It Has Been Sooo Long

Heyyyyy.  He lives!  Elder Blacker is surviving the office!  Sorry for the lack of communication, but I do honestly love talking to y'all!  If anyone wants to message me directly, here is my email.
chandler.blacker@missionary.org

I'm sorry if you have ever sent me a message and I never responded.  My pdays have been surprisingly busy lately with general conference and house fires, just the usual.  I promise that I'll get better at that.  My pday is changing just for today.  I'll be going back to saturdays.  We just wanted to have a zone pday with everyone.

Alright, now I can dive into what has been happening over the last 3 weeks.  Yeesh, I don't think I'll remember anything.  A big part of what I have been doing is helping with the zone conferences.  We had 5 in the last 3 weeks.  Every time we have a zone conference I have to set up the church with chairs and tables for lunch after, set up the audio system in the church, create the powerpoint presentations that the zone leaders and sister leaders use to talk, take photos during the whole conference, record the musical number, give a 30min presentation in the conference, edit all the photos I took, upload them to a google drive for all the missionaries, upload them to facebook, edit the musical number, upload it to the drive and facebook, and do every random task that president or anyone else has for me (such as buying sodas from the store, sending missionaries to the hospital, editing and adding videos to the presentations, or doing surprise phone audits on evil sinners).  So basically, it is a lot of work.

One really cool thing that we did over the last couple weeks is what we call the gira (pronounced 'he raw').  We travel to the 4 corners of the mission to hold zone conferences for the missionaries there.  This means packing up all my tech tools and things for a week long trip.  Paraguay is smaller than Texas, so even though I visited almost all of my mision, we only had to drive a total of about 14 hours to make a giant circle around the perimeter of my mission.  This was not a vacation.  It was a week of sleeping on the floor or sharing 4 matresses between 7 Elders, of going 48 hours with just one meal,  and of arriving past midnight just to wake up way too early.  It's quite fun.

This past week we had the opportunity of having Brother Littlefield from SLC with us.  He's no general authority or anything, but he did help us with the 'stats' of the mission.  How to improve in the little things and find more people and such.  On Wednesday, all the Zone leaders and Sister leaders were going to get together to hear Brother Littlefield speak.  Tuesday morning we were planning the meeting and Brother Littlefield said, "Oh, I'm not going to talk, I'm just here to watch how you guys do it."  Oof.  We had to plan a 3 hour conference in a day, and all the District leaders had to come as well (leaving us less than 24 hours to bring like 30 district leaders from all over paraguay into asuncion).  Kinda crazy no?  Well we did it.  I ended up talking for 30 min and it was pretty cool.

You know what?  I never realize how crazy my life truly is until I start writing these emails.  I mean, so much more has happened in these last 3 weeks that I can't believe it.  I just want to testify that when Christ is the center of our lives, we can do anything.  If we focus on Him as our roots, our branches will grow.

I am going to attach a lot of pictures that have nothing to do with what I just talked about.  Love y'all!

Elder Blacker







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