Emily sent us the following email on Monday, June 9, 2014:

Dear familia,

I am doing so much better with my companion!  Thank goodness! 

  

It's interesting because they keep having different zone training meetings and every meeting is supposed to change our missions and change our lives and change the way we teach.  I mean, they are sometimes moderately helpful.  It is good to focus on teaching simple and using the foyettos and such.  Our last one was just on Tuesday and from that they instructed us to always teach the first lesson just as a overview of what you will talk about in lesson one and find out what their doubt is so you can address that later.  This is good, but.....  Anyway.  It didn't really work that well in our zone or in the other zone that I had communication with.  The zone training meetings are interesting because they will be taught a topic by President Hall, and then they disperse to their respective zones and relay the message to us.  After relaying the message and the vision, they try to illustrate the point by having a role play.  They always ask people "who has an investigator with a  doubt?" and then they do their best to role play it and try to use their new "teaching strategies" to show how easy missionary work will be if we just apply these new principles. 

The biggest reason it all flopped was because they would try to have a companionship pin down a specific doubt for the investigator they had in mind.  Then they would have a companionship come in from the hall and have them teach them and try to identify the doubt.  Usually we can't tell you exactly what the investigator's doubt is because they don't even know what their doubt is.  The zone leaders were looking for doubts like: the authority never left the earth or God wouldn't call profetas in these days.  The investigators' doubts are more usually like: "but I'm Catholic" or "yes I know that Joseph Smith saw God and Jesus Christ and I really like my church and all churches are good."  Sometimes I think the hardest thing for them to understand is that the authority of God is an actual thing that has to be received in a specific way and then is stored by being held by a worthy male.  I think they confuse the spirit of God for the authority.  They think that if someone is "inspired by the spirit" then they definitely have that power and authority to act in the name of God.  That is how they think that all their baptisms are valid is because they believe and have faith in the men that are pastors at their churches. 

I have tried to make clear to people that the authority of God is not something that can be achieved or attained merely by study or by being a good person.  You cannot read the bible or start a church or be very faithful and have the authority to baptize.  You have to be given this permission by the laying on of hands by someone that already holds the priesthood.  Worthy males are the vessels that hold the priesthood and keep it present on the earth. 

They almost needed to identify the superficial doubt (as much as the investigator might know about their doubt) and then discover together what is the root doubt because root doubts are diagnosable.  We know scriptures and explanations for every "root doubt".  They didn't distinguish between superficial doubts and root doubts and for that reason ZTM was pretty rough. 

I love you so much and I will talk to you soon! 

Thanks for sending me a letter this week.  I loved getting it and I got it early enough that I could respond to it :)

I love you!  Talk to you really soon! :)

Love, Emma <3