Mom,
The conferences were amazing. I learned so much from Elder Dyches as he spoke and as we got to know him. We traveled along with him throughout the South of England to all three of the Zone Conferences. It was quite the journey, with many a mishap along the way :) But, just as every travel plan extravaganza, there are always a few mistakes. Everyone got where they needed to be and the conferences went really smoothly.
He talked all about connecting our teaching to needs. I feel like I've been teaching wrong my whole life after the training that he gave. It's amazing how much power there is in really helping your investigators to know, each lesson, where you are going and what they are meant to understand. Sometimes we just dump information on them and expect them to pick out the points we know are important, and when they don't, we don't know what we did wrong. I learned that "How to Begin Teaching" needs to happen every lesson, and we need to tell people upfront our expectations and commitments for them at the beginning and at the end, when we actually commit them. I think that applies in any training circumstance, really; in the work place, the family, the classroom, and the mission field.
He also spoke a lot about our future after the mission. I'm really impressed with some of the things he explained and trained us on. He gave us training on how to extend a calling effectively, which I had never even thought about before. He taught us how training makes the world go round, and how every single phase of our life will involve us receiving or giving training. He had us name all of the things we loved about president Millar and his wife, then explained to us that these attributes were the things we needed to search for in an eternal companion. He also taught us that the thing we really needed to worry about was not so much searching for someone like this, but instead becoming someone like this, so that we are the attractive ones ;) Ha, dating advice from a 70.
I wish that I could tell you everything that I learned, but it was simply too much. The miracle of the week was that our Bishop called us the night before Sunday and asked us to emergency-speak on living the Abundant Life :) It was perfect, because we got the chance to regurgitate some of the incredible training tha twe had just received. It was soooooo good. We spent most of our time out of our area this week, so there should be an exciting week to come with our investigators, but for now I don't have much more to say on them.
I love you all, and pray for you regularly. Talk to you soon!
Love,
Elder Foster