Every Child's Prayer

Hey everyone happy Valentines Day ;)

I hope y'all had a good week. This past week went by so fast I don't even know what to tell you.

This week was lots of appointments falling through which gave us lots of contacting time. The hard part about our area is that it used to be in the ward boundaries of a different ward and the church building we go to is really far away. We had high hopes to finally get an investigator to come to church this week and even passed by one of their houses. No luck. But this week we are walking a family to church so hopefully we can break this bad streak.

There was a lot of office work this week. That helped the days go by quick. Two different days a missionary went home for different reasons. That meant President calling me and saying hey make sure everything is ready for this missionary to go home. The first day I got that call and had about two hours to get the transportation and migrations stuff figured out. The other call I had about a day so it was a lot calmer. Also a group of missionaries went to Lima to get their migrations renewed which meant more stress.

Prayer is so powerful. You may think prayer is some basic primary answer but it is one of the most powerful tools God has given us. That day when people were going to Lima and I had only a couple hours to get everything figured out for the missionary to leave the country, I felt overwhelmed. Not knowing anything else to do to help me calm and focus, I went to a private room and just got on my knees and prayed. It wasn't a formal boring prayer. I really just got on my knees and poured out all my feelings to my Heavenly Father. Immediately i felt his love and in so many ways I saw my prayer answered. GOD is REAL. If you want to know that and feel that get on your knees and pray. But really pray. Pour out the feelings of your heart so that there is room for God to pour out his love into your heart. I promise you will feel his love. Why? Because he really loves us. He cares for us. He didn't send us to this earth to feel lost and alone. He sent us here to learn to trust in Him. This week pray like Enos and not like you are blessing your Pop-Tart as you are late for school.

Anyway, have a good week Love you!

Photos:

1. Time to interpret my chalk art

2. Historic old park next to our house

3. More baile de los negritos

Not so weekly Weekly

Hey everyone!

Sorry I've been slacking a lot on the emails. There just isn't a whole lot to tell you about. Every morning we are in the office. After lunch we have studies and then get about 3-4 hours to proselyte.

The missionary work is starting to pick up slowly but surely. Our area recently got new boundaries and it used to be a part of a different ward so all of the members in our area still go to that ward and also the cool investigators are being taught by the other missionaries and going to the other ward. So we get lots of time to knock doors and try to find people. But we have met a couple really cool Venezuelan people who walked to Peru from Venezuela. They are both about 30 and their families still live there. They work here and send them back money. Most of our investigators we have are from Venezuela and are super humble but cool people. Racism here against Venezuelans is crazy. In my area there is a giant sign that hangs over the road that says, "Any Venezuelan caught stealing will be lynched and burned alive" which is so sad because 99% of them are good people just trying to rebuild their lives. They all went from normal jobs with college degrees to now selling candy in the street or getting underpaid to do crazy physical work.

Last week I got pretty sick with food poisoning, which is always fun. Also one night President called me with 10 emergency transfers I had to organize and then the next day he gave me a couple more changes and changed some of the ones he gave me. So it was a crazy couple days with lots of phone calls. By the way phone calls are literally my least favorite thing in the world haha whenever my phone goes off I want to either throw my phone at the wall or just not answer it.

This week I bought my own plane ticket home. I'll arrive in Salt Lake on the 24th of June at 12:46 pm if you were curious ;) But it was really weird to do. I've read a couple talks this week which have helped me keep my focus on the mission. If you were wondering, they were "Becoming a Consecrated Missionary" by Tad Callister and "Be the 4th Missionary" by Lawrence E. Corbridge. They are super good talks that help you realize the kind of missionary you should be.

A couple weeks ago I read a talk called "Why Mountains" by Michael A. Dunn. It is probably the best talk I've heard so far. Here is the link https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/michael-a-dunn/why-mountains/ . It is a super good talk that teaches us why we have hard things in our life, why we need to overcome our fears, and how mountains are here for our benefit. He shares his story of when he climbed to the top of the Teton mountains. He was afraid of heights but did it because his wife wanted to. He had to overcome his fears but after was able to accomplish something great. Anyway hearing this makes me really want to go hike a mountain when i get back. So if anyways if anyone is interested, just shoot me an email 👍

I have really thought about how powerful our minds are. I always thought that was a cheesy statement but it is so true. Our bodies can adapt to almost anything. The only thing that keeps us from achieving our goals and being great is our mind. Our mind decides if we practice every day or not. Our mind decides what talents we develop and what we do with our mind. If we win the battle with our mind we can do almost anything we want to.

Photos:

1) Little slot canyons made of mud we explored

2) Sometimes you just gotta squat next to the neighbor pig

3) Beautiful sunset after a rainy day 😍