Week 70

PEOPLE! Whats up! This week was crazy busy! Its felt like we've been running nonstop but i guess that's a good thing! we haven't been able to see a lot of the people we normally visit but its been good to get out and find some new people. 

The first half of the week was actually really slow as far as lessons go, we did a lot of biking and trying to get a hold of people but didn't have too much going on, but after a few days things started picking up. We also got asked to do a ton of service for the ward members which is good. We were able to see a few less active members this week which was really good too, we have seen a lot of success with less active members who just need a visit or two to remember what their missing our and start coming back to church, its been really rewarding to be able to help them in that process.

This week we started teaching teaching a man named Abraham who moved here from Honduras and he is a pretty cool guy. He's still pretty new and we've had a few lessons with him so we'll see pretty soon if he will continue to progress. 

We have also seen some success trying to find old investigators, we've found that a lot of them are still open to hearing the gospel, but were dropped due to loss of contact or one thing or another so instead of just knocking random doors we've been focusing on less or inactive members and former investigators and its worked out pretty well.

We weren't able to see Vidal and Lan this week, both times we set a lesson the ended up canceling on us so we'll try and put a little more focus on them and try and show up randomly. Its hard because their work schedules don't match up too often so its hard to find them both home. 

We have also been teaching a family from Venezuela which has been fun, its a mom and her son and step daughter, we haven't been able to teach the Dad but we met him this week and he seems really nice, just really busy. They are really funny together and kind of remind me of my family because when they all get together they are really loud and talk really fast haha but its cool to get to know so many people from so many different cultures and see the differences and the similarities there are in their cultures and ours and the many others we meet on a daily basis.

We've also started teaching a weekly English class to try and get Spanish speakers in one place to try and teach them English which is what they want to learn and the Gospel which is what they need to learn haha we've only had a few people come but we are going to start advertising in Mexican stores or home depot parking lots or anywhere we can haha so hopefully that goes well!

Other than that its been a pretty normal week! Love you guys, thanks for all the support!Hope you have a great week! 

Para siempre Dios esté con vos!

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! 

Week 65

What's up people! This week went really good! We are kind of in a finding mode right now so we've talked to And met a few new people which has been cool. So the whole situation with Our investigator took a lot of prayer and a little fasting and a lot of studying but basically because of his current condition he has no place to go and is really not doing to well, so with some help from our ward mission leader we had a sit down with Our investigator and told him that he couldn't do it on his own and not with just us either but that he would need more professional help, we more or less had an intervention and told him that if he can get clean for 3 days he can be admitted into a help program and from there after about a week go into a 6 months 12 step program and after that it would be more appropriate to think about baptism. And honestly if i had to put my money on anyone overcoming something like this, i would put it all on Him.  i think he can over come it but i guess we'll see this week.but yeah he is a great guy and hopefully a few months down the road will be able to be baptized. 

Other than that this week we started teaching a 16 year old Cuban girl named Roxana who just barely moved here a few weeks ago. She seemed pretty curious and open to what we were saying and really grasped it all, its been interesting to see that the majority of the time, teaching children or youth they usually pick it up a lot faster and understand a lot easier where as adults are usually a little more set in there ways and a little slower to pick things up. so that's cool, hopefully we'll be able to teach her and her family. 

We also have been teaching a less active guy named Vidal who is super awesome! he is super spiritual and loves to read and study the scriptures and watch conference talks and everything, he just doesn't come to church haha i think its pretty hard for members here to go to a church group where no body else speaks your language and you hear all the meetings through a headphone set, but i guess there's no excuses! we've been trying hard to get him to come to church the past 2 weeks but he hasn't made it yet. His wife is from Vietnam and isn't a member but doesn't really speak English super well, and neither does he but they communicate either way haha.

This Friday we also had interviews with President Brough which went really well. He's a great guy. The first thing he asked me was how the whole in my mouth was haha but anyway, the transfer is coming up, only one more week! its crazy how fast time is going by here!

Love you guys, hope you have a great week!

Para siempre Dios esté con vos! 

Week 64

Whats up people! this week was a really good week but at the same time its been really hard. This might be a super short email but just to explain whats going on, it'll be kind of hard to keep it still appropriate and confidential but still explaining the whole situation,but ill try.

So this week we saw An investigator everyday, he asked us if we could come over everyday and see him and we have and we've had some great experiences and grown super close to this man, he has progressed so much in the 2 short weeks we've known him and he has opened up to us a lot. On Monday night we invited him to be baptized on the 18th of July and he was willing and excited to be baptized! he asked us what he had to do to be baptized and we briefly laid out all the requirements for baptism and he said he would be willing to live them, so we just kept coming back and we would read about and focus a lot on the atonement because he had expressed a lot of sorrow and guilt and he has been reading the Book of Mormon and praying everyday and has told us that he sees a huge change in his life and you can just tell that hes soaking in everything like every single lesson he was in tears and so happy at what we were telling him and its been so amazing to work with someone like this and every time we see him he talks so much about how he wants to make this change for the rest of his life and how badly he wants to be baptized and how excited he was for the 18th and its just been super awesome to be able to help someone like this so willing and so in need of the Gospel! its been honestly one of the best experiences of my life to see this man so desperate for hope and to be able to help him see that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is his way out. But we ran into a very large and unexpected hurdle when we taught the word of wisdom. Its kind of out of our league as missionaries, and i want so badly to help this man but i don't know how. So we will keep working with him, he is completely 100% willing to do the things we tell him and rely completely on God but this is going to be a very long and crazy roller coaster of emotions haha so pray for us and more importantly PRAY FOR HIM!

We definitely will need some deliverance right now, he is honestly is one of the most Christlike people I have met, just has made some wrong choices and now wants to change, really difficult but with God all things are possible! He really has the biggest heart and I seriously love this man more than myself! I just hope things will work out, I don't care how long it takes! Love you guys! Hope everything is going well back home! 

Love you guys alot, Hope youve had a great week!

Teeny Tiny Toast!

Week 63

WHATS UP PEOPLE!! This week was good! it was kind of an interesting
one but it was still good haha so we had some really good people we
found and some good people we dropped and some good people we found
and then dropped shortly after!
So we had a lot of good lesson and some "bad" ones that kinda needed
to happen! not bad in the sense that like we taught badly haha but
pretty much we weeded out some people that were meeting with us for
the wrong reasons and didn't have intentions to change!
The first big drop was a Guy named Joel who moved here from Cuba a few
years ago.  He basically told us that we were ignorant because we
wouldn't watch a youtube video that explains that Joseph Smith was
incorrect with his translation of the book of Abraham and so he
couldn't be a prophet and he wasn't willing to read the book of Mormon
and pray so we told him when he was we'd come back but for now we
wouldn't come back!
The next drop was that kid named William, it was a little sad but it
mad a lot of sense and it felt right after! he told us he was just
meeting with us because he liked us and didn't think the book of
Mormon was true! so we gave him the best shot we could to except it
but he still didn't!
The NEXT drop was one that was a little more sad haha it was a lady
named Gloria who had recently moved from Cuba like 3 months ago, and
we had met with her starting this week and had 2 really good lessons
with her and she said she wanted to go to church if we could find a
ride for her, but Saturday she called us and told us that the owner of
the house she was living in doesn't want us to come by and so we tried
to meet with her in public or at a members home or something but she
watches the guys kids so she cant like leave. She said she was working
on getting her own place to live so we are going to follow up in few
months to see if she is okay to meet with us again!
BUT, despite all the drops this week we found the most Golden
Investigator i have ever taught! Actually he found us haha on Thursday
we were walking through a trailer park and he saw us and ran towards
us and flagged us down and told us he wanted to come to church! he
said his name was Emmanuel and that he had gone to our church here in
Louisville like 10 years ago because he dated a Mormon girl but they
broke up and he stopped to go and eventually the girl died, but long
story short he said he had a great experience in the church and wanted
to get his life back on track and he wanted to teach his son whats
right! He is a single dad and has a little 5 year old named Tristan
and so we came over and taught him the first lesson the next day and
he loved it, he actually had a friend there who was from Kansas named
Carlos and as we got to know him it turned out he was actually a
member haha but the next day Emmanuel came to church and brought his
son and they both loved it and made a lot of friends and said they
really wanted to keep coming and now we have a lesson with him tonight
so I'm super excited about him!

Things are looking pretty good here in Arcadia, there's a lot of cool
people here!

Love you guys, have a great week!

Para siempre Dios esté con vos

Worlds Largest Baseball bat here in downtown Louisville 

Week 62

WHATS UP PEOPLE! this week was a huge improvement from last week!
Still not super ideal but i decided to take Coach Behms advice and
"control what you can control" so i had to stop worrying about all the
stupid stuff that didn't matter anymore and just go do the best i could
and it turned out to be an okay week! its hard here because its so big
and spread out, there's Hispanic people everywhere as opposed to in
Georgetown where all the Hispanics lived in 2 places, so it was a lot
easier to find people there! there are definitely more people here but
they're all spread out!
But we had a pretty good week, on Tuesday we had a lesson with a kid
named William who is 14, 2 years ago he moved here from Honduras and
he actually speaks really good English! But he has been taught by
missionaries for a while and he is super cool! he has a good
understanding of everything and will come to church every week as long
as someone gives him a ride! so we had a great lesson with him about
the holy ghost and how he can receive his answer so I'm pretty excited
about him!
Wednesday we went all the way downtown to a street called Muhammad Ali
which is actually the street i took that video of on the icloud but we
found a lady named Joanna and taught her and her kids and it went
really well, both her and her 8 year old son Jacob were pretty intent
on listening and when we came back on Saturday they were both super
excited to tell us that they'd read the first 2 pages of the book of
Mormon so that was cool! were pretty excited about them as well.
On Thursday i went on an exchange with my district leader Elder
Engstrom across the river in a own called New Albany, Indiana, and it
was a pretty good day! we were doing a district fast so we hadn't eaten
all day and it was a super hot day so we were pretty beat at the end
of the day but overall it was still really good!
Friday we met a less active guy named Carlos who was super cool! he
was super excited to see us and let us in and talk to us, he's someone
who still has a huge testimony of the church and still loves the
church but just kinda let life get in the way but he told us to come
back the next day and when we did he had 3 of his friends there and
wanted us to teach them the gospel haha it was super cool! so we
taught these 4 guys about the restoration and it was super cool. This
area has a lot of potential and I'm excited to see what we can do here!
I got those pictures from lily's baptism and I'm super sad i missed it
but it looks like it was a really good time!
love you guys, hope you have a great week! Thanks for all the prayers!

Para siempre Dios esté con vos!

Week 61

Whats up people! so week one in Louisville wasn't everything i expected haha its been frustrating to say the least! The area is huge and there are so many people here but its pretty slow right now! not a lot of work has been done recently and when i got here the elders had already gone 100 miles over the mile limit for our car so we had to bike and ride the bus a lot this week which makes it pretty hard especially in such a huge area. The only people we saw this week were people that we found this week, i still haven't met anyone that was being taught here before so its been a struggle! its pretty frustrating because i don't know the area but I've just been telling my companion to take me to the trailer parks or places with a lot of Hispanics and we've met a lot of new people and taught a few good lessons that way! The one good thing is that there are a lot of people that haven't met missionaries before haha so in no way is this area overworked! plenty of work to do! so hopefully things will start getting better soon! so prayers wouldn't hurt right now haha but the area is pretty cool! in our area we have the Louisville Slugger museum, the Muhammad Ali museum, Churchill Downs (where they have the Kentucky Derby) so that's pretty cool! 

we also got Ipads this week as you guys probably figured out from the icloud pictures i sent yesterday!  so that's pretty cool! its not super different, we dont have internet unless we go to a place with wifi so right now not a lot has changed. they do things in like 3 different phases ans this is phase 1, get the ipads haha so after we finish doing some training's then we will move on to phase 2 which is planning and doing all the records on the ipads and then phase 3 will be facebook and online proselyting so it'll probably be another 4-6 before we even get to phase 3! so we'll see how it goes with that! 

Other than that not to much to report! the area is way way different then Shelbyville or Georgetown was haha like missionary work is so different in the city! the small town was hard at first but i had really gotten used to it and i knew how to work it and this is totally different! the people are different the culture is different its a complete change! in the missionary handbook it says to not write home anything negative about the place your serving in so I'm just going to say the gross capital income of Louisville is probably not high haha but something kind of unique and cool about Louisville is its LOADED with Cubans! when Cuban people come here they all go to Miami, because its so close, but the city with the 2nd largest population of Cubans is Louisville Kentucky so that's cool! I'm having to adjust my Spanish a little so I don't sound too Mexican haha but Cuban Spanish is crazy haha like they talk so fast and mumble their words and usually cut off the beginning and ending sound of the word and only say the middle part so its taken some adjusting! and most of the time its hard to tell a difference between African Americans and some Cubans until you hear them talk so its a guessing game sometimes when you talk to people on the street!

but i hope you guys have a great week, i think Lily's baptism is coming up right? let me know how that goes i guess haha I'm trying hard to not be too sad about missing it but what can you do! 

Love you guys! 

Para siempre Dios esté con vos! 

Week 60

What's up people! so first things first I got transferred! I'm in an Area called Arcadia which is the West End of Louisville and I am back with Elder Plumb, who I was with for a transfer in Shelbyville a while back! so that's pretty exciting! it feels weird to have left Georgetown after being there for so long! it felt like home almost haha but I'm super excited to get to work here in this part of the lords vineyard.

But last week we had a couple of really cool experiences, we went to an appointment in the morning around 11 one day and we knocked on the door and we were standing out there waiting and no body answered but there was a little old lady next door who happened to open her door as we were walking by and when she saw us she said "hey its the Mormons!" haha and so we started talking to her and asking her what she knew about the Mormons and she told us "heck I am one!" haha apparently she was baptized when she was like 15 out in the mountains of eastern Kentucky and had kind of lost contact with the church and had lived in Georgetown for 10 years and hadn't met anyone from the church! so we were able to get her info written down and let the English elders know about her and hopefully she'll be on the church's radar now but it was just a really cool little coincidence that we met her and we definitely were lead to be there that morning.

Another pretty cool little experience we had this week, a few weeks ago we helped a member move to a city outside of our area in a town called Paris Kentucky and while we were there we met a Hispanic guy who was doing the plumbing at the new house and so we talked to him and asked him if he would want missionaries to teach him and he said maybe but he didn't have time to talk because he was working, so we called the Sister missionaries in Paris that do the Spanish work and told them that he would probably be at the house if they wanted to try and see him and after that we didn't thing anything of it. later we got a call from the lady we helped move and she said "elders that guys here again here talk to him" and then handed him the phone so we talked to him and he told us he actually lived in Georgetown not Paris so we got his address and phone number and said we'd come visit him later and then didn't think much of it, just another potential investigator. THEN a few days later we were walking in the trailer park and we saw this lady who clearly did not speak Spanish but we decided to try and talk to her and so we gave her a pass along card and before we could say anything she asked us of we prayed with people because she needed a prayer, so we were like sure we'd love to pray with you! and she began to tell us that today was her birthday and that she had just lost a baby she was pregnant with and she just needed a prayer so we prayed with her and cried with her and testified of Gods plan for us and it was cool, we wrote down her info to give to the English elders and before she said anything she looked at my short little Peruvian companion and said "you speak Spanish right?" because my husband doesn't speak any English" and we told her we would love to come by and teach her and her husband and when we asked her husbands name we figured out her husband was the guy we had met in Paris and talked to on the phone just a few days earlier! it was super cool! I have no doubt that the Lord was guiding us to specific places at specific times to talk with specific people.

Also this week we had the mission conference with Elder Zwick of the Seventy and we didn't get the ipads! we barely even talked about them actually haha yes we will be getting them on Friday but all that we talked about was our personal righteousness and how the best filter the Church can provide for these electronic devices is our conversion to the gospel, I really enjoyed it, I'm excited to see the success that will come in being able to use these ipads!

I'm super excited to see what the lord has in store for us here in Louisville and I'm so grateful for this opportunity to serve him!

Love you guys, hope you have a great week!

Para siempre Dios esté con vos!

My new Address:

1822 San José ave #163 Louisville KY 40216