I love this view from one of the stake centers where we hold our Multi-zone Conferences.
We just completed our third series of Multi-zone Conferences. Every three months we hold four of these day-long training meetings, each with three zones and around fifty missionaries. We began each Conference day at 9AM, broke at noon for the lunch hour, and ended the day around 4:30 PM.
These Multi-zone Conferences are a time to train, teach, motivate and inspire our missionaries. During the first hour Marsh taught about prayer. He invited the missionaries to share experiences they had had with prayer. They told of so many wonderful incidents that had happened in their lives. One Brazilian sister from the Northeast told of an experience she had had as a little girl before she and her family became members of the Church. They were living in extreme poverty and she and her brothers and sisters had gone for three days without food. Her mother was desperate and prayed fervently for help from above. While she was praying she felt a strong impression to go out to the back of their shanty and cut the tall grass there. She was weak from hunger and it seemed an odd thing to do, but the feeling was unmistakable so she took an old scythe and began to chop at the weeds. Up popped coins. The more she hacked, the more coins sprang up. Unknown to anyone but heaven, a pile of money lay hidden in the tall grasses. She gathered all she could find. Then, as she was going inside her house a passer-by by handed her a chicken. She had enough to feed her children and knew that it had come from God in answer to her urgent prayers. This answer to her mother’s plea filled this sweet-natured sister with a simple sure faith in the reality of a Heavenly Father who hears and responds to heartfelt prayers.
I took thirty minutes of the nearly seven hours of training to teach the missionaries in the three areas of health habits, cleaning skills and personal grooming and dress. This time I did it almost completely in Portuguese with a little translating help from the Assistants. It felt good. The missionaries were so encouraging and attentive. They even laughed at my jokes. In the last part of the training I taught them how to iron a shirt really fast and then challenged two elders to race each other. We set up ironing boards, gave them each a hot steaming iron and away they went while the other missionaries cheered them on. It was fun.
After lunch we acknowledged those who had had birthdays in the previous three months. We called them up to the front, gave them a prettily wrapped cupcake and sang them the Brazilian birthday song, twice, each time clapping and singing faster and faster. The missionaries love these birthday mufins (one ‘f’) which I buy at McDonalds. They’re a cross between a muffin and a cupcake, unfrosted and less sweet, but big, sticky, and delicious. One American whose birthday falls in the coming three months will be going home just a few days before the next Multi-zone Conferences and will just miss getting a cupcake. He came up to me very seriously bargaining for the last unclaimed cupcake I still had in my basket. “I want that cupcake.’ he said. I quickly realized that he was serious and wouldn’t be put off, so I gave it to him. I’d been eyeing that cupcake myself, but I’m glad I had an extra one for him.
At the end of the day we loaded them up with their personal mail and packages that had been collecting for weeks in the mission office. Some hauled away bags full of things for their houses. Fans, and irons, pots and silverware, sandwich makers, toilet seat lids, even an ironing board went home on the buses with the missionaries. If I could, I’d send them home with the washing machines, and refrigerators, and ovens that they also need but alas, Marsh and I have to deliver those big items when we can. Finally we sent the missionaries off, hopefully better trained and full of new ideas and enthusiasm for their work and Marsh and I got ready to do it all over again three more times with the rest of our twelve zones.
