Elder Goodale's e-mail home today was quite short, and he forgot to tell us his new address. So if you have anything to snail mail to him, please send it to the mission home address posted last week. I have posted some Bentonville links herein; with an estimated population of just under 34,000, it's the 11th largest city in Arkansas. I bet more than half of those are Wal-Mart employees, too! Bentonville is the county seat for Benton County (county website, Wikipedia entry); the county having just over 200,000 people. He's in the big city/county now!!! :-) He mentions going to Tulsa for several days of training. According to Yahoo Maps, that's about a 125-mile drive. With his zone leader duties having him travel so much, it's a wonder that they get any work done in their own area!
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Dear Family,
Hey everybody! This email is going to be really, really, really, short, so I apologize. We're leaving in about an hour to go to Tulsa, where we will be until Thursday night getting training and stuff. I won't go into too great detail on it because so many of the other missionaries that are out have talked about it in their emails and stuff quite a bit. But it is some pretty exciting stuff, basically 8 new simplified lessons that the church has come out with, nothing to replace the lessons we teach, these 8 lessons are actually aimed at us as missionaries, to basically make us more effective teachers. It's all stuff straight from Preach My Gospel, but now in a new format and a new way of training us on it. They've already given us Zone Leaders little tastes of it (we've known about it for a couple of months now, actually a few days before most other missions did. Elder Lynn G. Robbins introduced all the changes to us when he came and visited the mission and came to our Zone Leader Council) and I think this will make a huge difference in our missionaries. I guess in the spring they are going to start teaching these things in the MTC, so they are having all the missions do extensive training on it right now so that by the time the MTC starts teaching it all of the missions in the world are caught up and trained on it too. Christopher is picking a really, really great time to go out on a mission. I'm excited to see the difference this will make. Bentonville (city website, Wikipedia entry, Northwest Arkansas News(paper)) is good though, of course I've only been here a couple of days but it's been awesome. This is a really great area, the church is super strong down here, partially because this is the Wal-Mart headquarters and Wal-Mart really likes recruiting from BYU... It's an awesome area. We cover the Bentonville 1st ward and also Rogers 3rd, which is the singles branch. My companion is Elder David Bustamante, he's from Orlando, Florida, and he's awesome. I love him, I hope I get to finish my mission with him. He's been out 2 transfers less than me, so we came out pretty much around the same time. There is a lot of good stuff going on here, so I'm excited. It's been so long since I've been back in Arkansas, I'd forgotten how beautiful it is here... It's really nice. I love you all! Hope you have a great week!
Love,
Elder Goodale
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