Zone Conference and More

We drove to the Brandon Stake Center for today's zone conference.  Three zones were included, Sarasota, Brandon, and Lakeland.  We don't have much interaction with the Brandon and Lakeland missionaries, so we don't know them as well.  However, with the transfers around the mission, we know at least some missionaries in every zone.

President Cusick spoke about how their missions are the MTCs for the rest of their lives.  They will use the skills they develop on their missions when they return home and start school, careers, families, etc.  He said that we need to change a bit each day and get a little better.  Sister Cusick spoke on prayer.

When Pres. Cusick introduced the training on the core 7 topics, he said that we would have 5 minutes.  We immediately knew we were in trouble.  We had worked to get our presentation down to just over 6 minutes, which is the amount of time we thought we would have.  So we tried to make a couple of changes, but it still took us 6 minutes for our presentation.  Fortunately, we were not the only ones to go over the 5 minutes.

I thought the presentations were good.  After each presentation, Pres. Cusick followed up by asking what action items the missionaries had thought of related to the presentation/topic.  They had some good ideas.  At the end of the meeting, President Cusick reminded them that the training would have been wasted unless they took something away for their improvement.

Renee had mentioned to some of the missionaries that today was my birthday.  So the missionaries sang "Happy Birthday" to me at lunch.  Two of the sister missionaries gave me this birthday card:

Here are most of the missionaries at the zone conference.

The Sarasota Zone

The Brandon Zone

Following the zone conference, we drove to Clearwater where I had a baptism interview.  So it turned out to be a very long day.