The new mission president is super cool!

First off, I'm so freaking jealous that you guys were all in Lake Powell! That's twice now that I've not been there and you all have been. Lake Powell is seriously like my favorite place on earth. Many of my fondest family memories come from our times there. I'm so happy that I'll get to go next year though! I hope you all treasure those great family times together because one day you'll be in my position where you can't go and you have to see everybody else make memories without you. I can't wait for next year Lake Powell!

So this past week we had our Zone Conference with President I and he's really cool and I'm super happy about the direction he's wanting to take the mission in. He presented a new key indicator which we just call the "Balance/ 555," which is super cool.

Basically, it just means that the idea is to have balance in our focus. As in, if we get an investigator lesson, we should also try to get an active member lesson and a less-active member lesson. If we have 2 in one category, we should try to bring the others up to 2 as well. The 555 thing came from another mission where the idea was to have 5 of each. Here, that's basically impossible. But the idea of balance is what we're focusing on, and that's totally possible.

President I is really trying to get the mission as a whole to focus on people instead of numbers. Before, we kept track of our hours finding and potential investigators received, which are good things to keep track of ideally, but many people took that as to just walk around for hours without really doing anything, or to take down numbers of crazy people or gypsies or just write down apartment numbers of people that weren't even really interested. Basically it just kind of stressed people out a lot and made many people just try to get as many hours outside as possible, which could lead them to neglect the members or other worthwhile activities in favor of getting hours to look good to president.

I liked the idea when President H introduced it, but lately it's just kind of proven to help only mostly superficially. But this new 555 thing really is going to help. Me and Elder D are already planning to do a lot and I'm really excited. This new direction just frees up our time to not have to worry about just contacting all day; instead we're supposed to spend our time having lessons, which historically has either not really happened, or people would meet with crazy people all the time just to put down that they had lessons. But man I just really like this idea.

I'll let you know what happens there!

Romania's great. A while ago a saw a guy using a buzz saw to cut a piece of tile in half. He was wearing flip-flops. His foot was right next to the saw. I just love Romania's IDGAF vibe. I'm pretty sure that's why they also build and insulate all their buildings with styrofoam:

 

Haha but no really things are going pretty well still. I'm just really excited for how the missions going and I really think things are going to start picking up!

 

Love all of you!

 

-Elder DeGraw

 

P.S. There was a Lunar Eclipse that I just happened to see and got a crappy picture of: