New Mission President

Family and others creepin! How's it going. I'm doing pretty well. Watching mormon.org videos as usual about a mom who likes quilting .. now the video is getting sadder .. something about a little boy dying. Ahh .. this is sad now. Anyways , haha , I'm doing good. Happy , healthy. ...this video is greatly distracting me. And kind of depressing , haha. So we're here in Urdaneta again. It's always been one of my favorite cities because he's kind of big and really clean. Our area is only 20 minutes away , so that's fortunate. I guess I'll just run you through this week. Tuesday we had our zone gathering and district meetings. After all their district meetings we gathered together as a zone and discussed our zone focus' and what me and Elder Bermejo have in mind for them for this upcoming transfer. What it is to emphasize and so on. We've got a pretty sweet zone , including Elder Iray [past companion] Elder Nieman [past kabahay] Elder Mayes and Elder Tolman [assistants] and many many others. Later that day we taught some lessons and nothing too exciting happened. The next day , Wednesday , was the spiritual highlight of the week. We had a tri-zone conference in Urdaneta to meet the new mission president [oh also we had run into them in the grocery store last monday after I emailed. haha , super super kind and really funny.] So me and Elder Bermejo were in charge of getting the chapel ready for the conference. It started at 11 and immediately we were just slapped with a spiritual meeting. After singing and stuff Sister Monahan got up to bear her testimony and oh man does she have a strong spirit. I have no idea why but it was just a solemn moment. So powerful. Afterwards while we were like trying to recover from just the few words she shared President Monahan got up and delivered a sermon by the Spirit , completely without notes or anything , on prayer. Just whatever came to his mind. He's an incredible speaker and gave a terrific address. Along with that he introduced himself and gave us a bit of a background. After that we had like a 20 minute question and answer thing where we could ask a lot of personal and family questions to get to know them. So all in all we pieced together that he's from Arizona , served in the Air Force Band back after high school and was transferred to the Philippines where he met Sister Monahan who was the daughter of a colonel or something. Sister Monahan had always been a member but President Monahan was a recent convert of only a few months when they met. They were then married legally in Baguio [there was no temple yet in the Philippines and they couldn't get permission to leave the country] and then I forget where they were sealed , Salt Lake City maybe. Since then he studied law and BYU and has practiced and taught law. Written a couple books I think and a number of gospel articles and many poems. If you can track down his name I'd google it and see what he's published , he's so intelligent. Also he was a stake president before receiving the call. He said a number of things during his opening talk that I loved including "the way I live my life I expect and deserve to receive revelation" and "never ask a question unless you know the answer" those were the opening two things I liked. After the question and answer portion he then taught US the doctrine of Christ. I'm telling you he's brilliant. His opening portion was on FAITH vs. COMPLIANCE. In referring to our obedience and struck home with so many missionaries. Faith is related to obedience and when we use loop holes in the mission but still obey the rules we're no longer exercising faith but simply complying. Meaning we no longer love the reason for the commandment or law nor who gave it. It was so powerful. Not to mention he quoted from memory a number of scriptures and expounded in a way no one had ever thought of. Hahaha honestly it felt like we were being schooled by an Apostle. Then he went through the rest of the Doctrine of Christ and closed. Wow ... it's hard to describe how good it was. Best of all he is strict , haha. There's so much that missionaries get away with here in the mission , but President Monahan basically has a three strike system. He calls it his trust boxes. The first trust box is large and you can move around where ever within. The second box gets smaller when you leave the first box. And when you leave the second box you get the third , which is an airplane ticket home haha. He's awesome. The last thing I loved that he said was about self-control and obedience.  "The more control from within , the less control from without" . I think that's all I can say about that meeting ... just so good. Not to mention he hugged every missionary on the way in ahaha. He's so so nice and way funny , but knows when the be serious. I will miss Sister and President Jensen so much because they still feel like my parents here , but we're very lucky the have the Monahans. After the meeting we were invited , along with the assistants and a few others , to have lunch with the Monahan's at shakeys. Apparently there are Shakey's in america because Pres. Monahan used to eat there all the time in Texas he said.  Anyways that was the highlight of the week. Thursday was okay , Friday we had exchanges which were okay , Saturday we gave a workshop and held a training meeting for all the ward mission leaders in the Urdaneta Stake. Sunday was good church and now it's Monday. I'm out of time now or I'd write more , but that's really all worth knowing for this week. We're really happy to have them here. Last note - please tell me whose gotten letters lately , because I sent one home to be given to Bishop Keller but no mention so far so I don't know if it's arrived. Also - please tell Travis to email me and he owes me a letter ASAP. Haha please annoy him every time to you see him!  Love you all, -Elder Austin White  NOTICE: This email message is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message.