Week 42 Kinston, NC

Hello Friends and Family!

I am absolutely loving it here in Kinston. Kinston can be divided into two major parts. East Kinston, which is extremely ghetto, and West Kinston which has some fairly nice neighborhoods. Some how all of our investigators are in East Kinston. This area has a relatively high density of Mormons for North Carolina. There is at least one member in every neighborhood. We also do a ton of service here. Several times a week we help the city, or a thrift shop, or a member. The members here are absolutely incredible. We are fed almost every single night. 

We had zone meeting this last Friday and it was all about setting goals and how to reach a vision. I don't know why, but I really enjoyed it. In it we used Amalickiah as a great example of effective planning. As you read Alma 46 you can clearly see how Amalickiah's vision was to over-through the Lamanite king and take control of the kingdom. You also see some of his actionable items such as kill the king, gain favor of armies, and get the queen. It was pretty funny taking a generally bad example to teach a principle. 

Things I learned this week:

• All acts of faith are expressions of repentance to one degree or another.

• As I meet with someone for the first time, I soon come to an understanding of what aspect of the gospel they need to work on. It is neat being able to view others testimonies and help them strengthen it. 

• God has given us talents so we can help better the lives of others: I figured out how to productively program! There are almost 400 households in this ward and that would take at least 6 hours to type into the GPS. So instead of wasting 6 hours, I sat down for 1 hour and deconstructed the GPS Point of Interest code to see if I could recreate it. Then, I browsed the church website to see If I could get all of the members addresses. Turns out that there is no easy way to do this so I had to use the developer console to extract some JSON data from the server. Then I created a JSON to GPX converter that I could run in the developer console. Now if I am ever transferred again I can run my code and within 10 min download the entire ward roster onto the GPS instead of spending 4-6 hours! Not to shabby considering I never used Google or any unapproved website

I love y'all

-Elder Shill