Hermana Bingham's Adventures in San Jose: Sister's Training

Hey there family!

It's been an awesome week! Sounds like you had a great one as well. Lots of fun things going on. Mom, I love those patterns of light videos. They are the best. It's a great talk.

So this week was awesome. We started off by having Zone Conference on Tuesday, which knocked out a good chunk of our day because it was up in San Jose. But it was awesome. We had a big Q&A panel, so we could ask whatever we wanted and members of our mission presidency and their wives and President and Sister Watkins would give us advice. We talked a lot about school, marriage, and family and it was really good. We got lots of good advice.

And then on Saturday we had a sister's training for all 107 sisters in our mission. We went up to San Jose, and had a full day (9-3) of speakers, activities, lunch, being edified, seeing old friends... It was really fun. I got to spend a lot of the day with Sister Kofford, because we were divided into groups and she was in mine. She says she thinks about living with you guys more and more often. She's seriously considering it. But we'll let you know when she gets all the for sure details figured out. It was fun. We had a special guest speaker, which was none other than Elaine S. Dalton! It was so cool, because she was the general YW's president when I was in young woman's. She kept saying how lucky she was to get to come talk to "her young women." She is so amazing. We all stood up and recited the young woman's theme, and she talked about how we are daughters of our Heavenly Father, and because we know that, and we are members of His church, we carry His light. And people see that light. Even if they don't know who we are, they see our light. She told us we are NOT ordinary, we are very special, and that we were reserved for now, according to the foreknowledge of God (Alma 13). That before this life we were kept in Heaven and prepared for right now---for this time we have on early. And then she talked about how we were saved because of our testimonies. We all know that we fought and WON a war of words in the premortal existence. We won the war with our testimonies of Jesus Christ. And we were all saved for this point in time because of those testimonies. We are to do here, exactly what we did there. Fight with our testimonies to bring our brothers and sisters back to our Father in Heaven. And we are able to do that because of our faith. We have to let Him lead us by the hand. She also told us a story of some young women that she met in Africa. They were talking about some of the challenges that they had, what their lives were like, who they were, and then Sister Dalton asked them what the most challenging thing about being a young woman in Africa was. And they were silent. She said that usually when she asks that question, girls shoot up their hands with answers like modesty, or language that you hear at school, or drugs... stuff like that. But these girls were quiet. So she asked again. And they were still quiet. Finally, one of them stood up and said, "Yes it is true, we have many challenges. But Sister Dalton don't you know? We have the restored gospel of Jesus Christ." How amazing is that? Yes we have challenges, but we have the restored gospel. I challenge each of us to have that attitude. life may be hard. We may have trials and burdens. But always remember, that we have the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. And with that, we can do anything.

I love you all, and hope you have a fantastic week. Always remember how lucky you are to have the gospel. There are so many people out there that don't.

Love,

Hermana Bingham