Elder Raia: Merry Christmas!

Elder Raia is doing well. . . Working hard and keeping busy. We can't believe his two years are winding down, and we are SO excited to talk to him on Christmas!!!!

I’m doing great! This week we had Zone conference and it was really good! We have the best missionaries in this zone! And we just talked to President this morning and were changing the mission a lot. Everything is going to a monthly bases rather than a 6 week bases. That means monthly splits, monthly zone conferences, and monthly interviews. I think it will really help our mission. Right now we are 17 baptisms a way from doubling last years baptisms and next year we want to do the same thing. 180 baptisms. So in order to do that, we need a change like this and all the missionaries need to step it up in all the phases of the work.

Some missionaries teach investigators just because they are told to. They teach them the message of the restoration because it’s in Preach my Gospel, which is a good thing, but not the best. Missionaries need to be teaching for the right purposes. They need to be teaching to the needs of their investigators. They need to be teaching because they want their investigators to come to Jesus Christ and to become happy. It sounds obvious but sometimes they become "robot missionaries".