Last February in the mission field... where has all the time gone? This time last year I was only out 5 or so months, now it's 17... time is not on my side right now.

Been a good week for us. Our wards gave us a lot of names to go contact, and we've spent this week contacting them all. All of them set appointments for this week, but we're looking at like, 10+ new people to teach this week. Should be good. It's not been the most fun contacting them all, but that's the "work" in "missionary work", the finding.

Elder Witbeck's been a good comp so far. He's a follower for sure, he just goes along with the things I say to do. It's pretty annoying at times, I'm ready to be the follower again for once, but such is the way it goes. We get along pretty well, so I'm not complaining about it. He likes to play chess, and I've got a chess board, so that's been pretty fun. I'm better than him, but he'll catch me if I make mistakes.

I've got a question, This is something that's been troubling me a lot lately. I feel like I don't get along with our zone leaders. I just feel like the curve ball in the zone. They seem to have this vision about how the zone should be run, but my ideas are different. They're trying to tailor the district meetings to match that vision, but I don't completely agree with it. It just seems like everything they're trying to do I don't agree with and we butt heads. I don't want to just conform to them, doing that I would feel less effective since I don't believe in it, but I don't want to go against them since they are my zone leaders and the ones in charge of this area, it's a hard thing for me. Do y'all have any advice for me?

One example of things the zone leaders have done that I don't agree with. In the month of February they wanted our zone (8 companionships) to find 100 new investigators. It's possible, but as the month went on it wasn't looking like it was gonna happen. The last week of the month they called us and told us we needed to find 8 new investigators that week. They told us we should cut out less active work in order to have more time for finding. That's one thing I don't agree with. These less actives are just as important (more important depending on who you're talking to) as non members. I don't feel we should cut out that work in order to reach that number. Not that we had much work going on anyway, but I feel that's wrong to ask of someone. That's just one example of my differences with zone leaders. I want to repair our relationship, but I don't want to just conform to them. I've got some ideas, but any suggestions y'all have would be great.

There's a lot of good things happening though. I don't know if y'all know already or not, but they're splitting the Boise mission into 3! There's gonna be the Boise, Twin Falls, and Nampa missions being made outta this one. That's crazy! As far as we know, there's no other mission in the world being split into 3. 58 new missions worldwide, 17 of em in the states, and 2 of those are here. It goes into effect July 1st, so I'll have about 3 months or so with the new changes. Funny thing too is that one of the mission presidents is a President Cannon. about 1/3 of the mission will have 2 president cannons. But it's exciting to see the changes. They're looking at getting missionaries into 1-2 wards per companionship vs the 4+ that we have now. I'm really excited for it. That won't happen in my time, when the split comes we're gonna be split a little thin still I think, but it's exciting to see what's happening in this area.

I'm excited for this week. There's good things happening, both in the mission and our area. Let's keep up the good work!

Elder Blomquist