New opportunities to learn

December 16th

Okay, this week was pretty busy!

It seems like this whole week I've been scrambling to get stuff done. This week we had zone conferences and it was the last week of the transfer, so there was a lot to do! Planning announcements, organizing how and when the missionaries will get to the conferences, missionaries  losing documents the day before they go home, finishing up the t-shirts (turned out pretty good! Ill send a pic of them to the Sync this week), getting the returning missionaries' plans ready,  buying tickets, etc. But, busy weeks are good weeks!

Monday should be a pretty packed day as well. Normally, we send the returning missionaries home on Monday and get the new missionaries on Tuesday, but for some reason with Christmas being close the MTC decided to send the new missionaries on Monday as well. The group going home will be the biggest group that President Scholz sends on his mission! We're all a bit anxious to see how it'll go. Yesterday I also got an email from the church in São Paulo that didn't have super good news. Brazil came out with a new law with registering foreigners in the country a few weeks ago, but the problem is that they didn't tell anyone what it means or how to use it.... so pretty much all the federal police stations in the country are sitting around not knowing what to do, and they're all scared that if they renew a visa or something the wrong way they'll get in trouble, so they just decided that they won't renew visas until they know what's going on. Doesn't make a lot of sense, but that's the situation. So, because I'm in charge of making sure that all the foreigners are legal to stay this causes me a few problems. The email that I got said that one of the missionaries that we will get on Monday wasn't able to get registered at the MTC, to they're going to send some documents with him so that we can try to register him here. He has 30 days since the day he got into the country to get registered and he got here on the 21 of November so he's running out of time quick! I've never had to do a full registration of someone before, so... we'll see how it goes I guess!

This week I rediscovered BYU talks. When I first got into the office I was listening to them a bunch as I was working, but for some reason I stopped! But Elder Dwain reminded me in an email to start listening to them again! He told me about a really good one, called "A Law of Increasing Returns" by Henry B. Eyring. It talks about how many times, it seems like we work super hard and try to be obedient but it doesn't seem to pay off and the promised blessing don't come. It's awesome and you guys should check it out! 

We're starting a new transfer, I'll have a new district, and new opportunities to learn. Looking forward to what it brings! Thanks for the support that I always get from you guys, and have a great week! Love you!

Elder Odom