"I'm happier"

Dear everyone,

First of all, pretty funny that you got to help out with the zone conference lunch. It's weird how things are so similar everywhere in the church. I kind of thought that was just a Colorado thing to have zone conference lunch provided by the stake, but yeah that's totally a thing we do here too. We also always sing to the sisters that made and served the lunch. Our song is just straight up the "Army of Helaman" without any changed lyrics except that at the end after the "to bring the world his truth" we say "and thank you for the food." So anyway we're basically pretty cool I think is how that works.

This week was pretty great for us. The biggest, most awesome thing, was that our investigator was baptized and confirmed! It was really, really awesome. There was kind of a little bit of stress leading up to it, not being able to find the baptismal clothing, and some other craziness, but as soon as the baptismal service started, it was just great. The first counselor in the bishopric did the actual baptism, and our bishop confirmed her yesterday, so that was pretty cool. I got to give a talk about the gift of the Holy Ghost at the actual baptism--I think that was the first time I've actually given a written talk in Spanish here. I mean, I've borne my testimony plenty of times, and done some other like impromptu stuff, but in terms of a talk talk, that was the first time. The whole time the Spirit was just super strong. It was really just amazing to see how much she's changed, how much she wants to do the right thing. As we've been teaching her, she's been talking about how much different she feels than before. And then after she was baptized, we were just telling her how happy we were for her, and she just told us "I'm happier." And you know that just felt so awesome. It really is an amazing experience to see someone change so much. We talked to her yesterday after she received the Holy Ghost, and she just told us that she felt so good. Leading up to her baptism she was feeling kind of nervous, but she said that she just felt completely calm and great. So basically I just can't come up with enough ways of saying that it is just completely great to be a missionary.

Another pretty cool experience came from a girl we've been helping to reactivate. Basically she's gone from completely not active when we got here to completely active now. I've mentioned her before, because she's really cool basically. Something really awesome is that most of her family is either less-active or nonmembers, it's just her and her mom that are going to church right now. Her Mom told us that her Dad is like really not friendly towards the church, and actually tried to get her to stop going to church. But apparently her reaction to that was a "He[ck] no!" So basically when I heard that I laughed a lot and fist-bumped her :).

 

And then after the baptismal service we had the ward Christmas party which was pretty good too. Had some weird dessert thing where you basically just make a really crispy (not burnt, not sure exactly how that works) tortilla, and then completely cover it in cinnamon sugar. That was really good. And of course, lately we've been singing a lot of Christmas carols at basically any meeting we go to ever. So that's a lot of fun.

Things are going great. We're finally being able to get into the Christmas spirit now that it's finally started to snow and it's gotten below 40 degrees outside. I hope everything's going well with you all. I don't have details about Christmas calls/skyping yet, but I'll obviously make sure to make that happen next Monday.

 

Love you all!

Peter

 

P.s. I don't have the classic "in baptismal clothing" picture because things were a little crazy, but here's a picture we took during the ward Christmas party.

Everything is awesome!

Dear Mom! And everyone else!

It's Christmas time, and it's awesome! Although the thing is basically we haven't been having any Christmassy weather for a while now, and we won't be having any this week apparently, so that's kind of weird. It's supposed to be in the 60s this week. But it's okay, we've been getting into the Christmas spirit anyways, listening to Christmas music, and putting up Christmas decorations (Thanks so much for contributing to that! The "I don't even know what it is sticky nativity thing" was really cool, and we were both duly impressed with the sabuda pop-up.)

It sounds like you've been having a pretty dang busy week. I will always be jealous of people who get to go to the symphony while I can't. Sounds like a pretty neat week. I was surprised that you still don't have a tree, but then I thought about it and it makes sense, it's just that like every single house I've gone to lately has their tree all set up and decorated and everything. I think Hispanics are way more into Christmas than Thanksgiving.

This week was a little bit slower for us--we were doing a lot of tracting, but that's okay. You probably remember that closer to the beginning of my mission we weren't doing too much of that, but lately we have definitely been doing more. But there were some great things about the week too! Some highlights:

This Sunday I got to give a baby blessing! That was suuuuuper weird. There's a family who's been returning to activity for the last few months, and the dad has the Aaronic priesthood, but not the Melchizidek, but they wanted their baby blessed, so they asked me to do it. It was really weird, but really great.

Our investigator is still doing really awesome. She's so cool. We had her baptismal interview on Tuesday, and she passed, and it's just been really great. She is doing awesome, and she is so ready. The experience of teaching her has just been awesome. Her baptism is going to be the same night as our ward Christmas party, like immediately before it, so we're hoping a lot of people come for the baptism and stay for the party. The bishop's announced it the last two Sundays, so that's been really cool. 

I'm sorry, that doesn't seem like a lot, but that's basically the cool things that happened this week. We also were able to get in contact with some cool less-actives that I'd never been able to talk to, so that was pretty neat.

There are definitely some people who I hope to be able to keep in touch with as the years go by. I think one of the best parts of serving a mission is the huge variety of people you get to meet, and I definitely want to be able to keep up those relationships. There's definitely a lot of people I've gotten to know and love here that I probably would never even have talked to in "normal life".

Basically things are going well, my companion's awesome, being a missionary is awesome, and yeah basically that's it!

Again, thanks so much for the package, that was fun. I love you all a lot!

 

Love,

Peter

He is the Gift

Hi!

First of all, thanks so much for all the pictures! That was pretty great and awesome and made me a little bit jealous, but that's okay. And then I'm super jealous of the new game store thing. Last P-day we stopped by this game store in our area that was about like a quarter the size of Rainy Day Games, so anyways I'm jealous I think that's clear.

I'm gonna go ahead and answer your questions first!

1. I don't really have any requests for Christmas... maybe just that it not be something bulky. I'm kind of running very thin on luggage space, so that's fun. Probably the most like practical thing would be maybe like a new pair of pants?

2. I don't really know (how our ward with celebrate Christmas). I do know that members of our ward like Christmas a lot, e.g. one of our investigators has had a Christmas tree up for like the past 3 weeks, so that should be fun! We'll be having a Christmas activity a couple weeks from now, and that'll be fun.

3. Yes I have seen the new video about Christmas He is the Gift. In fact, the church has made these special pass-along cards for us all about the video, so we've basically been giving those out at every door we knock, so yeah, we've seen it. It's pretty cool, huh? I especially like how it invites us at the end to like do something about it. Not just be like "yeah Christmas!" but actually to act. And the music's pretty cool too.

4. What do district leaders do? Not a ton. (That's a palindrome). So far, we set up district meetings, answer a ton of questions from the missionaries in the district, and try to help encourage the missionaries to do good work! So pretty fun!

So this week was pretty great. Had a good Thanksgiving--there's this Anglo family in the ward, and they had us over for dinner along with a lot of their family, so we had a pretty standard Thanksgiving dinner. We even had Funeral Potatoes! So that was fun. The rest of Thanksgiving, when we weren't eating, we went and visited a lot of members and less-active members, so that was pretty cool. It still felt like Thanksgiving, but we were still working hard. So the best of both worlds, I guess!

Our investigator is getting closer and closer to being baptized! We had to push it back one week, so now it's gonna be the 13th, but it's gonna be awesome. Bishop announced it in church on Sunday, and we've been teaching her a ton this week, and it's been great. We taught her the law of tithing, and fasting, and she has no problems with any of it; she's just really prepared. It's really cool to just see how much she's changing and how much she wants to take those important steps in her life.

Things are going pretty good here. The transfer made things a little crazy, but things are getting moving - there were some transfers and some new missionaries so just kind of weird.

I hope you have a great week! I love you all!

Love,

Peter

When you feel like you're making a difference in someone's life...

Hey!

So Thanksgiving's probably going to be pretty low-key this year, it isn't a really big thing in the Hispanic culture, so not too different. We will be having Thanksgiving dinner with a white family in our ward, so that should be fun! As in they go to our ward because they really like Spanish but they are both white. They used to live in Portland! They're pretty cool. And then our ward mission leader is gonna have us over for a Mexican Thanksgiving too, with this really good Mexican soup called posole, it's really good. So it should be a good day.

So this week was pretty good for us! We've had a lot of pretty neat experiences. A woman we're teaching is getting closer and closer to baptism, so that's really cool. We taught her about the word of wisdom yesterday, and as soon as we mentioned coffee, she just immediately was like "ooh, I guess we can't drink coffee anymore!" So anyways that was cool.

This week we also started teaching someone really cool. She's living with some members, and has come to church a few times. She's from the Dominican Republic, and was taught by missionaries there, but she's basically completely forgotten everything except the first vision. BUT she tells us that she completely knows the church is true and wants to be baptized! So that was really neat.

One more cool thing. We've been teaching this 15-year old girl this transfer, who was less active. She started to go to church basically the first week of this transfer, and it seems like she's been liking it. But she basically knows nothing about the gospel, so we've been teaching her a lot of the like really simple stuff. But anyways, we had dinner at her house yesterday (Her mom's a super active member), and she told us about a missionary experience she had! She was apparently talking to her brother's girlfriend, who's going through a really hard time, and she basically just bore her testimony to her! She told her about how much happier she felt going to church, and learning more about the gospel. So that was really cool to hear. It's those times when you really feel like you're making a difference in someone's life. Really neat.

So with our companionship nothing happened with transfers! Yay! But all of the other companionships in the district changed, so that's fun. Also, I'm now the district leader in the ward, so that'll be a fun new challenge thing I guess.  Things are really just going great. My companion's awesome, we're working hard, and it's pretty cool. Love,Peter

Things have been cool, literally and figuratively

Well, it sounds like a pretty dang eventful week! You guys have got me feeling pretty jealous about the board games. That is one thing hat I realized was a kind of a big part of our family-like tradition, and so it's annoying that there's not really much opportunity to do any of that stuff here. But it's okay I guess.

The weather has been pretty dang chilly. It is a dry cold, I guess you would say, and I've got pretty good cold weather gear thanks to you guys, but when it's like 2 degrees outside, it's still really cold. It's a little disturbing when it's like 20 degrees and when you go outside you're like "oh, it's not so bad today!". So anyways it's cold. And I think we probably got your missing snow over here in Denver. It's kind of really cold and snowy here. So I'm having fun experiencing driving in the snow for the first time ever! This week should be better though, supposedly!

W/r/t transfers, it's not like a guarantee that we'll be staying together, but it's a pretty sure thing. There are a lot of reasons why a trainer might be separated from his trainee, but I'm feeling like we'll probably be staying together. We'll find out on Saturday!

Anyways, for us this week was pretty dang busy! We had kind of a lot going on. We had zone conference on Thursday, which was pretty cool. The theme was "change", so it definitely left me a lot to think about. Obviously there's a lot I can change before I'm perfect, so I guess it helped me think about that more, and to set some more specific goals for just you know how to be better. So that was cool. 

On a kind of sad note, we always have car inspections at zone conference, and well to make a long story short we won the award for worst car! We didn't even get a prize! Just shame! I guess next time I should probably take the Halloween window clings off the windows before inspections...

Good thing about this week, we were able to teach a lot more investigators than we have in the past while. We actually doubled the number of investigator lessons we had from last week. And it was pretty cool! I'll share a pretty cool highlight right here: So we went looking for a person who'd been taught by the missionaries about two years ago, to see if he would be interested in learning again (especially because our records didn't have any reason why he had stopped investigating the church.) So when we knocked on his door, his sister answered, and explained to us a kind of crazy situation. So a while after this man had stopped investigating, he was in some horrible accident or something, and had gotten really hurt and suffered some really severe brain damage. He's still alive and stuff, but he can barely talk and is not super coherent. And because he's here illegally, he can't really get the best care. So we weren't really able to teach this guy, but his sister told us that she felt like our visit was from God! She's taking care of him, and it's been really hard for her, and she needed something to help, and she felt like God sent us there. We gave her a Book of Mormon, and she said she'd definitely read it! So that was pretty freaking awesome. The only thing is that she's gonna move to Mexico in like two weeks. So we're gonna give the Mexican missionaries a great referral!

Another pretty cool thing! We had two less-active families come to church for the first time in a long while yesterday, even with the cold and snow and stuff! It was really cool to be able to see the difference, especially talking to one of them after church. He said that he felt so much different, that he felt the way that he felt back when he was active. So that was just super awesome.

I'm sorry for the pretty short email! The thing is that we're gonna go play a dungeons-and-dragons style game based on star wars, and we kind of have to hurry or else there will literally be no time to play. As it is probably half of the three hours we have scheduled will probably be setup and character creation, you know how it is :). Kind of funny, we have an investigator (part of a part-member family) who's super into Star Wars, so we took some suggestions from him re: what our characters should be. So that's pretty fun!

Anyways, things have been cool, literally and figuratively. I love you all! Sorry to break up the streak of photos, but I forgot my camera today :(.

Loads of love,Peter!

How radically different Joseph Smith's theology was...and zombie polar bears?

Hey!

Thanks for the responses to my questions! I really appreciate it! I figure as many personal insights I can get from investigators (I know you don't like that word, sorry :)) about the process of being taught, the better. I'll be honest, sometimes it's a little hard to put oneself in their shoes and think about how it would feel to be learning about all this stuff.

And then okay I'm so jealous of the Terryl Givens fireside, you don't even know. Reminded me of a talk I read by him a few months back about how radically different Joseph Smith's Theology was, and how much that had to do with the strength of the church. (http://speeches.byu.edu/?act=viewitem&id=1508).

My companion

It was a pretty great week! It started out pretty awesomely, with our P-day being pretty dang great. It was a "free day" at the Denver Zoo, which is in our ward, so we went there with some other missionaries, which was a blast, even though it was a little chilly. Then on the way home I introduced my companion to Voodoo Doughnuts, which was pretty great. I'll send some pictures!

It's like a freaking zombie polar bear!

That lion was so close to the glass!

Wednesday was a pretty interesting day, and kind of showed some of the great parts, and some of the not so great parts of missionary work. We had two appointments cancel on us, and an investigator tell us that she wasn't interested in meeting with us anymore, which was pretty disappointing. But there were some great things too! We met and taught a less-active that I'd never met, taught, or even heard of before, which was pretty cool. We did some pretty cool service at the food bank, and met some pretty cool people there, and a member took us out to Red Robin for dinner, which was pretty sweet!

We also were able to set the investigator that we've been teaching a lot, who's husband is a member, on a baptismal date! We actually had dinner with her on Friday (super good. She cooks really well.), and then we taught about the plan of salvation and invited her to be baptized on December 6th, and she accepted, and it was great!

So it was a pretty good week. I went on exchanges with our district leader, and it was pretty cool. It's been a while since I've been with a missionary who's been out for more than a few months, so it was kind of cool.

So basically it was a good week. I love you all a lot!

 

Love,

Peter

I know, it's a miracle.

Hey!

First of all to answer the first question, yes I very much liked sleeping in guilt-free! It was awesome. Although the problem was our phone didn't change time until like 8:00 in the morning, so it woke us up at 5:30, and it took me like 10 minutes to figure out that I could actually go back to sleep.

With Halloween, it actually didn't change much, and we were still able to do a lot of work. It's really nice having a companion who really wants to work, and hasn't been like jaded by the routine of missionary work yet, because it gives me a lot more energy, and motivates me to keep working hard. So yeah it was a good week. The only less-productive time was actual Halloween day, when we were asked to be in our homes at 6:00. We didn't actually get home until like 6:45, but we made an effort. So we watched a church movie and reminisced about Fairview for a bit. Apparently my companion has actually been to the Fairview house! I guess when he was younger he was pretty close with Mason, and Mason took him over to the house. Pretty insane! It really is a ridiculously tiny world.

To answer your question, we did not see hardly anything for dia de los muertos. The only thing we saw was a picture of a less-active at a costume party with her face painted like one of those decorated Mexican skulls. Apart from that, nada. Kind of disappointing, but I guess that's what happens when you serve here in the states.

To just give a rundown of the week, things have been going pretty well. We had a pretty great lesson with the lady that I've been like focusing on the last two weeks, and she was at church yesterday, which was great, because we had some great testimonies, and the impromptu gospel principles lesson given by our bishopric's second counselor was about gaining a testimony! So that was awesome! She participated quite a bit in the lesson and it was just really cool. She even came without her member husband, who was sick! So that was super legit.

District - last transfer

A bit of less exciting news, though. If you remember that girl who we were teaching who has been coming to church for a while but doesn't speak Spanish? So her mom had given her permission to be baptized, and she had set a date to be baptized, but then this week we got a text from her saying that she doesn't feel ready yet. This was after she was acting really excited, and had set things up so that she could get baptized, and everything. That was really hard. I think maybe she just kind of freaked out a bit when it felt like it was actually going to happen. So we basically just bore her our testimonies that we knew that baptism was important, and that she didn't have to be perfect to be baptized. We'll see what happens with that. But I do know that when she does get baptized, her testimony will probably be even stronger for having gone through some of this uncertainty and stuff. So that's the bright side, I guess.

We went up to the food bank on Wednesday and did some pretty cool service there--we basically run around their big warehouse and collect large quantities of food for different organizations that are going to distribute them, so that was a lot of fun.

So all in all, it was a pretty good week, although, you know, there's upsides and downsides to everything.

With family member where we lived last transfer

Spiritual thought of the week: "God is not a God of superheroes, nor of people without weaknesses, for such beings do not exist" --Gerald Causse, 2nd Counselor Presiding Bishopric. (http://speeches.byu.edu/index.php?act=viewitem&id=2157) Isn't it great that the Lord uses us weak people to do stuff? I mean, he's kind of God, He could just do anything He wants to happen. But that's not really the game plan, because He wants us to grow. You all should watch or listen to that talk, by the way, it's awesome.

Also, here are some pictures! I know, it's a miracle.

Love,

Peter