A Conviction That Leads Us to Love Our Heavenly Father and Others

Hahaha, thanks mom and dad for the letters. My aunts are so funny.... sending you a life size Elder Layton haha. It'd be cool to have a life size cardboard cutout of my family!!! I miss you all lots.

This morning we had to send reports to the offices with the numbers of the zone and about how the zone's doing. We do that every week, as with other things, but nothing really hard. Just work. Also this week we went to a Zone Leader conference where President and the Assistants taught us about our responsibilites, and after we ate pizza. Mmmm pizza.

This week has been crazy. I saw a ton of members from Ermitao. Several times in the street and also last night in the Christmas devotional, which was AMAZING by the way. My ward's a lot bigger now in Los Pinos. More people come than in Mt. Bachelor... well, I haven't been there for a while, but more than when I was there. We have several baptism dates for this Saturday.

I finally sent out my clothes.... I don't think I told you, but recently the people in the mission that washed our clothes was layed off so there was a ton of confusion in the changes and I just ended up washing by hand last week. The thing is... my companion helped me put em all out on the lines outside to dry and it turned out that that line wasn't clean.... so basically everything was dirty again. I'm good now I didn't die. Tomorrow I get clean clothes again.

The zone is doing good. We don't have very many baptism dates as a zone but they've put goals and we're going to have success. Elder Acevedo`s helping me a ton. He's been Zone Leader for a while now and he's been here in this area for a couple transfers so he knows what we have to do. I'm learning a ton from him, and trying to help as much as I can. Today we went and flew kites on top of a huge butte with the zone. YES!!!! It was so fun I just have to say. Also, an abandoned puppy on top of the butte pooped on one of the missionaries in the zone.....

I'd like to share with you something I've learned from my mission. It's conviction. When we believe in something or we want to acheive something before we can do anything....we have to believe we can do it. It's doesn't matter what it is. It's something I've learned from the Gospel too. Especially in repentance. During all the time in my mission I've had to change tons of things but what was the most important to me was that I had conviction to do it. I know the Lord doesn't only want us doing the motions for commitment. We have to have a conviction that leads us to love our Heavenly Father and others. Especially in Christmas, just like the brethren talked about last night, we should remember the pure love of Christ in every thing we do.

Mom, Dad, Nana, Eric, Curtis, hopefully you like the presents I sent home for you. It's extremely creative watch out.

I still haven't met the Bishop. They introduced my on Sunday and I went up and bore my testimony like normal. Bishop is traveling I guess. I did eat lunch in his house today. I've actually eaten there before about 5 months ago.

I'll tell you more about the experiences I'm having in sharing the gospel this week. I really still haven't gotten to know that much yet. All I know is that we have really awesome investigators and it's way to close to Christmas....not really let it snow let it snow let it snow. I think I saw it snow.... oh no, that's dust. Cool. Family, friends I love you soo much. Write me and I'll really try to write you back.

Love,

Elder Layton

(Brenda and I had lunch today with Seth Hurd today. Seth was just released from the Peru Lima North Mission and lives about 30 minutes away from us. He knows Sean very well. He related several amazing experiences and comments about the kind of missionary Sean is. I'll share one of those.

Elder Hurd was in Sean's first area when Sean arrived. Some of the Elders were getting fleas and flea bites. So they were given a spray that would take care of the problem. The thing was, it never made it to Elder Layton, who had been sleeping on the floor. He didn't complain too much and the spray didn't make it his way for 2 weeks.

By the time the Mission President's wife realized that something was wrong, Sean had over 700 flea bites on his body (I'm not sure how they knew that unless someone actually counted).

Seth shared a few other things with us that helped us to understand that Elder Layton is serving an honorable mission for the Lord.

It was good to be able to meet with Seth and to talk with someone who had just come back from Sean's mission and who had just been with him on Monday. Between that and the life-sized Sean cutout sent by his crazy aunts, we almost feel that he's home for Christmas this year. And we get the December 25th phone call too!)