Reflections of a True Millennial

Hello, Hope you all had an awesome Thanksgiving at home. For us in Chile it was just another day, and Black Friday doesn´t exist either. For Thanksgiving we didn´t even have lunch with any members and I made guacamole and burritos in the house. Not quite a Thanksgiving meal, but it was a good day. Anyway it has been a great week. Anita is progressing well towards her baptism on the 13th and yesterday we rode the micro with her and her brother Javier to the Stake Conference in Talca. Last night we also watched "Conozca a los Mormones" (Meet the Mormons) with their family, and it was really great. That is a powerful movie and really sheds light on what makes us tick as members of the Church, and how to find the most purpose and joy from life.  Another great family we are working with is the Rojas-Valdes family. We first contacted Victoria using church records, because her mom is a less active from much time back. When we shared the Book of Mormon with Victoria she read what we ...

Elder Chaves and I ​ Did some service out on a plot of land this week. Pretty cool ​ Local San Clemente skate park ​

Hola a todos, This has been a great week. We have had awesome primavera (spring) weather that reminds me of the old days at BYU. Good weather for walking around and talking to people.  Anyway, the work is going pretty well. We put a baptismal fecha with Anita (who is part of the family I talked about last week) for December 13th. She is really excited and working towards it. Usually when we put a baptismal date it is accompanied by a lession, but she has already seen so much about the church that we just stopped by and explained that to be baptised she needs to go to church 6 times and hear certain lessions from us, and that she can be baptised on this certain day. That was enough explanation and she is working toward the 13th. We have some other solid investigators and are working to contact more. This Friday we did divisions with the zone leaders and Elder Cardon (one of the zone leaders) helped me set some goals and such for better contacting. We have interesting experiences contact...

Hola hola! It has been a good week. I am getting a better handle on figuring out how to plan and lead the sector. Some days it is hard to fill all of our time effectively, but there is always something important that we can be doing, and Im figuring that out. So one strange thing that happened is that our mission president, Presidente y Hermana Warne, had to return to the United States two weeks ago so that he could do a surgery on his kidneys. Everything went well and they will be coming back on Thursday. But in the meantime we still need a mission president, so the area presidency called on Presidente y Hermana Wilhelm (former Seventy from the south of Chile) to be the interim president. We had a zone meeting with them this week and they gave us a good message about a variety of missionary topics. One important thing was to be super specific in planning because through that the Lord can bless you with success. So kind of weird to have a different mission president for these three wee...

Hola hola! This has been an interesting week! My companion Elder Bustamante changed to Rancagua and now I with Elder Chaves from Fortaleza, Brasil. He has 11 months in the mission and was previously in Buin, near Santiago. Hes a great missionary and we are trying to work hard here. It has been a weird week because now I am guiding the sector, since I am the one that knows everyone and where everyone lives and such. This has been pretty difficult because I have to basically decide where we go and what we teach. It has been hard, but Im doing alright. Elder Chaves also talks a lot, which is good, but its hard for me to get anything in to a conversation. But Im working on it and trying to keep positive. We are working especially hard with one great family. Javier and Cristian are recent converts to the church, and their parents and little sister are investigators. We have been working hard with them to keep them all along the path of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The hard part is that the p...

Hola a todos, It was a great last week of the transfer here. We finished it off with Maria´s baptism yesterday! She was definitely a golden investigator. We got a random call about 2 months ago from her saying that she wanted to meet with the missionaries. We were a little skeptical of course, but went to her house, taking the micro out to Aurora. She found our number via the chat feature on mormon.org . Everything we taught she was super interested in and has been eager to learn everything. Finally yesterday she took the step of baptism! I did the baptism and it was a cool experience. A great way to end the transfer. Speaking of transfers, I am staying in San Clemente! But Elder Bustamante will be going to Tupahue in Rancagua. My new companion is Elder Chaves from Brasil and he comes into San Clemente tomorrow. Hopefully we get along and he wants to work hard. It has been a great time with Elder Bustamante and I have learned a lot. With this transfer my training has officially ended a...