SO JEALOUS THAT YOU WENT TO ITALY!

I honestly can't wait to go. Only 2 more weeks!!

Thank you for the package Cory!! And for your efforts as the president of the Coalition For Skinny Return Sister Missionaries. Luckily the moms of both of my companions seem to be members of the Coalition, so I have had good influences and think that so far, there is hope for me.

Thanks for the news about baptisms in the Milan mission, Mom! We have had so many lessons here in our zone about fearing not and ignoring rumors that we have heard from people about Italy going to be a hard mission where we won't teach anyone. I actually never believed that or was worried about it, so the teachers always bringing up that such rumors exist make me more worried than I would have been in the first place. We had a Zone Conference this past week and that was the main goal - to dispel fear that is put in our mind by Satan. I guess I owe you a big thanks, Mom, for making all us kids believe we can do anything and not really fearing anything ahead of us. There must be some other way that Satan is trying to get to me though...guess I better figure out what that is. There was one quote that they shared during the Zone Conference that I really did love, though, and that motivated me. Eyring has said that,"When you find out who you are, you will be sorry you didn't try harder." We all have sooo much potential as children of God, we just need to trust that we do. Also, someone mentioned that when we are making goals we need to not think about what we by ourselves can do, but what WE AND THE LORD can do together.

It was especially neat to hear that you saw they were baptizing Arabs in our mission. Mona just wrote me a letter and shared some awesome news about the church in the Middle East. Apparently Lebanon and Jordan were dedicated last week for preaching the gospel by Elder Holland, and the first district of the church was organized in Iraq. As excited as I am for all of this happening, I'm not sure I'll be much use for teaching Arabs anymore...yesterday in the TRC I told the lady we were teaching that I was studying Arabic before the mission and she asked me to say something to her. Honestly, the only thing I could sputter out was, "My name is Lauren and I am from Virginia," in Arabic. No matter how hard I thought, nothing was coming to mind. It was pathetic.

We have had some really great mission wide meetings this past week. Elder Perry spoke at the devotional last Tuesday. They never tell us who is speaking at the fireside in advance. When he walked in,though, as I am sure all of you have experienced before when in the presence of an Apostle, the spirit just overtook me. We always sing hymns for the 15 minutes before any entire mission meeting starts but I litereally couldn't sing because my heart was pounding so hard from the Spirit. I am sad to say that I didn't get a ton out of his talk because I was dozing in and out. I'm not sure why I was so tired that night...maybe that's how Satan is working on me!! The main thing that I liked was that he talked about praying for specific things...such as retentive powers to be able to remember the things that we have learned. I've definitely gotten better at praying for specifics since I have been here at the MTC. Although I don't have a huge pool of vocab to use (since we always say our prayers in Italian), I try really hard to make every single one of my 20+ prayers a day different and it has made a HUUUUge difference.

Oh man, there are so many thoughts from this past Sunday's mission conference that I want to share with you too, but there just isn't enough time! Maybe I'll hand write a letter. We have had some really great firesides, devotionals this week!