With great knowledge comes great responsibility...

The subject of this letter pretty much tells the story of what this week was like and what I learned most. For my brief spiritual message we were told by a speaker this week that our time is the one of the most precious gifts that God has given us. How we use is it is how we show God how committed to being a Disciple of Christ we are. The more we choose to take those 5 minutes we have sitting around somewhere and study his word or find someone that you can go and make their day the more we show our willingness to be as Christ.

Moving forward this was the hardest week that we have had most likely because of some things that happened. The first thing that comes to my mind was the teachers coming and sitting down with me and Elder Cox and telling us that our Zone has a lot of things that they need to work on and that they don't want to be the ones to bring it up so they asked us to lead a meeting where we were supposed to practically chastise our Zone..... HAHAHAHA what a terrible assignment!!! We were worried because we didn't want to come off in a way that would offend people but the teachers brought up some really good points and so we starting game planning for how we could make that happen. In the end we lead a group discussion about how our goal is to be like Christ and that to get there we all need to focus on not getting comfortable and always working to better ourselves. It turned out way better than expected and I felt like the Elders and Sisters in our Zone in the end taught me way more about being Christ-like than We taught them.

Also this week was our first full week as Zone leaders and I had not idea that the mission would include answering so many calls on the phone they gave me having to do with insurance and winning awesome sounding vacations to Hawaii. hahaha but Being zone leader is almost exactly how I thought... practically nothing different with my day to day service here but it's fun.

I got to see Elder Herd here this week along with Elder Taylor and a lot of others from Davis High. It feels so weird to see all of them here because sometimes I feel like I am seriously back in school just going from class to class in some super extreme uniform but alas deep down I know that in less than two weeks I'll be on a plane to Africa. How crazy is that!! 13 days is what it sounds like. We haven't gotten our official travel plans yet but we get it this week and from what we have been told it sounds like we will be leaving Sunday the 13th of August. I am so excited to go and have the opportunity to come to know these people that I have been coming to love more and more each week. One of our devotional speakers advised us to pray for the people in our mission every night and now I feel such a connection with people that I don't even know yet. I know that I won't be able to communicate very well but I just want to be able to try.

It's getting harder and harder to write these emails at the MTC because I feel like the days are all mushing together and I honestly can't even remember exactly what happened this week. I think things are starting to feel a bit repetitive (yeah I know I stink at spelling) !##$#$@#$

quick side story that is sooo important.... I found out his week that when I was asked to spell doughnut for the group and I went up and spelled it the way I have MY WHOLE LIFE: Donut. AND GUESS WHAT that's how it is spelled in Portuguese so obviously my call was definitely divine. Okay side story over but I really do love it here but I am also extremely ready to move on to the next step. I'll keep on moving along here and I can't wait to tell yall when I'm heading to Mozambique next monday!

-Elder Thornton