January 8th

Përshëndetje familja!

Well another week down and New Year's is over. Luckily I'm also over my annual New Year's sickness.

Things are going well here. I'm loving serving with Elder Schneider. It's taking a little bit of adjustment, but he's a great missionary and I'm super glad we get to serve together again.

This week we've been pretty busy traveling and doing zone leader stuff so we haven't had as much time for regular proselyting, but we have had some good lessons. This week we had transfers in Tirana, two district meetings in Vlorë, and MLC in Tirana. MLC was so cool though, it's a meeting for all the zone leaders and sister training leaders with president and the APs and we got to discuss the state of the mission from last year, and set goals for the new year. Last year was a good year, but we're ready to kick things into gear and get even more done this year. Also it was fun because 6 of the 9 people in my original MTC district were there. So now we'll take the stuff we learned and apply them in zone conference this week. This conference Elder Schneider and I get to give our first trainings as zone leaders, it should be exciting.

As for work in our area, we were able to meet with Redi again. He was really busy with work over the holidays so we didn't see him for a couple weeks, but then we had a good lesson with him on Thursday. We're still working on getting him to accept a solid baptismal date, but we're meeting with him again today and we're having Vëllai Gjika come help us so it should be a really powerful lesson.
Because Elder Schneider was new here we decided to go and visit some of the members and see if they have any people that we can teach. So we got to meet with a few different people, and while we haven't gotten any referrals from it yet, they did commit to think about people they can talk to and share the gospel with.

I had a really cool experience this Sunday. The Stake President, President Mema, came down for church here this Sunday and bore his testimony. Then after church he took me on a split and we went to visit some members who have been offended by President Lewis and he talked to them. I was just there to show him where they lived, but I got to sit in as he talked to them, and it was so cool. I felt his love for them and I felt the power he holds as their caretaker appointed from God he was able to connect with them and to help them in a way we as the missionaries just can't quite do. It was amazing.

That's about it for me. It was a great week, we were super busy though so it flew by.

I love you all, have an amazing week!
Elder Gardiner