Zone Conference

Hey y’all, hope you had a good week. We had a few highlights this week.
ZONE CONFERENCE:
   On Thursday at 9am was our ZC.  We had to pick up the Elders in downtown Chattanooga because they are on bikes, so we left our apartment at 7:30 that morning to pick them up and headed to our church building. Luckily, the Cookeville zone came down here this time, or else it would have been a pretty early morning.   
  

   We had a really good conference. Our Zone conferences usually go from about 9AM to 3-4PM or so.  Most of the time is spent in the chapel hearing training from President and Sister Pickett, the APs, and other missionaries.  This time we also had a big tracting role play through the halls, so that was fun I guess.  We also split up as Zones into separate rooms for a portion. One zone has an open discussion about goals and such while the other gets training from the office staff. They go for 45 minutes then switch.  After the conference is over, the District Leaders from the 2 zones, as well as the APs and President Pickett have a meeting, which I think is a really good meeting.  But it is always good to see good friends I’ve made on the mission at these events.  A couple good buddies gave their departing testimonies, which was cool. I also had both of my 'sons' there, so we took a picture, haha.
  

Elder Roden's "sons', Elders Jeppesen and Weyland

   After everything was done, we loaded back up and headed back to downtown Chatt.  When we got there we spent some time going through their church building because it is super cool.  It is an old home of a Civil War General. I believe his name was General Bragg. It is a really unique church, haha.  The missionaries actually live right next to it in the old slaves’ quarters.  So that was super cool. 

SERVICE:
   On Saturday we got picked up by JP Preston, who is a super cool member,  to go help move some folks out of their apartment to a town home about a mile away.  All we had was a little pick up and some tie downs.  And lucky for us it was absolutely pouring rain, haha. It took us about 3 hours to get everything moved and it was seriously some of the hardest rain I’ve ever seen that we were working through.  The pictures we took were when we were about 30 minutes in, and the rain had slowed down for a bit, haha.  But it was still pretty fun, nonetheless, and it literally looked and felt like we had just gone swimming in our clothes for a few hours.  On the way home there were some roads cut off because of some flash flooding so it took a while, but we eventually got there.  So it was a pretty crazy storm!

Other than that it was a normal week, we found a few new people to work with and had a couple people come to church, too. So it was an overall good week!
Elder Derek K. Roden
11320 Station West Dr Ste 101
Farragut TN 37934
United States