Elder John Robert Gaskill III: Believing, Bold, Baptizing California Sacramento Missionaries

Hello Everyone

Hope the last week went well.

This past week we had lots of exciting things happen in the mission. On Tuesday we had our Zone Leader Round Table meeting and talked about how the mission was doing. We were disappointed at some of the recent outcomes of baptisms in the mission so we decided to make a training for all the leadership positions in the mission that Thursday. It turned out to be a great meeting and was really inspiring. We heard lots of great ideas on being "Believing, Bold, Baptizing California Sacramento Missionaries". The thoughts that were presented were really cool. We took the same training to do it in our own way for our zone. One of the interesting things we did had to do with believing. We talked about the word "believe" meaning "to allow" because you can't exceed the limit of what you believe you can do. We gave an example of having everyone write down how many cups of water they thought they could drink in 30 seconds and then we did the challenge. It was a lot of fun and really instructional as well. Some of the missionaries were able to drink as much as they could and had extra after 30 seconds while some weren't able to reach their full potential because they were only given the number of cups full of water that they thought they could drink. One elder managed to chug 5 cups of water (about 80 fluid ounces) in 30 seconds which was really impressive. He almost threw up after but he didn't so everything turned out OK. We're excited to see a lot of success in our zone in the months to come.

One thing I forgot to mention about my companion. The first time I met him was his first couple months in the mission. We were both in the Lodi zone. My companion was Elder Martinez and Elder Ross was in the Lodi Hills with Elder Gurr. After a zone training we were driving back to our areas. While my companion was driving we were side by side to Elder Ross and his companion. I motioned for him to roll down the window. After he did I pulled out a little nerf gun I had in the car and shot him in the ear. They continued down the road and we turned away to where we were going. We were never really around each other so we never talked about it but the first day we were companions (a year later) he brought it up to me and we had a good laugh about it. It seems like we're always laughing and we get along great which is awesome.

We've been working a lot with Mark and he has been progressing nicely. We have one last kink that we have to work out though. We found out that he's not married, he's just been living with his "wife" for 8 years. We told him he needs to be married and so he decided to ask his wife to get married. However, she said no because she wants a ring and he doesn't have one or money to get one because of his financial situation with school and everything. Mark's baptismal date is this Saturday so we're working with him a lot to either figure out how he can get married or how he can move out so that he's not breaking the law of chastity. It will be a lot of work but I have the faith that the Lord will help us so that we can meet our goals and Mark can receive these blessings.

General Conference was great and I was very inspired by it! I can't wait to apply the messages I've heard. I hope a lot of members get the hint about what so many church leaders talked about (member missionary work)! It's an exciting time to be a missionary and I love every minute of it!

Les Quiero Mucho!

Elder Gaskill