Happy Easter! What a great week it has been leading up to Easter. It has been so great to have Come Follow Me to use as a resource for our study this week on the Atonement and Resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I am so grateful for the testimony that I have that I can see my loved ones again some day and that through the Atonement of Jesus Christ I can someday return to live with my Heavenly Father again.

We are grateful that we are close enough to Tracey to be able to spend holidays with her. We had a yummy Easter dinner and finished it off with an Easter Egg shaped fruit pizza! Thank you Alyssa!

It has been an incredibly busy week as we continue to learn more about our duties. On Tuesday we had MLC (Mission Leadership Council) again and prepared a meal for 40 people. This time I prepared the dessert and made (4) pans of Eclair cake. My 1st real contribution to the meals! We picked up more cars in McMinnville and brought them back to the mission office. Then Elder Rowan had to prepare to switch the new cars with old cars. Just to show you how busy it was we were invited to dinner on Wednesday night with the other office couples. We were supposed to be there at 5:30 PM. We were in the office on Wednesday afternoon so that some more cars could be picked up and taken away for sale. We were working away and before we knew it, it was 5:50 and the phone rang. They wondered if we were coming to dinner! I have never in my life forgotten an appointment! To say we were embarrassed is an understatement. They were very kind and gracious and waited for us to arrive.

It was also Zone Conferences this week which are a big deal. We have (8) Zones in our mission and the conferences are spread out over 3 days in different locations. This time they were in Keizer, Salem, and Bend. They were Wednesday, Thursday, & Friday. On Wednesday it was local and we could come and go back to our apartment. But on Friday they were in Bend which is 3.5 hrs from here so after the conference in Salem on Thursday we drove to Bend to spend the night. We had (6) new cars to deliver to the missionaries in Bend so Elder Rowan was busy arranging drivers to take those as well as preparing for all he needed to do for car inspections. Car inspecions and giving a safe driving presentation are part of his responsibilities as Vehicle Coordinator. We began zone conference at 8:00 AM. All the missionaries were there with their cars with their hoods up. We gave them a clipboard with a car inspection sheet and they inspected their cars while we went around topping off windshield wiper fluid and checking the thread on their tires. We also looked for any visible signs of damage. The missionaries headed into meetings at 9:00 AM while we completed the rest of the inspections. It was cold out there and it rained some of the days (:. But it was a beautiful drive out to Bend and we look forward to going back out there and doing some exploring. :).

The zone conferences were amazing!! We loved seeing all the missionaries together and the spiritual maturity they expressed is inspiring! For this zone conference the missionaries were asked to prepare by reading a talk by Elder Dallin H. Oaks from October 1984. It is "Why Do We Serve?" The talk identifies (6) reasons why people serve. It was very thought provoking. The (6) reasons are: 1) Hope of an earthly reward 2) Personal desire to obtain good companionship 3) Fear of punishment 4) Sense of duty or out of loyalty 5) Hope of an eternal reward 6) Charity, the pure love of Christ

Obviously #6, Charity, the pure love of Christ, is our goal while we are here. This means that our service should be for the love of God and the love of fellowmen rather than for personal advantage or any other lesser motive. Right now I would say that I am somewhere between #5 and #6 so I have some work to do. Elder Oaks says that if we have difficulty with this idea we should follow the counsel given in Moroni 7:48, "Wherefore, my beloved brethren, pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart, that ye may be filled with this love, which he hath bestowed upon all who are true followers of his Son, Jesus Christ." I guess I know what I will be doing....