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!

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

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

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

April 25, 2011

Dear Family,

We had a great week! Happy Easter to all!!

Easter here is kinda funny. So Argentina has lots of European influence (e.g. they use bidets). The Easter here is funny because they are suuuper Catholic, but they have big commercial traditions as well. For example, Easter eggs. I never really noticed much about Easter eggs in the states. Maybe the occasional chocolate bunny, or just lots of chocolate in general. Here however, they have a big custom of Easter eggs, which are big hollow chocolate eggs that have some goodies inside. The week of Easter, on almost every street corner there are people selling them, and they range in size from a grape to a football. Very entertaining. At the same time, there are big Catholic traditions surrounding Easter. One of the big ones down here is that they do lots of reenactments of the torturing and the crucifixion of Christ. Two nights this week we were sitting in the apartment at the end of the night planning for the next day when we heard what sounded like a riot outside. We looked out the window and saw a group of people acting out the scene of the Roman soldiers whipping Christ (with pretty legit costumes and everything) as a parade taking up the entire street with about 100 or so people watching them and following them. They went pretty slowly and stopped for a little bit when the got to each intersection, acted out a little more, and then a car that was following them with a big loudspeaker on top would start reading off some prayers and they continued the acting until the next intersection. I tried getting a video of it, but it was pretty dark, so I only got a few decent pictures. (There were a few egg-salesmen and a man with a popcorn cart who trailed behind too). It was nice to see them giving attention to this important time, but I felt like they just completely missed the boat, focusing on the trial and persecution after Christ had already done so much of what the Atonement is in Gethsemane, and forgetting to show the triumphant resurrected Savior.

Anyway, José is doing great and progressing well. We had lunch this week with him, and at the end of lunch after sharing the scripture we asked them the standard missionary question "Who do you know that we could share the gospel with?" José’s wife is a member since she was a kid, but is now inactive and working on reactivating. She gave us the standard member response. "Oh, elders, we know lots of people, but none of them would be interested in the gospel." José however, butted in and gave an awesome response: "Elders, we know lots of people, but we don’t know if they’re interested *yet*." What a great response! So many times we see our friends as they currently are, and how well their current self would fit in the church. We forget that people can change. That’s actually kinda the purpose, to change. And how do we know if our friends are interested unless we give them a chance? So be like José. Be great missionaries! Your friends are depending on you to bring them the gospel whether they know it or not.

I love you all tons! Happy Easter! Remember what it’s all about, then share it with someone!

-Elder Spencer

April 18, 2011

Dear Family,

This week we had some great things happen. Our best investigator, José, told us on Tuesday that he wanted to get baptized, and he felt like he had repented in his head, but not in his heart. He told us that he struggled a lot with prayer and having sincere prayers. (He said that every time he started to pray Messi popped into his head to score some epic goal, haha.) We had a really great lesson about prayer, read about Enos, and then helped him work out his problems with it giving suggestions, like thinking out what he was going to say before praying, or whispering silently the words rather than just thinking them. We then committed him to pray. Our next lesson with him, at the end of the week, he said that the week had been super difficult at work, but that he was able to find so much peace and strength through prayer, something which had been so difficult for him earlier. He had also never come to church before, and before, it was like pulling teeth to get him to commit to coming. That appointment, however, he told us how excited he was to come to church this week! We also had planned to reset his baptismal date that lesson because it had fallen, and when we were getting to the end of the lesson, he brought up the subject of his baptism himself and told us the day he wanted to get baptized. There you have it, prayer can change the night to day!!

In other news, our other investigators aren’t doing so hot. Fernando had lots of problems with a house he has in another providence, so he is traveling a lot and doesn’t have time. And the others have kinda fizzled out a little which gives us lots of time to... ...look for new ones!! We actually found some really cool new investigators this week who were super super receptive and we have lots of appointments for the coming week with them, so hopefully that will turn out well. In the mean time, we’ve also been working a lot with inactives and part-member families, and we’re starting to see some progress there too. The work progresses, brick by brick.

Anyway, love you all tons. The church is true! Tell everyone you know!
-Elder Spencer

April 11, 2011

Dear Family,

Wonderful week! Today was great! We went down with both of the Tucuman zones (about 50 missionaries) to a dam and had an asado (Argentine BBQ). My first companion taught me how to make a pretty solid charcoal fire, and I learned about my 2nd month on a mission that a frisbee works really well for fanning fire, so I made the fire and it turned out pretty delicious. That’s one of the great parts of Argentina, the meat. There’s meat in every meal. Meat meat meat meat. You still have to be careful, though. Last week my comp and I decided to make "choripan", which is basically just bratwurst, but you use the Argentine mystery sausage, chorizo. Yep, we both got pretty sick off that and had to have healthy dosages of pepto bismol afterwards. Oh well, it was pretty delicious.

Well, the missionary work is coming along really well. Elder Petersen and I get along fantastically and we have a great time working together. Fernando’s doing great. In one week he read to... (drum roll please) ...1 Nephi 19! Pretty impressive. I think that’s the farthest I’ve ever had an investigator read. We had a great lesson with him this week and we brought over the stake patriarch, who happens to live in our ward and be about the same age as him, and it was a good lesson. One of the coolest stories from this week was that of a couple we’ve been working with, Martin and Sandra. He’s an inactive and she’s not a member. They have lots of weird beliefs, kinda agnostic, they think that God is just an energy. This has always presented a problem with prayer because they don’t feel like God is anything you can direct yourself to in prayer. We talked about prayer a little and then invited them to pray every single day to ask God if he existed and if our message was true. They didn’t want to because they didn’t think it would work. Then we explained that that is when faith comes in, and sooner or later we will always be backed up to the wall of faith, having to walk into uncertainty solely trusting. We invited them to trust in our words and pray every day, and... they accepted! We were so excited that we fasted this weekend that they would get a response. We have an appointment with them tomorrow and can’t wait to find out how it went.

Well, that’s about all for this week. I love you all tons! The church is true! Tell all your friends, for "their souls are precious" (Alma 31:35).

-Elder Spencer





My good lookin' comp Elder Petersen and I





The beautiful views at Cadillal