Here's to new beginnings (Aug 26)

hello hello my dear family and friends! 

So we now have an hour and a half to write letters so hopefully this letter is a good one haha. I feel so blessed now. And poor mal only can write for half an hour! I didn’t know presidents could do so much. i thought missions were a lot more uniform. But anyways... 

yeah i do get dearelders, just usually in a group after like 3 weeks and sometimes i don’t get the ends of the letters. I hope you keep all the things you send via dearelder so i can read them in their entirety one day. haha. also yeah i am so excited for Jackie! She´s gunna be an AWESOME mom one day. haha should say SOON! 

Also mom so cool about Education week. So glad you could do that and that it was fun for you! I feel like we had similar weeks, this week felt like a new beginning for me too, which i will explain mas adelante. But that’s so great. Also good luck to Tali and Afton at school today! Also i hope madeline is enjoying getting back into school! Tell me all about your first days girls! Also Trevor, dang son. · weeks... que va a hacer... (thats like "what are you going to do" but it means like "dang or wow") I told you my bishop is japanese right? spanish with a japonese accent is like the best thing ever haha.

Multi-zone activity

Ok so on monday we had an awesome multi zone activity. I tried to send pictures, hopefully you got them. The picture with lots of people is the two zones. The one with not very many people is just my zone.

Distict

We aren’t much bigger than a district because we just divided from another zone so thats why we are not very many people. But i actually really like it. we are a fun zone. For the activity we played sport and had a BBQ in the park. But someone found a chess set and i ended up battling it out with some people. It got pretty intense and it was so fun! I was so into it haha but it was so fun. We all learned a lot of english while playing. (things like "oh no!" and "dang it!" and "you cant´do that!" and "I win!" haha we had a lot of fun). 

A moment of losing :-)

 Wednesday we got working hard. We found a new person to teach- her name is Mirna and she is studying at the univisidad here. There was this really awkward moment in the lesson when i was looking at fotos of her family and was like "thats a really nice picture of your dad" and she was like "oh that’s my mom". Like, what can you do after that? But she is awesome and I think she´s got some real intention which is exciting! Right after that we had this lesson with these two ladies and hermana james was like "invite your daughter to the lesson" and the lady was like "that’s my sister!" so...we are definitely good at awkward in this companionship. 

On thursday we invited one of our investigators to the zone meeting, and we all practiced teaching him together. His name is Ryder, and he has been going to church since marchish, but just doesn’t want to get baptized. We had a poweful lesson (14 missionaries teaching together) and he really felt the spirit. His biggest concern right now is that if he gets baptized and goes to the celestial kingdom, he wont be with his family because they will be in another kingdom. So we are going to work on that with him this week. He is really great and extremely active. Also we found this other family of 8 that are basically ready. its a solo mom with 7 kids. She can only go to church every other week but she did meet with the missionaries like 5 years ago. But her kids went to church the other week. We found them because they live in the house of Bladimir. sometimes God has different things in mind than i do. And isn’t that wonderful?

Friday we found yet another family that has gone to the church before, and they want to get baptized! They just have a lot of things they need to get figured out first. This day was extremely cold, and guess what zone decided to give up their blankets to be washed thrusday? Us. So we all are basically dying of cold haha. But no today (monday) is a little warmer. Also Hermana James and i knocked on this door of this hilarious dog that could jump super high. Now if we ever have a bad day we know what door we are going back to. Seriously we laughed for a good 10 minutes straight.

On saturday we had a lesson with the husband who isn’t a member but his wife is a less active. I’ve met with him one other time, but i think he is developing real interest, and we are excited about him. we got him to kneel (ok not us. the spirit) down and pray for his family. He got up after and said that he hadn’t prayed in 19 years. He just was very calm and seemed to really be meditating in all that we explained about his family. Normally he just plays playstation all night long. The first time i passed by with my companion he didn’t want to talk to us. But we just did a super fast powerful lesson in less than 5 minutes, and after he was like oh wait... you can talk a little more. We have been taking it slow, but today we taught about joseph smith and i think he was really touched. So we are excited.

Sunday it was super cold, but we have valiant members who came to church! Also we made pancakes and brought them to one of our investigators house to get them up to go to church . Um now have a testimony of the power of pancakes and think I’m going to do this more! Even though it was soooo dang cold, they saw the pancakes and got ready and came to church! Well really it’s a less active family but their 11 year old daughter isn’t baptized and missionaries have been trying to get them to church since february. Well the solution was pancakes my friends. So hopefully we will be getting this family back into action soon! (They also have other family that they live with that aren’t members so they can really be powerful help if they can get active!) So we are happy about this. 

Also i have a testimony of the importance of both of the missionaries needing to have their hearts and strength and might in the work. Seriously i feel like i am in a new area, and it’s just because hermana james and i worked hard together this week. We have tons of new promising people, more than i ever had in my month and a half with my other companion. So if you are thinking about marrying someone who isn’t in the church, I’d really say think again. You´ve got to have the same goals and desires and stuff like that. Life lessons from the mission. The mission is really the best preparation for life. And this is just one small example of that. 

Oh also my ward got together as relief society on sunday to go and visit all the less actives with the stake relief society presidency. We met with them after to get references from them, and seriously they were all glowing and happy from being able to find and help people. If you want to be happy, go and visit someone. Seriously it was so great to see all of these sisters just pink from the cold but smiling with the joy of lifting someone else. I know that helping others makes us happy. So go out and help someone this week. Go out of your way, take some time, but just do something different that you wouldn’t normally do to make someone else a little happier. I invite you to do this because I want you to be happy. Deal? deal.

Have a great day, a great week, and know that I love this work more than ever! Thanks for your prayers, encouragement, and love. Keep the faith,

Hermana Elisa Black