dear family,
how is everybody? i'm sorry to know that mom's knees aren't doing to hot. that schmells. i'd give you both of mine in a heartbeat if i could, mom. today and tomorrow is zone conference. we had an excellent role play with the assistants this morning and i had a good interview with president skelton early this afternoon. he just asked me how training was going and we chit-chatted a little bit. he said that we were going to have an intense training tomorrow. he's really been pushing us to have more baptisms because they have been extremely low throughout the mission lately. we have to set for august 9th, but after that we don't really have anybody who is really going to make their date =(
this week was amazing! it was the by far the best week (as far as numbers go) of my mission. we have things called "key indicators" that we tally up at the end of the week and report to the district leader at the end of every week. these things include lessons taught to investigators with a member present (president skelton set the zone standard at 8 weekly), other lessons (i think 25 is the zone standard), referrals received and contacted (zero received and 10 contacted ZS), new investigators (10 ZS), and lessons taught to/with recent converts/less active members (7 or 8 is the ZS). we also set our own goals for every week in addition to the zone standards and we always set our goals fairly high so that they will push us. i've never had a week when we've met all of our goals... until this one. we didn't just meet them, we absolutely blew them out of the water! we had 16 member present lessons, 39 other lessons, 10 contacted referrals, 20 new investigators, and 12 recent convert/less active lessons. to add to that, we had 10 investigators come to sacrament meeting! how did we do it? MEMBERS. we had a member at almost every appointment this week. i don't really know how the others got so high, but when you get a lot of member present lessons, everything improves. it's amazing. it took a lot of prayer and work, but we finally are seeing a fire for the missionary work with our members.
so how's everybody else doing? how's tj and kimberly's little one coming along? is kimberly big? send me some pictures of her. i bet my belly is bigger than hers. i really am getting so fat! i wasn't able to do morning exercises friday, saturday, or sunday! so i did some hard core running and 6:15 this morning to make up for it. i really am thinking that i wanna try and play ball somewhere when i get back.
the language is slowly coming along. i don't get to speak it very often, because whenever you speak malay to anyone hear, they always answer you in english. my speaking is getting pretty decent, but on the rare occasion that somebody does respond in malay, i can't understand hardly anything. i love west malaysia though and i wouldn't mind at all if i spent my whole mission here. (knock on wood).
so i saw a preview for batman... awesome! as elder vanpelt from 'the best two years' said, "this is trunking me out of my mind!" i can't wait to see that movie. i also saw a preview for hellboy 2 (which also looks sweet) and some movie called hancock with will smith. let me know how those are. i can get them here on dvd for like two ringgit if you want them. they've been selling them here in the street markets for weeks now. there's a lot of bootleggers here.
tell whitney i am so sorry her package didn't get there. tell her not to worry though; i punched one of the mail men in the face for her. well, physically i didn't, but it's the thought that counts right?anywho, hang in there mom. i'll be praying especially for you in the upcoming weeks. tell everyone i say hello.
love,Elder troxel
ps. my visa run is on the 5th of august, so if you have anything else you want to send to me, that needs to be done ASAP. (beef jerky)
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