The Work Goes On

Dear Family,

Thanks for the emails and for the spiritual thougts. I really do love to hear about them. To answer your questions mom, my companion has been out for about 6 months. We are working great together, both of us have the same desires for the area and we both have good ideas for how to work. Well, the investigator we have is doing good and we are trying to find more people. We have a couple of people that we have lost contact with and some people that a member wanted us to teach that didn't really want to talk to us. So, it´s been an interesting week. This week we have some ideas for trying to find more people so we´ll see how that goes.

Comodoro Zone

My mission president has not told me anything about an endorsement to attend BYU. We have interviews on the 21st so I can ask him then or I can send him an email and see what he says. I don´t know if I´ll see him outside of that. And I think that it would be fine for dad to sign me up for classes that he thinks I would like.

I don´t know if this is the most spiritual experience of the year but on Sunday I had a really cool experience with Elder Carter. He is a senior missionary that is working in the mission office and comes to our ward. Yesterday I went with him on a visit and we went to a member´s house that said she had a person for us to teach. When we got there we found a 17 year old girl that really did need the Gospel. She told us her life story and it was kind of crazy. She´s had a lot of bad experiences and said that she was in a bad place right now. So, Elder Carter and I taught her a bit about the Gospel and shared some scriptures with her and then we offered to give her a blessing. She accepted the blessing and when Elder Carter gave the blessing you could feel the spirit super strongly. That was definitely a testimony builder about the power of the priesthood and the blessing that it is to have it.

The things that I love most about my area are that it is different and that we meet a lot of people. My area is mostly downtown with a little bit of neighborhood so we have a lot of apartment buildings, lots of people in the street and a lot of businesses. So, it is different from all my other areas that were all houses. It makes it a bit more difficult to find people that live there when you contact in the street but we do get to meet all kinds of people. I have met people from all over Argentina and last week we met a member from Chile. It´s really cool to be here and see how different people are.

As a district leader I have learned to prepare ahead of time, to teach better and to show the missionaries in my district that I care about them. I love them all and now I need to show it and help them to do their work the best they can. I am really grateful to be a district leader because it has put me in situations that I otherwise would not have been in and has helped me to learn to do things that I didn´t really want to do before. It´s been a good learning experience for me.

My current favorite scripture is Doctrine and Covenants 63:23 On Sunday we were talking Luke 4 where Jesus tells the Samaritan woman that He was the fountain of Living Water. And Elder Carter (who was teaching the class) said that the Living Water was a spiritual water. And then he asked the members to share about what brought them to want to be members of the Church, what was their thirst? It was a really cool discussion. And the reason that I like the scripture in D&C is because it tells us "But unto him that keepeth my commandments I will give the mysteries of my kingdom, and the same shall be in him a well of living water, springing up unto everlasting life." I like this because it tells us a bit more of how we can have this well of living water inside of us. That as we are obedient and do the things that God wants us to do we will learn more about the mysteries of the Gospel and that those will well up inside of us and we will be able to have eternal life.

Outside of all of the things that I have told you the other big events this week were two big meetings that I had on Wednesday and Thursday. On Wednesday we had a big meeting with all of the leadership of the mission where we talked a lot about how to be like Christ when we teach and how we lead. It was really good. And on Thursday Elder Viñas of the 70 came to visit the mission and he taught us a lot about the Atonement and had us share about how it had affected us personally. It was a really cool lesson and I learned a lot. Then he told us the things that we needed to do better as a mission and how we could work better as missionaries. He was very direct and was a very good teacher. I really liked listening to him and I learned a whole lot about how to be a better missionary. So, I´m going to apply what I learned and try to be better. Hope you all have a great week and I love you all tons!

Love,

Michael