Hiya Elder Valentine (January 9)

Hi dad!

I think that is such an awesome idea to get the youth involved in teaching and doing family history work. It's funny because even though I had been going to mission prep and I had been studying Preach My Gospel etc., I realized when I got into the MTC all the steps to teaching and following the Spirit don't come through study, but through doing! Practice! Real lessons! So to give the youth the opportunity to teach will do SO much good for them. That's awesome!

Zone Conferences - we'll get two or three zones together and We'll start with a hymn and a prayer, then President Amorim will always go through his "agenda" for the meeting with us so we know what's going to happen. Then he will take 10-15 minutes and let missionaries ask him any question they might have about the work or just stuff in general - rule clarifications, questions about teaching situations, his ideas on a good way to teach, whatever.  Then we will have 1-2 hours where President will teach us what he wants us to focus on for the next little while. Our last zone conference, he had everyone stand up, look at all the other missionaries, and then asked "what do you see?" and people answered "servants of God" "good young men and women serving selflessly" "humility" "love for god" etc. and then he went through a bunch of new testament scriptures that talked about judging righteously and unrighteously. Then he will talk about how we are doing with mission goals about baptisms or whatever, and we'll talk about the next month or two and what he wants to see. Then we will do a practice on a topic or teaching principle that he thinks we need to learn as a mission (ex. The second lesson (plan of salvation) as a topic, "using the scriptures" as a teaching principle). Then he will give a last message with his wife, usually about faith or hard work or something showing how we can accomplish everything we talked about in the meeting, and testify of it.

 That's like a pretty basic outline of a zone meeting! If you have any other questions I'd love to answer, because I was just thinking about doing it with youth and some fun ways you could apply it and I think it would be super awesome.

Wow, busy life! You're insane! What kind of stuff do you have to prepare for RootsTech? And in your meetings at work, what do you talk about every day? Haha it seems like you're just always in meetings and that you should run out of stuff to talk about. What do you do? Actually yeah, what do you do at work? I know you're the senior vice president of records and partnership relations or whatever, but what does that entail for you?

Okay, that's about it for now, I guess! Love you dad!

- Elder Valentine!