Week 69

WHATS UP PEOPLE! Another week haha this week was pretty normal! We had some pretty cool experiences though! 

this week we went to a trailer park that is pretty far away but is full of Hispanics, so we went down and we had met a lady there a few weeks ago and she told us she lived in trailer 187, so we went to trailer 187 and it turned out she didn't live there but the lady that lived there just happened to be a less active member who was baptized in Uruguay like 15 years ago and since she had moved here had lost contact with the church since she had moved here so that was super cool! we are going to start teaching her tonight and hopefully be able to teach her family as well! 

We also have been teaching a less active member from Guatemala named Vidal for a few weeks and this week we started to teach his wife who is from Vietnam, and she doesn't speak Spanish and he doesn't speak Vietnamese so they communicate through very broken English haha so it is really hard to teach! she has been taught everything before by the missionaries when Vidal got baptized she just didn't ever get baptized, but still we have to speak in like very very slow broken English and usually she wouldn't understand and she would look at her husband kind of confused and he would say the exact same thing but just like with incorrect grammar and then she would understand haha so I'm excited to keep teaching them! we also started teaching a few of Vidal's buddies this week and its gone pretty well! 

We had another lesson with Emanuel this week too and it went good, we kind of reestablished our purpose and how we could help him but also were pretty bold in laying out what he had to do too. so hopefully he will be able to start progressing. 

Over all i feel pretty good about everything right now, we are working hard and with a lot more member participation than we've had before which is good. Were still working on hunting down some less active members and we've seen a lot of success already, we had 3 or 4 less active people back to church on Sunday and a few more who are helping us teach their friends so over all things are going well here and I'm excited to see what happens!

Love you guys, hope you have a great week! 

Para siempre Dios esté con vos!

Week 68

Whats up people! this week was HOT! haha we've been sweating a lot! but this week went pretty good! we had a lot of success working with less active members! we made a list of all the less active Hispanic families and there is about 40 families in our area who are less active haha so we decided that needed to be our focus! and we saw some pretty good success! a few members came to church on Sunday who hadn't been to church in a long while which is really good! one member in particular actually came to church and after went on splits with us and went to visit other members with us and also gave us a name and phone number of one of his friends who he thinks would be interested in the gospel which is awesome! its been pretty cool to see how its worked out to our favor, instead of just wandering around the streets trying to find a minority group we can just go to the members and strengthen them and just from a few weeks of focusing on them we have started finding a few new people to teach! we started teaching a less active member and after seeing her like twice we got a random call from her cousin who asked us to come over and help with some English translation stuff and we shared the first lesson with her and her family so hopefully we can keep teaching them! they seemed pretty interested in coming to church.  so members really are the key to missionary work! so even if you live in Utah go do some missionary work haha

We haven't seen our investigator at all this week except last night we drove by and saw him in a store parking lot so we pulled over and talked to him and he seemed kinda weird but told us to come over tonight so we're just planning on telling him whats up, that we want to help him but we cant do anything unless he is willing to help himself. SO well just see what happens with him! things are going well and I'm excited to be here in Louisville right now.

Love you guys, hope you have a great week!

Para siempre Dios esté con vos!

Week 67

WHATS UP PEOPLE! This week was not too bad! so first off me and my new companion Elder Birky get along super super well haha he came out one transfer before i did and we aren't necessarily like super alike but our personalities just fit really well and i feel like we've been laughing all week which has been great.

As far as the work went this week, i have definitely had better weeks haha we have kind of come to an end with a lot of people and are stuck now with just time to find people which is good! we visited a lot of less active members which was really good! on Sunday the only two Hispanic people who came to church were two less active members so we had a lesson with just the two of them and it went super well. One of the members who was baptized a few years ago isn't all the way there i think haha like she says she's catholic and she doesn't believe in the word of wisdom and shes always talking about la virgin maria and everything haha so in our lesson with her and this other guy during Sunday school we just taught the restoration and focused it on authority and that no other church has it except for us and we were super bold and straight up because this little old lady is kinda sassy so we had to take control of the situation and just say it how it was and it went really good! we both felt really  good after the lesson, like we had said everything we could of to give her the best chance to accept truth. She tried telling us without maria Jesus wouldn't be born so we told her yes but its a commandment not to worship anyone but god and she was telling us that scientifically coffee and wine were good for your bodies and we just had to tell her that scientists were wrong and that we should trust more in God than in science. but we gave her the best shot and if she cant accept it, we tried our best!

So we were scheduled to take Emanuel in last week and he never showed up and kind of started avoiding us and its been really hard to see but we've had to spend less time with him and he isnt doing super great. This week will probably be the make or break week, its now or never with him so we'll see what happens.

Love you guys, hope you have a great week!

Para siempre Dios esté con vos!

Week 66

WHATS UP PEOPLE! this week was kinda crazy but it was a good one!

So to fill you in on our investigator, so far everything is still going good and we are expecting to go with our ward mission leader at one o'clock to pick him up and take him into a place where he can get help. So we are making really great progress with him and in 6 months after I'm gone he should be good to be baptized haha it'll take a little bit of work and meeting but we've got our foot in the door at least. i really have grown to love this man and I'm willing to do pretty much anything to help him. Its been interesting to see like other peoples points of views when it comes to him and his problems right now, and maybe its naive or like kind of liberal but i honestly love the guy and don't look at him differently for his trials. I think I've been blessed to be able to see him like God sees us even though were all flawed we all have sinned and come short of the glory of God but i feel like it doesn't matter, for me at least, what he has done because its already over but like the thing that matters more to me for him right now is what he is going to do in the near future. I think going through an extensive repentance process has helped a lot as a missionary, i wouldn't suggest it to anyone but its helped surprisingly more than i had ever thought. I think i understand a lot more than i used to the love God has for us and the power that comes through the Atonement. 

Also some pretty big news, since Elder Plumb is going home I'm getting a new companion here and his name is Elder Birky and I'm super excited! i served around him a lot, he was in my zone for the 5 transfers i was in Georgetown and 2 of them he was in my district and we get along pretty well. He's from Logan and played high school football and a lot of people say we look alike haha but I'm super excited, i think it'll be a really fun transfer. 

Other than that things are going good and there's a lot of work to be done here and a lot of potential for good so I'm excited to be here right now! 

​​So just to explain a few of these, the lady in the gray is Juana! shes from Peru (I cant get away from Peruvians haha) but she is the BEST! She was baptized with her son Ali like 3 years ago and she does so much for the missionaries and the ward here! most of the food we have in our fridge right now is from her! 

This is the Stanley family! They aren't Hispanic, they are from a place called chuuke! its some Micronesian island haha but these guys are awesome! they all served missions and speak very little English and no Spanish but they always want to go teaching with us and play basketball with us on pdays haha they're awesome!