons with Shannon this week, and were able to put her on date for baptism on April 16th, so that's super exciting! We also had an awesome lesson with a potential investigator named Hope (one of the best lessons that Elder Bennett and I have both had on our missions), but unfortunately, she told us that she wants to study on her own for the time being, rather than continuing with the missionary discussions.

The zone has been on fire this last week, though! It's not about the numbers by any means, but the key indicators that are reported weekly have been higher than they've been in the zone in probably close to eight or nine months. There are lots of companionships that have people on date, and missionaries are starting to work more with members, it's been pretty awesome hearing about the different miracles that are going on!

Elder Bennett and I have had a couple of pretty fun preparation days the last couple of weeks--last week, we went Frisbee golfing, and the course was in the middle of a forest, so it was freakin' hard, but still pretty fun! This week, one of the members of our ward had us over, and he has a pottery wheel and a kiln, so we made bowls at his house with some help, and that was pretty cool!

This month is going to go by crazy fast--we've got General Conference, stake conference, a Mission Tour, transfers, hopefully a baptism, and hopefully a temple trip here in the next five weeks! Let me know if there is anything that I can do for you guys!

Love,
Elder Dallas Anderson

#ExpectMiracles