Conference

So, here comes the weekly update.

I hope you all had an excellent conference weekend! I certainly enjoyed coming to hear the prophets speak, and a week of visiting and inviting people out to the sessions resulted in one of our investigators attending with her mother, who is a recent convert. I'm excited to get the conference edition Liahona and add that as one of my morning study resources. I particularly liked the Neil A. Anderson talk on how adversity helps us grow stronger.  that seemed to be a theme throughout the entire conference- to sand strong through adversity, defend your faith and be vigilant and diligent in striving to be a disciple of Christ. I also quite liked the Henry B. Eyring talk on how we have the opportunity to keep covenants, a them that was then reiterated in the Sunday morning session by what's his name, the presiding bishop. And of course, president Uchdorf almost stealing airforce one. that's always fun.

In all seriousness, if you missed any of the conference sessions or haven't watched the priesthood session yet, I would encourage you to take that opportunity. I found that as I listened intently and took notes, I was really able to not only feel the power of the testimony of the apostles, but extract specific, applicable counsel and promises. I particularly encourage you to obtain a Preach My Gospel manual as counseled by Elder Ballard, and to study from it, share your study with the full time missionaries in your ward and ask them about their study. The preach my gospel manual has an astonishing capacity to surprise me with seemingly new content every time I open it to study, and I can guarantee it will help you find simple ways to strengthen your own testimony, to share the gospel in everyday interactions with people, and to understand, cooperate and help the full time missionaries better.

I won't drag this email out since conference was more or less the only really exciting thing that happened this week (oh yeah actually transfer week, and elder spice and I are both staying in progresso another six weeks), but I will also share some particularly impactful scriptures I encountered while studying the book of Mormon in Spanish for the first full time. I found it interesting how the different order of the words made different verses pop out more particular to me: 1 nephi 13:11 and 15:37 are some of my favorite scriptures of the week.

Have a good one,

El. Backstrom