Dear Family,
An awesome week! So, biggest news, José blessed the sacrament this week! We had talked with the bishop on Tuesday about José and his progress and the Bishop said that he was super pleased with how well José had been doing and how his interview went and he wanted him to bless the sacrament this week and that he wanted to put the goal to get ordained an Elder in September when General Priesthood meeting is. On our appointment on Saturday with José we talked about Priesthood and read D&C 20 and 84 and talked about his duties as a Priesthood holder. He told us "apart from reading and talking about the Priesthood, I want to *use* the Priesthood." My comp and I were grinning from ear to ear. We then told him that he was going to bless the sacrament on Sunday and he was pretty pleased. He’s such a solid person! He just gets it. He is excited to be a home teacher and he’s excited to have a calling and serve in the church, and he’s just going through a mighty change of heart. It’s such a miracle for me to see because he’s probably the richest investigator or member I’ve seen in my whole mission, but he’s like king Lamoni’s father, so willing to give all that he has to know God. Whenever he reads the scriptures with us it’s pretty epic, he has a deep booming voice and he reads slowly and carefully, letting every word sink in. When he blessed the sacrament, it was just awesome.
More good news. An investigator we had last transfer, Julieta, (cousin of a member) had dropped us about a month ago. She told us that she just felt that the Catholic church was what she needed to follow. It was all super fishy because like the day before she was super pumped about the church and had a baptismal date and everything, but she had a baby she was going to baptize Catholic because her husband’s fam was all Catholic and wanted it like that. We just kinda told her that we respected her decision and then went on our merry way. This week, however, one night we were walking by her house and she told us that we should drop by and chat. Then she told her cousin that she wanted to come back to church, and when we were talking to her mom she told us that she had decided on the Mormon church. We had a great appointment with her and she remembered almost everything we had taught her and showed up to church on Sunday! She should be getting baptized in about a month.
Anyway, suffice it to say, it was a good week. By the way, Quentin is totally right, usually we only find the "weird" people knocking doors. Think about it, who else is home during the middle of the day: people who don’t have jobs. Therefore, give references! Work with the missionaries! President Hinckley said that it’s the key to missionary work and that if we do that we could double the amount of convert baptisms. I love you all! The church is true!
-Elder Spencer
PS- Our mission got 150 baptisms this month, a new record for our mission president.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Monday, May 23, 2011
May 23, 2011
Dear Family,
What an awesome week! Biggest news of the week, José got baptized!!! It was sooooo good. We did a double baptism with the other ward because a lady from there was getting baptized too. The program was super good. There were a couple talks, two other elders and I sang "Nearer, My God To Thee" and then my companion baptized him. His wife was crying (I couldn’t really tell if he was, being that he was drenching wet) and he came out beaming happy.
Sunday was super good. He showed up early for church and everything, and during classes had an interview with the bishop. The bishop asked him if he was ready to start serving in the church, so right after he got confirmed he got sustained to get the Aaronic Priesthood and then after church he got ordained. Hopefully in a year or so I’ll be making a trip back to Argentina for their temple sealing. :) Anyway, after church we had lunch at their house and José made asado (Argentine BBQ) and holy smokes, that was the most incredible meat I’ve ever eaten. It was soooooo tender and they had put it in this yummy garlic marinade. It was just wow.
Anyway, other than that, not much going on. We had been focusing a lot on José, getting him over those final hurdles, and now we don’t really have any progressing investigators. So, now that we’re freed up a little on time we’re going to be focusing a lot more on finding *lots* of new investigators and working on our non-progressing investigators.
Today we went up to the mountains next to the city where the Christ statue is where I went last year when I was here. It was super fun and we got some sweet pictures of the clouds melting down the mountain. Enjoy!
Love you all tons! The church is true!!
-Elder Spencer
José and I
José, his wife, my comp and I
Cooool clouds
Jumping off the edge of the world!
What an awesome week! Biggest news of the week, José got baptized!!! It was sooooo good. We did a double baptism with the other ward because a lady from there was getting baptized too. The program was super good. There were a couple talks, two other elders and I sang "Nearer, My God To Thee" and then my companion baptized him. His wife was crying (I couldn’t really tell if he was, being that he was drenching wet) and he came out beaming happy.
Sunday was super good. He showed up early for church and everything, and during classes had an interview with the bishop. The bishop asked him if he was ready to start serving in the church, so right after he got confirmed he got sustained to get the Aaronic Priesthood and then after church he got ordained. Hopefully in a year or so I’ll be making a trip back to Argentina for their temple sealing. :) Anyway, after church we had lunch at their house and José made asado (Argentine BBQ) and holy smokes, that was the most incredible meat I’ve ever eaten. It was soooooo tender and they had put it in this yummy garlic marinade. It was just wow.
Anyway, other than that, not much going on. We had been focusing a lot on José, getting him over those final hurdles, and now we don’t really have any progressing investigators. So, now that we’re freed up a little on time we’re going to be focusing a lot more on finding *lots* of new investigators and working on our non-progressing investigators.
Today we went up to the mountains next to the city where the Christ statue is where I went last year when I was here. It was super fun and we got some sweet pictures of the clouds melting down the mountain. Enjoy!
Love you all tons! The church is true!!
-Elder Spencer
José and I
José, his wife, my comp and I
Cooool clouds
Jumping off the edge of the world!
Monday, May 16, 2011
May 16, 2011
Dear Family,
This week went super good. It was also super hectic. First of all, José is doing well. For the last two weeks we’ve been meeting with him every other day to pump him up for his baptism. He was still having problems with dropping alcohol, so we fasted with him on Sunday to help him go cold turkey. Hopefully he makes it. If he passes his interview tomorrow he can get baptized this week. If not, we’ll have to put it off until he is able to stop drinking. Pray for him. He’s super excited and prepared for his baptism, he just needs to go over this last hurdle to make it.
So we’ve been preparing to do a big missionary fireside, focused on member missionary work. We got a big box of copies of the Book of Mormon and our ward mission leader made a whole ton of banana bread and... 7 people showed up. Yeah, kinda a bummer, especially it just happened to fall right when we were fasting so we couldn’t even load up on the bread. But, it went well anyway and we at least got 7 members of the ward pumped up about missionary work. By small and simple things....
Those awesome new investigators we found last week are doing well. As a rule with new investigators we usually try making the return appointment within the first few days after the contact or first lesson. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to get a hold of one, and the other is moving to Buenos Aires next week, so... gotta keep on working :) This week we had a pretty funny story about finding a new family, though. One night we were knocking doors and a 14 year old boy answered and said his mom wasn’t home, but would be the next day. The next day we went back and his older brother (15) answered the door. We told the older brother that we were missionaries and that the younger brother had said we should come back. The older brother let us in without protest and we walked up into the house. We walked into the living room and the mom and the sister walked in with super surprised expressions on their faces, like "what are these two random guys doing in our house?". The mom however said, "you guys are Mormons, right? Have a seat!" (we like to hear that) and they treated us super well and even fed us dinner. Haha, we couldn’t keep laughing about how randomly we got into the house, but how nice they were to let us stay and give us food. We have a return appointment to teach them this Friday, hopefully it goes well. They seem like such a perfect family ready for the gospel.
Well, that’s about it for this week. Love you all tons! The church is true!
-Elder Spencer
This week went super good. It was also super hectic. First of all, José is doing well. For the last two weeks we’ve been meeting with him every other day to pump him up for his baptism. He was still having problems with dropping alcohol, so we fasted with him on Sunday to help him go cold turkey. Hopefully he makes it. If he passes his interview tomorrow he can get baptized this week. If not, we’ll have to put it off until he is able to stop drinking. Pray for him. He’s super excited and prepared for his baptism, he just needs to go over this last hurdle to make it.
So we’ve been preparing to do a big missionary fireside, focused on member missionary work. We got a big box of copies of the Book of Mormon and our ward mission leader made a whole ton of banana bread and... 7 people showed up. Yeah, kinda a bummer, especially it just happened to fall right when we were fasting so we couldn’t even load up on the bread. But, it went well anyway and we at least got 7 members of the ward pumped up about missionary work. By small and simple things....
Those awesome new investigators we found last week are doing well. As a rule with new investigators we usually try making the return appointment within the first few days after the contact or first lesson. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to get a hold of one, and the other is moving to Buenos Aires next week, so... gotta keep on working :) This week we had a pretty funny story about finding a new family, though. One night we were knocking doors and a 14 year old boy answered and said his mom wasn’t home, but would be the next day. The next day we went back and his older brother (15) answered the door. We told the older brother that we were missionaries and that the younger brother had said we should come back. The older brother let us in without protest and we walked up into the house. We walked into the living room and the mom and the sister walked in with super surprised expressions on their faces, like "what are these two random guys doing in our house?". The mom however said, "you guys are Mormons, right? Have a seat!" (we like to hear that) and they treated us super well and even fed us dinner. Haha, we couldn’t keep laughing about how randomly we got into the house, but how nice they were to let us stay and give us food. We have a return appointment to teach them this Friday, hopefully it goes well. They seem like such a perfect family ready for the gospel.
Well, that’s about it for this week. Love you all tons! The church is true!
-Elder Spencer
Monday, May 9, 2011
May 9, 2011
Dear Family,
It was great talking to mom and co. yesterday! Updates on missionary work: José is doing great. Yesterday he went to all 3 meetings for the first time and loved it all! He got along super well with the High priests and is going to go to a barbecue with them this week. Our high priests quorum is super legit, about 10 guys (bigger than all the active priesthood combined in any of my other areas) and includes 4 ex-bishops and the current patriarch. They’re doing a great job of inviting him into the fold.
This week we had a couple of cool miracles in finding people. When we plan out the day we try to leave about an hour every day for finding new people to teach. Then we plan the exact time and place and ask the Lord to put the people that he has prepared in our way with the promise that we will talk to everyone. Well three days this week, just after talking to people for a whole hour with no success we were about to go to the next appointment, but decided just one last person. One was a lady in a park who told us how much she had been looking for peace in her life, and being closer to God. Another was a lady at a door who had recently lost her brother to a disease and wondered if she could ever see him again. The last was a girl who had been looking around at all the religions, but just wanted to find a way to unite her family. Well, we had some pretty good responses for all of them. All in all it was super cool to see the Lord’s hand guide us to these people he had prepared for us to teach.
Today for P-day we decided to check out downtown and we ended up taking a tour of the capitol bldg. It was super cool and the tour guide lady insisted in talking to us in her broken English even though there was a chileno in our group, haha. At the end we were talking and the lady (the governor’s translator) suddenly stopped and said "quick, the governor’s leaving, let’s go shake his hand" so the tour lady stopped him before he got into his car and got him to shake our hands. Pretty neat! Apparently the Argentine constitution is based a lot off of ours.
Well, that’s all folks, but I love you all tons! The church is true!!
-Elder Spencer
It was great talking to mom and co. yesterday! Updates on missionary work: José is doing great. Yesterday he went to all 3 meetings for the first time and loved it all! He got along super well with the High priests and is going to go to a barbecue with them this week. Our high priests quorum is super legit, about 10 guys (bigger than all the active priesthood combined in any of my other areas) and includes 4 ex-bishops and the current patriarch. They’re doing a great job of inviting him into the fold.
This week we had a couple of cool miracles in finding people. When we plan out the day we try to leave about an hour every day for finding new people to teach. Then we plan the exact time and place and ask the Lord to put the people that he has prepared in our way with the promise that we will talk to everyone. Well three days this week, just after talking to people for a whole hour with no success we were about to go to the next appointment, but decided just one last person. One was a lady in a park who told us how much she had been looking for peace in her life, and being closer to God. Another was a lady at a door who had recently lost her brother to a disease and wondered if she could ever see him again. The last was a girl who had been looking around at all the religions, but just wanted to find a way to unite her family. Well, we had some pretty good responses for all of them. All in all it was super cool to see the Lord’s hand guide us to these people he had prepared for us to teach.
Today for P-day we decided to check out downtown and we ended up taking a tour of the capitol bldg. It was super cool and the tour guide lady insisted in talking to us in her broken English even though there was a chileno in our group, haha. At the end we were talking and the lady (the governor’s translator) suddenly stopped and said "quick, the governor’s leaving, let’s go shake his hand" so the tour lady stopped him before he got into his car and got him to shake our hands. Pretty neat! Apparently the Argentine constitution is based a lot off of ours.
Well, that’s all folks, but I love you all tons! The church is true!!
-Elder Spencer
Monday, May 2, 2011
May 2, 2011
Dear Family,
This was an interesting/awesome week. It started off really well with my comp and I celebrating Easter on P-day. Ok, so we were at the butchershop two weeks ago and we saw that they had lamb. We were like, hey, why don’t we try lamb for Easter to try and do the old Jewish traditions. We got the lamb... a lot of it (2.5 kilos) and then on Monday we grilled it up. It was deeeeeeelicious.
From there things went a little crazy. One of the elders who lives in the apartment with us had been having bad knee problems so he had an MRI on his knee. The results came in and the mission doctor said that they would have to operate, so he had to go home (to Buenos Aires) (héll come back after the surgery), which left us in a trio until today (the transfer ended and they sent in a replacement).
It was pretty fun. The other missionary, Elder Ackerman, is super new and didn’t know Spanish or his area very well, so we tried dividing the time we worked half and half between his area and ours, but lots of the time we were in his area we got lost, haha. It made me remember how I was when I had that much time in the mission and I was left to direct in my area (divisions). Not only did I get lost, but we got robbed at gunpoint. :) He was feeling a little down for not knowing his area well, but he perked up after I told him that story.
We had an awesome lesson with Martin and Sandra (the agnostic investigators we have) and I felt like we resolved a lot of their doubts. I’ve been studying lots of gerenal conference talks lately, and that day it paid off. They were wondering why we need a prophet if we can just communicate personally with God. I had recently read Dallin H Oaks talk "Two Lines of Communication" (read it, it’s great) and so I kinda summarized that for them. They really liked the response and the spirit was great.
José’s doing great! Yesterday was his third Sunday in a row and he told us that he’s going every Sunday from now on. He’s got a little Word of Wisdom problem, he likes to drink a little wine with lunch. He says he has the will power to do it, but he just hasn’t convinced himself to yet. We taught him the story of Naaman and how obedience always brings blessings even if we can’t understand why. He committed to living the Word of Wisdom and so far he’s doing well.
Well, that’s about it, love you all tons! The Church is true! "Preach the gospel at all times, and if necessary, use words."
-Elder Spencer
This was an interesting/awesome week. It started off really well with my comp and I celebrating Easter on P-day. Ok, so we were at the butchershop two weeks ago and we saw that they had lamb. We were like, hey, why don’t we try lamb for Easter to try and do the old Jewish traditions. We got the lamb... a lot of it (2.5 kilos) and then on Monday we grilled it up. It was deeeeeeelicious.
From there things went a little crazy. One of the elders who lives in the apartment with us had been having bad knee problems so he had an MRI on his knee. The results came in and the mission doctor said that they would have to operate, so he had to go home (to Buenos Aires) (héll come back after the surgery), which left us in a trio until today (the transfer ended and they sent in a replacement).
It was pretty fun. The other missionary, Elder Ackerman, is super new and didn’t know Spanish or his area very well, so we tried dividing the time we worked half and half between his area and ours, but lots of the time we were in his area we got lost, haha. It made me remember how I was when I had that much time in the mission and I was left to direct in my area (divisions). Not only did I get lost, but we got robbed at gunpoint. :) He was feeling a little down for not knowing his area well, but he perked up after I told him that story.
We had an awesome lesson with Martin and Sandra (the agnostic investigators we have) and I felt like we resolved a lot of their doubts. I’ve been studying lots of gerenal conference talks lately, and that day it paid off. They were wondering why we need a prophet if we can just communicate personally with God. I had recently read Dallin H Oaks talk "Two Lines of Communication" (read it, it’s great) and so I kinda summarized that for them. They really liked the response and the spirit was great.
José’s doing great! Yesterday was his third Sunday in a row and he told us that he’s going every Sunday from now on. He’s got a little Word of Wisdom problem, he likes to drink a little wine with lunch. He says he has the will power to do it, but he just hasn’t convinced himself to yet. We taught him the story of Naaman and how obedience always brings blessings even if we can’t understand why. He committed to living the Word of Wisdom and so far he’s doing well.
Well, that’s about it, love you all tons! The Church is true! "Preach the gospel at all times, and if necessary, use words."
-Elder Spencer
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