Hello family! Things are going well over here. I´m enjoying the mission. I feel like I´ve finally got the hang of balancing our time in the office and the area.  In my extra time in the office, I like to make graphs so that I still feel productive. In our mission we have 4 standards of excellence: Baptism dates, church attendance, progressing investigators, and new investigators. I wanted to see which of those key indicators affected baptism most. So I added up all the standards of excellence for 9 areas over the last year and a half. Then I compared that to the number of baptisms they had. Then I made a scatter plots, and took the lines of best fit. The more horizontal the line is, the more the key indicator affected the number of baptisms. If the line is vertical, it hardly affected it at all. So, I found out that the key indicator that most affected the baptisms was new investigators. Then came church attendance. Then progressing. Then baptism dates. I also looked at the history of my area. I have all the numbers back until the beginning of 2013. The standard of excellence for new investigators per week is 12. With the exception of one week, our area had never gotten that many. It´s not that our area´s a really hard area, but I think that past secretaries have that because we´re in the office it´s ok if our area doesn´t do as well. But that is not true. We´ve started working a lot harder in our area. A little while ago Elder Alonzo, an area seventy, visited us. One of the things that he taught was that if we work harder, we achieve more. He said that if we think we´re working harder, but we don´t achieve more, we´re not working harder. I have come to know that that is true. So, we´ve started to work harder, and we´ve achieved more. Two weeks ago we found 14 new investigators. Last week, even though it was changes week, we found 12. That was truly a challenge. Monday through Thursday we had barely spent any time in the area and had taught only one lesson. But we worked like crazy on the weekend and were still able to achieve it.  So statistics are somewhat limited, and numbers are just numbers. But they help up focus more and they do help motive us to work harder. I´m pretty much out of time so this might be it for today. Mom asked me to explain how we find people to teach, but I´ll explain that next week. Just remind me. I love you all! Elder Hilton

We are learning how to follow the spirit.

September 18, 2015

Dear family, 

This was a good week. We are learning how to follow the spirit. We´ve been trying really hard lately to listen to the spirit and to live in such a way that nothing impedes its presence. This week I´ve felt it more strongly than before in the mission. It´s a really big blessing: we know where to go, where not to go, what to say, what not to say, and we know right away if we´re doing something wrong. The spirit is so important. Without it, we cannot really be missionaries. We can do the things that missionaries do, but we can´t truly be missionaries.

I´ve realized that if I didn´t have the gift of the Holy Ghost, I would be a different person. For example, sometimes as missionaries we get really tired, and we just want to rest. But we can´t, because we have a work to do. If we give in to those desires and slack off when we should be working, the spirit leaves, right away. But the harder we work, the strong the spirit is. I personally prefer to have the spirit, so that´s why I work hard.

We´re struggling a little bit with our area. We are able to find new investigators, but whenever we come back for the second appointment, they always make excuses, like there´re busy or something, or we just never find them again. So that´s the current issue with our area, but we keep working hard, and we keep feeling the spirit. That´s what makes it all worth it.

M still says he wants to be baptized, but not until next year. And recently we haven´t been able to find M.

So last time I said I would tell you a bit about what I do as a secretary.

The general secretary is responsible for everything “general.” That is to say, everything that is not handled by the financial secretary, migration secretary, or the records secretary.

My duties as general secretary include but are not limited to:

·         Making Reports

·         Buying/distributing materials

·         Managing Referrals

·         Obtaining legal documents (birth certificates, marriage/divorce documents, etc.)

·         Sorting/distributing mail

·         Managing phone numbers, making the directories, etc.

Well, in short, that´s what I do.

Well, I love you all! Thanks for everything!

Elder Hilton

Share the gospel! Be missionaries!

September 11, 2015

This week I was studying in Preach My Gospel chapter 9. That chapter starts with this sentence: "The doctrines and principles in this chapter will strengthen your faith tha the Lord is preparing people to receive you and the restored gospel. He will lead you to them or he will lead them to you." Then it lists some scriptures to show how the Lord is preparing his children to recieve the gospel.

1. Alma 13:24  For behold, angels are declaring it unto many at this time in our land; and this is for the purpose of preparing the hearts of the children of men to receive his word at the time of his coming in his glory.

2. Alma 16:16-17 the Lord did pour out his Spirit on all the face of the land to prepare the minds of the children of men, or to prepare their hearts to receive the word which should be taught among them at the time of his coming—That they might not be hardened against the word, that they might not be unbelieving, and go on to destruction, but that they might receive the word with joy

3. D&C 84:88  And whoso receiveth you, there I will be also, for I will go before your face. I will be on your right hand and on your left, and my Spirit shall be in your hearts, and mine angels round about you, to bear you up.

4. D&C 136:33 For my Spirit is sent forth into the world to enlighten the humble and contrite, and to the condemnation of the ungodly.

After reading those scriptures, I asked myself some questions:

1. Do I believe that there are angels at this very time in my area preparing people to receive the gospel? 

2. Do I believe that the Lord has poured out his spirit upon the people of my area? 

3. Do I believ that there are angels around us supporting us?

I´d like to say that I have have faith in those principles, but that faith could definitely be stronger. We can develop faith by experiment, as Alma teaches us. We can experiment upon these things by following the principles we are taught in Preach My Gospel.

Also, the way that people are most frequently prepared to receive the gospel is through the members...you guys! Share the gospel! Be missionaries!  You can be the angels that so many people that are wandering looking for the truth need.

I thought you guys would like to get to know my mission president better. This is his Mormon.org  profile, complete with a video: https://www.mormon.org/me/7c2m

I´m pretty much out of time for today, but now that I´ve got some time here, I can more succefully explain what I do as a secretary. So I´ll try to talk about that next time. If you´ve got questions about that, send them to me.

I love you all! Thanks for all your support!

Elder Hilton

Things are finally calm again

September 4, 2015 

Dear family,

Things are finally calm again. The busyness of changes are over. But it will be back in a few weeks. Time seems to go by so much faster in the office. 6 weeks seemed like a lot more time before I came here. Maybe it´s because our work is centered so much around changes. 

Change week (week 1): sooo busy. 

Week 2: recovering from changes. 

Weeks 3-6: preparing for changes.

Then the cycle repeats again. 

We have two pretty positive investigators now: M and M.

M came to church a few weeks ago. He also went to a baptism service. He´s reading the Book of Mormon. And he´s praying. He says that he can´t fall asleep at night because he´s thinking about it so much. He says he´s sure that he wants to be baptized, but he wants to wait. He´s thinking about being baptized next year. We´re working on that. We think that the problem is the way he´s praying. In his prays he just says "give me understanding" and stuff like that but he doesn´t specifically ask "Is the Book of Mormon true?" or "Was Joseph Smith a prophet?" I think that once he does that, he´ll be able make a decision.

M also wants to be baptized. His challenge is that he´s trying to stop drinking. He´s been drinking almost his whole life. But he´s trying to drop it.

Dad asked when I first heard the "music of the gospel." I honestly can´t think of when I first heard the music. I think that´s because I had such great parents. I´ve been reading the Book of Mormon ever since I was born because we always read together as a family, every day. We always prayed as a family. We always had our family home evenings. There was a big focus on the temple. I was taught how to read the scriptures daily, how to do family history, etc. The list goes on. Our home is truly a holy place. I´d say that that is was mostly what made the difference for me. So I suppose that in order to strengthen the youth you need to strength the parents.

Well, I love you all!

Elder Hilton.

Elder Barwick says hi.