My email this week

11/16/2009

Hola Family and Friends!

I hope that you all had a fantastic week back in chilly Utah and I hope that all is going well and almost perfect for you all in your lives right now. Thank you so much for the letters and love and support that you all sent to me this week. It was so great to hear about what you have all been up to and of the cool experiences that you have been able to have. It was also nice to feel the warmth of the love and your support for me which help me to continue to work hard in this great and marvelous work. I will always be thankful for the blessing that I have been given to be part of such a great family and to have such great friends! Thanks for all you do guys!

So this past week was a great hard week of work here in beautiful San Sebastian. We have had a rough past few weeks with the number of investigators that we have had drop out, but it was great to be able to work hard and see the blessings that the Lord had in store for us. As much as I miss you guys back home, I am so thankful for this opportunity. I know without a doubt that this is the place where the Lord wants us to be.

Our week was full of hard work, and a lot of it was just that . . . work! We had a lot of opportunities to find new people and invite them. This week we will have the opportunity to teach a lot. Because this week was used mostly to find new investigators to teach, I don’t have a lot of cool or exciting stories to share with you. But that’s OK because it was still a great week of work and I know that next week we will have some really cool experiences to share. But just because I didn’t have a lot doesn’t mean that I didn’t have any good experiences.

On Tuesday night we taught the entire family of our newest baptismal date Rut. By the way Uncle Todd I have a really cool piece of information for you, Rut and her mom are from Hungary. Do you remember very much Hungarian? Do you have any cool phrases that I could say to them that would make them laugh or smile? Haha! It’s so cool to see the type of people we get to meet here. Who knew that someday I would meet a Hungarian family living in Puerto Rico?? Anyways we had a lesson with Rut and we ended up teaching her whole family.

This lesson was one of the most amazing lessons that I have been part of in my mission. This family is so humble. They don’t have a whole lot but what they have is really the only thing that we need in able to work with people here . . . and that is faith and a desire to learn more. I can’t tell you what an amazing feeling it was to be guided by the spirit to say the things that I needed to say. I don’t know that I said a whole lot of my own words during this lesson and I know it was because the spirit was working through me to touch the hearts of these people. We taught great together. We taught like we have never taught before and we felt on fire. My Spanish was amazing and Elder Blandon and I were making connections and transitions that we have never been able to make before. We talked afterward about how amazing the lesson was and we both made the observation that this lesson felt really different.

As I thought about this lesson more and more I thought about the desire that these people had to learn about the gospel of Jesus Christ and their desire to change their lives. The Lord wanted His message to be made loud and clear to His children in this moment. I have no doubt in my mind that it was for this reason that He helped His lowly servants teach an amazing lesson. This is the Church of Jesus Christ in our days, I know it is! And I know that our Heavenly Father wants the best for His children. I know that this is the reason why He has established His church once again over the earth. He wants the best for all of His children.

There are a lot of great people in the world who go to a lot of good churches and do a lot of good things. But I know that the Lord wants the absolute best for His children. We all have problems. Some of them are bigger then others. But the key is that our loving Savior suffered for each and every one of us. He knows our problems and He knows our sorrows. He wants the best for us. And it’s for this reason that He has established His church on the earth again. I know my Savior lives and I know He loves us. I am so thankful for the sacrifice He made for us and the power that we can find in this sacrifice to change our lives and become better people.

Sorry if that was a little out of place, but I write what I feel I need to write in these emails and I felt that I really need to write about that. Anyways . . . besides that lesson, we had a great week. We found a lot of new people who have a real desire to learn more about the gospel.

This weekend we had a Stake activity and a Caribbean Area Conference with Elder Ballard. The activity was really fun because it was a talent show and the talents that the people shared were native talents in Puerto Rico, part of the culture here. It was so cool to see that and to realize how much I love this land and these people. The meeting with Elder Ballard was really neat. He talked a lot about how we can all receive personal revelation to do those things that we need to do in our lives. He challenged all of the investigators in the audience to read the Book of Mormon and pray to know if it comes from God. Then he promised that they would be able to know perfectly that the Book of Mormon is true and that this is the Church of Christ in the last days. It was such a blessing to hear from an apostle of Jesus Christ and it was really cool to realize how Jesus Christ is guiding us through His messengers today.

I know that this is His church and I am so thankful to be here serving Him. I hope that you all have a great week this week! I look forward to your letters and your emails. I hope that BYU does well this week and you all better remember not to wear red next week! Haha! I love you all so much and I hope that you have an amazing week.

Love you all! Have an amazing week.