Bednar

Well family this week was pretty stinking awesome, im not going to lie. First off, on saturday was super sick! We had a conference with our whole mission so i got to see all the guys that i used to live with and stuff and the guys from the mtc and stuff so it was really cool. Then our conference was in the institute building in Santo Domingo. So what happened is, they opened up two rooms in the institute building and then our whole mission fit in their and i sat on the 2nd row of chairs. And this conference first off had Elder Bednar, Bishop Mcmullin from the presiding bishopric, Elder Gonzalez from the presidency of the seventy, Elder cornish from the seventy, and another elder from the seventy that i cant remember his name. and they all sat down in front of us 200 elders and gave us a conference. Elder Bednar said this might be the only time in your life that we will sit with this many general athourities, with only this many people, so yeah it was pretty cool. Well Bednar had some really cool stuff to say, basically he didn´t give a talk he gave a guided discusion and taught us how to teach better. He said so many times in the social aspect of the church we do something stupid and that is, we ask questions with selected answers already in our head. Like in our classes at church someone will point someone out and ask what are the three points of the baptismal covenant, and even if someone knows the answer they usually get nervous and cant remember. He talked about how the spirit can not go forth and teach in situations like that. He showed us by example, questions that we should ask. Questions that are more broad that reallly get people thinkning and questions that let the spirit teach. He said that we aren´t the teachers, that the spirit is the teacher. We need to go and take them the message and then get out of the way and let the spirit touch their hearts. Then he also talked about spiritual gifts. He specifically talked about faith and to obtain faith is a spiritual gift that God gives. We cant just pray for faith and get it. God has to have confidence in us first and then he will give us spiritual gifts. He also opened it up to questions at the end and that was really cool. He explained about about when president monson was called to be a prophet and the whole process, and how he knows without a doubt that president monson is the prophet. And at the end he bore is Apostolic testimony of the truthfulness of the gospel and the restored church of Jesus Christ. He said its all true, all of it. And when he bore his testimony it was so powerful, all of us were blown away by the spirit. My eyes started sweating a little bit, and i was like oh man i can´t be tearing up right now, but as i looked around at the other elders and my mission president and everybody in the room had some tears in their eyes it was super powerful. He said at the end that we have the same scriptures as him and that we kind find the same answer as him. He said that is one of the reasons they all came, to show us that we dont need a general athority to answer our questions that if we truely study it out we can find the answers ourselves to the questions we have. Then on sunday our stake had a conference with Bishop Mcmullin and he promised some great blessings to the people hear in the Dominican Republic, that as they keep the comandments and our faithful they will recieve all of the promises that he gave, and they were great promises. So yeah that was my week it was a pretty good week. I hope everything is going really well back home and that you all just keep rocking it. I love you all.
Elder Wadman