Not too much going on.

Hey Family,

Ok, this week has been a little different form last week. Transfers were all worked out and went smoothly, and we got all the new missionaries oriented and are getting into the flow of things. This week were are just beginning our big push of meetings right at the beginning of the transfer. Yesterday we had zone leader's council. We spent a lot of time preparing for it and for zone conference this weekend and so I was going a little bit crazy being in the office for such a long time. However, the meeting went really well it actually surprised me. The spirit was really strong and there was such a strong feeling of unity and brotherhood among all of the zone leader's. I gave the longest presentation of my life... it was planned for about 35 minutes and i ended up taking about 40 minutes, talking about how planning is the key to a consecrated day- it was hopefully pretty interesting though, we had a lot of discussion and we had a short role-play where the zone leader's corrected each other's planners from early on in their missions. We had a big shock at the end of president Eyre's talk in the middle of the meeting he pulled out a big newspaper article with the face of Barack Obama (spelling?) on it and started talking about how the new president was being inaugurated at just that moment (because it was tuesday just a little bit before 12:00. Then he basically said that the U.S. has played an integral part in the history of the church, and its policies today continue to affect by where we are allowed to preach the gospel. Though we have more members outside of north America, most countries still associate our proselyting work with the united states, probably because most of the proselyting missionaries that would be able to go to a new country would be from the states. So he offered a pray to help President Obama essentially to help world relations in order to open more countries to the gospel. (Especially since the recent trend has been a lot of negative world opinion to the U.S.) I'll admit that at first I was kind of shocked (he told us he had a surprise but gave no hit to what was going on in any of our planning meetings) but once he started praying for the opening of other nations it made more sense and I started to understand why. Well thats just a random bit of new concerning the inauguration up here. The rest of the meeting continued to go really smoothly. It was all really focused on how we can become better leaders, on ways to inspire the zone leader's to reach farther and do more and we had a lot of good insights. Now we are just doing some preparation and then we are going to have a zone conference tomorrow another one on Friday and then the one after that will be on Tuesday. After each zone conference we are going to be on travels and we will be traveling saturday as well. The Tuesday conference is out in the country zones, where I spent the first year of my mission. The furthest country zone, which is really hard to go on travels(exchanges) with hasn't been traveled in awhile so we are going to spend the entire week out there and travel the entire zone right in a row. I imagine that it is going to be pretty exhausting but fun. Other than that life is pretty normal, going to buy some new shoes today because mine are becoming impossible to shine, and I'm gonna get a haircut. Its gonna feel really good. I hope everyone stays warm and healthy and I will talk to everybody soon!

Love Elder Olson...