24 January 2018

Hey, how´s  it goin'?

I got transferred the other day, now I'm in the ward San Felipe.  We are also in charge of a branch called Calawaché or something like that. This church building looks a lot cooler than my old area. I think God wanted to play a joke on me, so in this area, I have a little more responsibility.

My companion is pretty cool.. His name is Elder Acosta from Honduras. He is super awesome. He is super obedient and loves to work, and the best part, is I'm pretty sure he has autism. Everything is super awesome.

I love you all a bunch.

¡adiós!

17 January 2018

I have been learning a lot of people skills that I didn't even know I was lacking. Its pretty cool, I guess you learn stuff like that when you live with someone, and work with them all the time, and never leave there side. But it is super cool because the things I'm learning here will help me the rest of my life.  And there is nothing more fun than missionary work.  The relationship that forms when you share the gospel with someone is so strong, especially when they accept it. It is seriously the coolest thing ever. You know what would be really cool, is if you guys could go out with the missionaries to visit their investigators, or make friends with the investigators that they bring to church. That would be so cool. I have decided that's what I am going to do, cause I don't want to stop being a missionary. 

By the way, did I mention that I love you guys? 

Missionarying is seriously so much fun, Y'all should try it some time. 

By the way, if you haven't already used that scripture for the plaque, I found a better one that talks about the same doctrine, and in this one, it is explained a little better. Matthew 11: 28 - 30. I know life can be hard sometimes, but it doesn't have to be. this doctrine is very real, trust me.

Love you all.

¡Adiós!

10 January 2018

love you all

I have to tell you about a very spiritual experience that I had. We were with some investigators when out of nowhere all of the kids started asking me how you say things in English. How do you say this? How do you say that? I was having a great time, cause finally I knew enough Spanish to answer their random questions.  When all of the sudden someone asked me how you say "permiso" in English. I couldn't remember how you say "permiso" in English... I sat there for 5 minutes trying to remember until It finally came to me that night... excuse me.

Okay, it's not really spiritual, but it was pretty funny.

I don't have time to write a ton today, so I will just say the most important thing. Keep studying your scriptures.  It is seriously the most important thing you can do in the day.

Love you a ton!!!!

3 January 2018

2018

This has been a crazy couple of weeks for me, and I have learned a ton.


The other day I was reading a talk called the Riccardi Letter, it was super awesome, and I learned a lot. It is about a new missionary and all the things he learned from his trainer. But there is this one part that says "if you want to punch Satan the mouth, open YOUR mouth."


It is so true though, every time I get on a bus, the fear to open your mouth and preach starts to come. Every time Satan tries to keep you from opening your mouth, and if you don't, you'll get all worked up over nothing.  'Cause it turns out it is actually really easy to teach people the Gospel, it isn't scary at all, and the more you do it, the easier it gets.  So my trainer and I set a goal:  the two of us on our return flight to the states are going to preach to all the people on the plane, (if they'll let us and if not well just have to talk to all the people we can individually).


Love you all, bye!

25 December 2017

Merry Christmas!!

So last week Steven said that he forgot to record a message.  He also gave us some information about when we would have our Christmas Call for this week.  And he was going to get a new companion at the next day's Transfers.  That was about it.

But today is Christmas and we got to talk to Steven for about 45 minutes.  We stared at each other for a while.  We were able to share our White Christmas with him.  (I don't remember ever having a White Christmas before.) And we talked a bit.  It was pretty amazing.

And he called us to Repentance.

His new companion is from Argentina.  He has been out one transfer longer than Steven.

We also received a message via the mission Facebook group page from the mission pres. that starting next week, the mission's p-day was going to change to Wednesdays in order to utilize Sundays more efficiently, and to start off the week with planning, and also to give the missionaries a break mid-week. So we won't hear from him again until 3 January 2018.

This video was posted on the aforementioned Facebook group on the 22 December - "a couple videos from our conferences."  I included the relevant one.

11 December 2017

We sent Steven a voice recorder for Christmas.  Apparently, he received it.  So here is some rambling.





He is starting to get that Spanish language cadence.  How fun to hear.



Here is a transcript, I don't know if I will do this all the time -it took a lot of time. But here you go.



Hello everybody. Hope you're all doing well. So I don't quite know what to say to you guys but. What the heck.  This recorder thing is really weird. I'm not exactly sure that it's recording. But oh well. The instructions say when it blinks blue it's recording. It is blinking blue. So. Here goes nothing.

Right now I'm sitting here drinking water out of a bag. Because they don't believe in water bottles here. I think I sent you a picture of one of these. They're actually pretty cool. You just have to bite off the corner and you squeeze the water into your mouth. It's like magic because you can drink it faster than a water bottle.

Guatemala is pretty cool I like it here. I really think I don't like about it is there's a lot of trash like everywhere. Anywhere there'repeople, there's trash because they don't believe in trash cans.

And there're preachers everywhere. Over here, there're two main churches. Number one. I think it's called Evangelica I don't know what that is in English you say Evangelical something like that. But it's basically like a Protestant type church. And there're a lot of little ones around. Is like a guy decided, "I like this idea of being a preacher. I'm going to make a church" and somehow got the money to buy a building. And then he started preaching. And he opened up his church. But there's a lot of those guys and they're kind of funny to listen to.

The other day we're on a bus. So we're on this bus. When we got on we realized there's a guy standing up and he was preaching but he looks like a pirate. It is really really funny. He has this scraggly beard and he had, it I think you know, like one or two gold teeth and then a few missing teeth. He just looked Super grubby. I don't even know what he was saying because, you know, Spanish is a little tricky to understand. But he was like, he just kept like quoting scripture. "Moroni" No he couldn't have said Moroni because that's in the Book of Mormon. (Spanish). I don't want to start speaking Spanish to you. But he said something about alcohol is bad but.  got you there, cuz that's true. But it was kind of-of funny. But we're a little disappointed because we didn't get to preach. There are a lot of missionaries that are afraid to preach in the buses.

My companion just looked at me really weird because I'm talking to nobody.

But in this mission there's a thing called buscar (sp?) and it's basically. Just like when we're on a bus we stand up and sing a hymn to the people on the bus and then bare our testimonies or preach. Most of the missionaries are super afraid to do it; they get stage fright or something. But the preachers do it all the time. What my companion I realize is sometimes they give us free bus rides when we preach to them. Like they don't charge; it's kind of funny. Its like if we preach to them, they are "he's preaching the Word of God" and they don't charge. That's happened like three times where we tied to pay these people and est nada. It turns out it's actually kind of fun to buscar? I was a little scared to do it at first but. It's pretty fun. So we could hand out like a dozen or so panfletos….pamphlets. But I can hand out half a dozen pamphlets just about every time.

There's also a lot of people that think you shouldn't be baptized twice. We had one investigator like that. She's thought that it would be like playing with God to get baptized in another church because she was already baptized in a different church. She wouldn't accept it which was really sad. But the good part about is that is we can preach on the bus and get free bus rides because todo es bueno y todo es de Dios.

Spanish is coming along. Right now I’m to the point where I can understand just about everything people say. There’re still a few people that - I don't know what it is - they talk a little fast or pronounce things a little weird and so it's hard to understand some people. But the majority of the time I have a general idea what they're saying at least.  But people still don’t understand me.  I realized  The other day- a couple weeks ago - we're teaching a lesson, me and my companion, and you know my companion (and he's pretty awesome. Elder Sunday, he is from Utah and he has a year in the mission -a little more than a year. And his Spanish is really good.) And so we're teaching this lesson in a Family Home Evening. The family invited a neighbor to come listen to us teach. We taught about the brother of Jared and how he had so much faith and basically used the story of the brother of Jared as an example to teach about faith. She didn't understand a single thing. It was really, really funny. In my part of the lesson she didn't understand a single thing I taught.  I taught her a little part and I asked her a question.  She just looked at me and nodded. Like “ah ha, that's right.” And I asked, “did you understand me?” “No, not a single thing.”  She didn't understand much of what my companion said either.  We asked What did you think about the lesson?  and she's like, Well it was nice but I didn't understand hardly anything because you guys don't talk good Spanish. She said this with bad grammar which was really funny. “I don't talk good Spanglish.”  Our Spanish was good, his [companion] Spanish is super good.  I could say a sentence grammatically correct but they still don't understand just because of the accent. Afterwards, we were talking about how important it is to lose the accent. 1, people understand you better; and 2, if you say it correctly but with the accent of the people then they're not going to pay attention to the weird way you talk, but they're going to pay attention to what you're teaching them. So it would better invite the spirit if you actually didn’t have an accent.  "I am pronouncing everything perfectly. How can I work on my Spanish accent?"  My companion said, you know there's a little section in one of those books (I had never looked at.)  So I looked for it and found it.  It was like an alphabet of all the letters and the sounds they make and it turns out the “d” in Spanish makes the same sound as the “th” in the word “that.” Who knew? The word “todo”, which means all, is “totho” It's like super weird.  All of these sounds I thought made the same sound in English are completely different. No wonder no one can understand me, that makes perfect sense. But now I am trying to nail down these letters because it's pretty tricky. Your tongue is used to talking in a certain way, but you have to retrain your tongue to work in a different way.


What else can I tell you guys? I didn’t understand much of the last General Conference that they had.  I think I understood two words because it was in Spanish. But from what I understand, there was a lot about the book of Mormon. That makes perfect sense to me because the Book of Mormon is super, super important. That's one thing that we stress a lot with our investigators here, because if the Book of Mormon is true, then the Church is true. As I was telling you earlier about how everyone thinks that everything is Todo es bueno y todo es de Dios, everything is of God. If you can convince them of the Book of Mormon is of God, then that convinces them that they were wrong. It's super important to have a strong testimony of the Book of Mormon. Because, if you have a testimony of the Book of Mormon, you have a testimony of the church. So I hope you're reading the book because that’s super important.

One thing that I have been learning is the more obedient you are to the commandments, or the mission rules for me, the more you are going to learn. So I think the more you read the Book of Mormon and pray and do all the little stuff, the more your testimony is going to grow and the stronger you're going to be in the gospel. The more you magnify your calling, the more you are going to learn about that calling and that small part in the kingdom of God. Whatever calling you happen to have, you need to magnify it, do the very best you possibly can. With those three things: reading the Book of Mormon, praying every day, magnifying your calling, you're going to learn. You're going to receive a bunch of blessings. So I invite you all to do that. I missed out on a lot of time when I was younger.  I had a bunch of time as Teachers quorum President and leadership and I didn't do anything, I did not magnify my calling at all and now I really regret it because now I can actually see all the good that I could have done for the quorum members that weren't going to church. So I invite you guys to do better than I was. You will receive blessings.
I Think we should probably go, cuz we have stuff to do today. Love you all,
Adios

4 December 2017

Hello everyone, I think writing to you guys in English is hurting my progress in Spanish.  So you all should learn Spanish so we don't have to bother with English, plus, Spanish makes more sense anyway. Haha just kidding.

It is so weird to think about Washington weather.  Over here the rainy season is just ending, and the dry season is beginning, which basically just means relentless heat.... but I like it here.

The other day my companion and I were talking about how different it would be if we were anywhere else. First of all, on a mission, you get to learn a ton. Setting aside the gift of tongues and the blessing of another language, you are living a higher law. All of the rules that didn't make any sense before and didn't seem fair, make so much sense.  And when you are obedient with exactitude, you learn why they exist.  The more you follow them, the more you have the Spirit with you.  The more you have the Spirit with you, the more like Heavenly Father you become. I am convinced that the only we to learn the mysteries of God, is through obedience.

We are here in this world to learn from our own experience and through our own agency. But the only way you are going to learn and fulfill your divine potential is to be obedient in all things. So I hope you are all reading your scriptures, and saying your prayers, and magnifying your callings. These three things are super awesome blessings that we have been given; they are all ways to learn, and at the same time, further the work of the Lord.

I love you guys, enjoy the rain!