Hola Familia y Amigos!
How's it going? I hope all is going well in the beautiful USA I want you to know that all is going well down here on the beautiful island of Puerto Rico. I hope that the title to the email didn't scare anyone. Hurricane Bill is supposed to come to Puerto Rico on Thursday. Don't worry, we basically live in a bunker. It's a huge cement apartment building, and we have tons of food, so we are going to be just fine. It's crazy to think that last year at this time, the only concern I had about hurricanes was how they would be affecting the BYU football schedule. Now I get to live in a place where almost every hurricane will have some effect on us. I'm excited though, the danger is great, but heck, I'm a servant of the Lord! Nothing is going to happen to us and all will be well.
I'm looking forward to the great opportunities that we will have to serve these next few days while people are preparing for the worst . . . and after the storm with be the clean up. I don't think that it is that big of a storm because the people aren't really that worried about it. So you shouldn't be either! Dón't worry about me. We are going to be safe and sound and the Lord is on our side protecting us!
Thanks to all of you who sent loving emails or letters this week. I got letters from a bunch of friends and from grandma and grandpa and of course my loving family. I am so thankful for all of your love and support. I am sorry that I won't be able to write most of you today, but I will work as hard as I can to write you soon. The reason that I don't have much time is that we are once again away from San Sebastian at a zone activity. I'm sorry if you've sent me a letter and I haven't responded or if you just sent one and you don't get one this upcoming week. Know that I love you and I am so thankful for your love and support and that I will write you soon!
Mom and Dad thank you for the package! I got it! Believe it or not along with the letter that you wrote mom. It was actually a great blessing to receive that package this week because guess what! We didn't get to go shopping this past week because of the meeting in Ponce! We had enough food to barely last us this week but your package helped me to have something to snack on during the day when we were working so thank you so much! It was such a blessing and I know you were inspired! I love you.
This week was a great week full of hard work for the Lord. I had my first real experience of tracting in the rain this past week. I think it was Tuesday we went to start tracting and as soon as we started the rain started to pour and pour and pour and it rained for 2 hours straight. It was way fun to tract in the rain because everyone was home. Again a lot of the people didn't want to talk to us but it was still funny to see their faces. What are these darn kids doing in the rain. It was fun to have to help of a few little Puerto Rican boys who were playing in the rain. They would run up to the houses and get their friends or the parents of their friends and get them to come out and listen to us. I thought it was way cool how much they wanted to help us even though they had no idea what we were doing.
That was a great day because we came home soaking wet and when I took off my shoes it made a suction sound, it was funny. Then I took off my sock and noticed that my foot was covered in blood. Crazy eh? It's all good. Don't worry some pretty cool pictures huh. I'm not really sure what happened all of the sudden my foot was bleeding but don't worry i'm doing fine and it doesn't hurt at all. That day was good because I came home, took a shower in our water that was the same temp as the rain, snuggled up in my new BYU hoodie and opened up my package! :) Thanks again!
Anywho wow that was a weird story how about a better one.
Thursday morning we wook up and ride our bicycles up the mountain to help our good friend Victorio on his farm. Victorio is a great guy, he has a lot of doubts but is so open to our message. He drove a bus in New Jersey for like 40 years and retired and moved back to Puerto Rico. A lot of people do that here. Work in the U.S. and move back after a while. Anywho, he has this huge farm behind all of the houses and he wanted us to clear a hill of the vine and weeds that had overtaken his orange trees. We started at the bottom of the hill and with our MACHETES started hacking away. It was so fun and it is an experience that I will never forget. I wish i would've taken pictures, but alas I didn't. Hopefully I get to do it again. I was trying to think of a good gospel principle to apply to this experience and the only thing I could come up with was the atonement. The orange trees produce awesome fruit just like we do. When we do good works and work hard, we ourselves can produce awesome fruit. But sometimes the vines of the world or the temptations of satan start to creep in and even take over the tree and start to make it so the tree cannot grow fruit. When this occurs we can use the Atonement of Christ to help cut away the vines that we have entagled oursleves in and become clean of those things that can harm us from producing good fruit. Yeah, cheesy but kind of cool. Hopefully you liked it. If you have a better idea let me know.
Anywho, another cool experience I had this week was that I had a dream one night about what I should say during contacting. I had a dream that I should ask people 2 things: first why they thought we were here (the missionaries), and second what happened to the Church that Christ established. The first one was great and it actually works pretty well, but I had a great experience with the second one. We were teaching these people and I had a prompting to ask them which church was the Church that Christ established. The wife said none and the man said all. I opened my mouth and words just started to flow it was pretty cool. I'm pretty sure that I said something about this confusion and about how Christ restored His Church again because of this confusion but i'm not sure. All I know is that the spirit was telling me what to do every step of the way and that the spirit is the thing that got those people to soften their hearts and listen to our message. They both took a Book of Mormon and invited us back next week. I'll keep you updated.
Other then that my week was full of a lot of lessons and a lot of contacts. I love this work and I'm getting more and more used to it every single day.
Thanks again for all of your love and support,
Mckay Congrats on the Job offer and way to accept it. That's going to be awesome! Send me a picture of your new car that you buy to celebrate and write me a letter, I want to hear all about it! Trent I'm glad that you had fun at EFY! Write me and tell me what you felt.
I hope Trent's eagle project went well, that's sad about the rain but hey, life is like that, sometimes we just got to get off the horse get back on and work through it. I know you'll get it done.
Thanks to all of you for all of your love and support, I'm sorry that I didn't share a message about the scriptures with you but I hope my story helped.
I love you all and I hope that you know that I pray for you all every night.
This is the work of the Lord. This is His Church and He is at the head of this work. There is no doubt in my mind that God and Jesus Christ appeared to Joseph Smith and the way we know that is the Book of Mormon.
I love you all! Keep writing and keep praying! Stay Strong!
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