Rosy Cheeks

Well, first I will give you an update with Shashi, and then tell you the super duper exciting news for the week. Sister Shashi is doing AWESOME! She never ceases to amaze me. Really an amazing woman. And her kids are just TOO adorable, so it's always a blast going over there! :) And guess what? In the past 2 weeks we have visited her home a lot, and in the last 2 weeks we have never seen James (her husband) drunk. Not once. Blessings from his wife accepting the Gospel? I think so. 

It would be more than crazy if someone like Shashi came and visited our home in America... for multiple reasons. For one, it would be the equivalent of one of us getting to go live in one of those houses on the show "Cribs". Just ridiculous how nice our home would be to her. Overwhelmingly nice. And being surrounded by church members... crazy! 

Well, big big news for this week. For the first time in YEARS we had a mission conference!! All of the missionaries from the entire India Bangalore mission all assembled in Bangalore for our conference. (haha we had 14 elders sleeping at our apartment that night. We only have 8 mattresses... ya, things got cuddly.) Flying in tons of elders, and other elders taking buses for 14 hours to get to the conference. A LOT of work went into getting everyone there.

Mission Conference with Elder Holland

So why all the hoopla for getting all the missionaries together? Well, we had a special visitor come and talk to us... ELDER JEFFREY R. HOLLAND!! :D SO COOL!! 

It was a day I'll definitely never forget. Everything from being reunited with many of my missionary friends, to getting to shake an Apostle's hand (and in that 5 second encounter with him, he told me I had nice rosy cheeks... haha everyone loves 'em!), to getting to hear Elder Holland give some top notch training IN PERSON! It was all so great. 

Interestingly, he didn't give us a "hell fire and damnation" talk at all (he talked about teaching to investigators needs/level of understanding), but still after hearing from him I felt like I could/need to do so much better... I'll do my best! 

Then on Saturday all the other zones went back to their normal areas, but since I'm here in Bangalore I got to be here on Sunday when we had a special District Conference presided by Elder Holland! So I got to have a double dosage of that man! Huuzaw! It was so great seeing how many people came to the district conference. Even people that are less than fully active in the church came out to the meeting. It was OVER FLOWING in there! So many people came. :) 

I did think afterwards though how Elder Holland really didn't give some amazing kind of talk (as in, not anything way more amazing than he would normally give in Conference), but the difference that this was so much better is because WE were more spiritually prepared to receive the message he would give to us. I'll just have to keep that same kind of prepardeness when conference comes around again! 

Also, after the District Conference I was delighted to see Vidya Sree, Dinakeran, and Manjula there from Convent Road branch. Glad to see that some of my favorite people are still coming to church! :)

Bangalore Zone Conference

Me, and Elder Singh, and Elder Mangum