MLK Day

Newark

Hey everyone! 

It's  been a while since I've written and I apologize. Things have been incredibly busy around here which is great.

This week I was transferred from Union City to Newark. I miss Union City and all the people there a whole lot, but Newark is great! You can't drink the water here because it's full of lead, the drivers are super aggressive and you get honked at for following the law, and it's definitely a rougher part of town than Union City. I love it.

We've got an amazing Ward. It's known by all the missionaries as one of the best in the mission. We have an amazing apartment on the 12th floor overlooking the city (see the view at sunrise attached). I have a new companion, Elder Wagner. He's from Delta, Utah and is honestly one of the best missionaries in the mission. The people here are super awesome as well. They're so prepared to hear the Gospel. From Tuesday to Saturday we just taught lessons all day every day. We're feeling really blessed and I know we're going to do great things.

Here are a couple of the people we're teaching:

The Almache Family:

They're super cool. Elder Wagner met them two weeks ago from today and they're already progressing so much. They came to church and loved it yesterday. The dad has been reading and praying really hard because he wants to know if our message is true. 

Juan: 

Super cool 20-something guy. Moved here from the Dominican Republic. He's really looking for peace and loves listening to our message. He gets so excited and happy when we pray with him and share with him.

Josefina:

She's super cool. She's blind and lives in an assisted living home. She's super funny. She really wants to get baptized and has a lot of friends in the ward. She just needs permission from everyone at the assisted living home to go to church every week which is something we're working on.

There's honestly like a lot more people who I could go on about, but those are some people who stuck out this week and I've got more appts tonight. 

Love you all!

Elder Reyes

Hi everyone! This will probably be my shortest post yet since I have like 5 minutes to write it before a night chock-full of appointments.

Highlights this week:

We had transfers! Said goodbye to some amazing missionaries like Elder Kitchen and my boy Dru. Shout out to Dru.

I moved apartments! We now live about a block away from our old place in Union City.

We spent the week planning Wendy's baptism.

We started planning Marbeny's baptism. She's going to be baptized on Sunday.

Wendy got baptized! I'm so excited for her! She's going back to Spain tomorrow until February, so we got Ecuadorian food to say goodbye! It was really cool talking to her and it was fun when she was telling us about how she found us. She saw a poster in the street and called. She came into the church extremely nervous and said she walked in and I called her over to sit down. She's super cool and I hope the ward in Spain is really welcoming. It's really cool to think that anyone I'm meeting right now could be that next person.

Thanksgiving was awesome! I ate wayyy too much food this week.

Love you all!

Still Training

Late email this week!

This week was awesome. It was the last week of the transfer, so we're going to have to say goodbye to many great missionaries in our District and Zone. However, we're also getting 4 new missionaries straight from the MTC to our Zone, including the South Side Elders. So, my trainee and I will share the ward with Elder Owens and his incoming trainee. We're pretty pumped.

The people that we're teaching are progressing really well! We've stopped teaching a couple of them and are focusing on those who are really ready to progress. We taught Marbeny today, which was awesome. She is really ready to be baptized. We went throught the interview questions and everything. She has a couple of minor things that she wants resolved before she gets baptized, but it should be within the next few weeks. We're going back over to resolve those on Wednesday and she wants us to try to teach her husband on Sunday. That's pretty awesome.

Luz brought herself to church and took herself home. We're going to go over with her friend from the ward and teach her this week and try to see how she feels about baptism as well.

This week was pretty interesting. On Sunday we were walking down a busy street when a guy with his window rolled down and shades on started yelling to us. We couldn't figure out what he was saying, but he sounded kind of irrational, so we just kept walking as he turned onto the side street that we were about to cross and into the neighborhood a little bit. He put his hazards on, parked halfway into someone's driveway, and left his car running and front door open as he ran over to us. We quickly realized that the gentleman was absolutely sloshed. Drunk as a skunk (sidenote we were chased by a large mangy skunk this week through the city), he came up to us and started talking about why we were wasting our time trying to preach. He asked us to tell him something about Jesus. He spoke Spanish, but almost punched me when I tried to speak Spanish. He started asking us about politics and ranting about how bad the world would be without President Trump. We told him we were politically neutral as missionaries. Eventually he shifted into praising us and offered to buy us food and a drink nearby. We politely declined. We were on our way to get some awesome tamales from a member anyway. Currently eating said tamales as I write. He congratulated us for our service and told us to never let anyone dissuade us from what we were doing and left. Interesting guy.

I got a new phone, so I can finally take people's numbers down without waiting like 5 years for stuff to load, so I'm pretty psyched about that.

We've been contacting people with a poster about the prodigal son. That's this week's spiritual thought. Heavenly Father loves us. He waits for us with open arms even when we go off course. All we have to do is correct course back to Him.

Here's a great scripture about it:
3 Nephi 9:

13 O all ye that are spared because ye were more righteous than they, will ye not now return unto me, and repent of your sins, and be converted, that I may heal you?

14 Yea, verily I say unto you, if ye will come unto me ye shall have eternal life. Behold, mine arm of mercy is extended towards you, and whosoever will come, him will I receive; and blessed are those who come unto me.

I know that we all have things that we're going through that we need healing with. Just like we all go through physical wounds, we also go through spiritual and emotional wounds. Christ has power to help us to have healing. We just have to get ourselves closer to him. Sometimes people get hurt and scared and worry about meeting with us. Sometimes we ask, "Do you think you'll find more peace moving towards God?" They always say yes and realize that at the end of the day, that's how we can find true, fulfilling, lasting happiness for eternity.

Have an amazing week everyone!

Conference, 56 Tacos, and Balling

Happy Monday everybody!

I hope you all had a great weekend and a great Conference! I absolutely loved it.

This was a pretty awesome week for us! Luz came to conference and loved it, and we went and watched it at Marbeny's house. (We thought it was Marlene but apparently it's Marbeny and she's just never said anything until we gave her a blessing when she showed us her full name on her mail.) Anyway, she loved it too.

We found a really cool lady named Luisa, and we're really thankful to Heavenly Father for that! She let us in while we were knocking doors and it was the first time that Elder Kelsey had been let into a house while door knocking. It was coincidentally also probably the last door we were going to knock before watching Conference on Sunday morning.

We had a District P-day today where we went and got $1 a piece tacos. I was the first to order. I ordered 9 tacos. No regrets. 3 other Elders then also ordered 9 tacos. We had 8 missionaries and we ended up ordering 56 tacos total which was pretty awesome. We played basketball and chair soccer afterwards which was awesome. Elder Kelsey is pretty good at basketball so it was fun to see him drop some threes on people. It was also great to see my former companion (Elder Rasband, who's great at basketball as well) play him, even though Elder Rasband was playing on a recently sprained ankle.

We've got some appointments tonight which should be pretty awesome. Missionary work is super awesome.

Love you all! Have a great week!

Elder Reyes

God and Mammon

Awesome week! This was a super spiritually edifying week!

First off, we had Elder Renlund of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles come to the mission and speak to us (see the picture). He was accompanied by Elder Haynie of the General Seventy and Elder Buckner of the Area Seventy. They were all amazingly powerful speakers, but with great senses of humor and lots of awesome stories. Elder Renlund is very official in General Conference, and is still a spiritual giant in person, but told a lot more jokes, personal stories about trials as a young Bishop, and had an awesome dynamic with Sister Renlund who is an extremely talented speaker herself. We had two sessions with them. One Friday night, and the other Saturday morning. We got to have Elders Shields and Kitchen over to stay at our apartment between sessions which was super fun. Shout out to Elder Shields and Elder Kitchen! You guys rock! If anyone reading this knows them, know that they're amazing missionaries.

I have tons of notes, but there were some really standout quotes to me. Here are a few:

"It doesn't matter much to God who you were, it matters much more who you are and who you will become."

I loved that quote. I think it simultaneously gives us comfort in knowing that we can be different and better than our mistakes in the past, yet stokes the fire of ambition and motivates us in knowing that God isn't pleased with us just resting on our laurels.

I'm going to put my Spiritual Thought here this week. Elder Haynie told the story of being in a Sacrament Meeting with the Twelve and all of the Seventy assigned to Salt Lake. President Nelson was the only speaker. After the Sacrament, he stood up and before his prepared remarks said,

"The ordinance that you just participated in is much more important than the words I am going to share now. I made a new covenant today."

Elder Haynie continued,"If partaking of the Sacrament doesn't become a delight to you rather than just a routine, I'm not convinced that you will survive spiritually."

Elder Renlund echoed the importance of the Sacrament. He illustrated with a story about a recently baptized and confirmed couple. After they're all set up and they've got all of that done, what is the next ordinance that they need to complete? The missionaries said it was going to the temple. He replied that it was kind of a trick question. The answer was that they needed to partake of the Sacrament that week, and that the Sacrament is almost always the next ordinance that we need to complete each and every week.

A little while ago, we taught a lesson about the importance of the Sacrament, reading from 3 Nephi 18. In this chapter, the Savior is very clear in his commandment that we partake of the Sacrament. It is not simply something good to do. It is a commandment of God.

Elder Renlund hammered this point home:

"What are we promised for enduring to the end of the covenant path?"

"Everything."

"What are we promised for just being baptized and confirmed?"

"Nothing."

His point was that it's a mistake if we are teaching people to be baptized and confirmed, and not teaching them about the responsibility that they have to continue on that path afterwards. However, this applies to all of us. Baptism and confirmation is the front gate to the covenant path, but we're promised nothing from simply opening that gate. We're promised everything that God has for continuing to follow it until the end as co-heirs with Christ (Romans 8:17).

Another thing we talked about was having joy, even in circumstances we can't control. We can't control other people's agency. They have their free will and Heavenly Father doesn't impede that. Our righteousness is completely contingent on our own agency. Joy coming from righteousness means that our joy is completely our own choice and effort. President Nelson had a great talk about that (Joy and Spiritual Survival, Oct. 2016)

He said, "...the joy we feel has little to do with the circumstances of our lives and everything to do with the focus of our lives. When the focus of our lives is on God’s plan of salvation... and Jesus Christ and His gospel, we can feel joy regardless of what is happening —or not happening —in our lives."
It was reinforced to me that my success as a missionary is completely my own choice. It is based 100% on my own effort. Elder Renlund went through each measure of missionary success in Preach My Gospel and pointed out that all of them were based on the agency of each missionary and no one else. So, I decided to step up my effort, and in the last two days we've seen amazing miracles. I'll share a couple here:

1. Yesterday we had some time to knock, and we had picked out a couple of stop-bys to knock around that were near each other. It was pouring rain, which in my opinion is when the most miracles come, so we set off. We walked towards the first one, and as we got closer to it, I felt like we should go to the second one instead. I voiced this to my companion and he agreed to go to the second house first. As we got half-way to the second house I felt impressed that we should go back to the first house! I was super confused and voiced this to my companion and suggested we say a prayer.
Upon praying, I felt like neither houses were right, which was super confusing, but we kept going to the second house until I felt like we should take a turn in onto a different street away from it. At this point I had no idea where we were going and looked at the map and found another former near to where I felt like we should go. We went and knocked it but no one answered. We knocked a couple houses next to it that I felt like were right, but no one was interested in those either. I was wasn't sure what to do at that point, but this time my companion said he felt like we should knock a few more doors in the direction we were going. We did so, and after a few doors, we turned around and saw a beautiful house that looked very different from the other houses on the street. My companion felt like that was the house we should knock, so we did.

A man opened the door and after showing him a "Come and See" video, he let us right in to share our message with him. He loves God and has been trying to study the Bible. He was grateful to God for changing his life, and has recently become more interested in studying the scriptures. He said he loves to read. He was attentive to our message and asked us if we thought that God would send prophets again soon like he had before. We explained the Restoration, the Book of Mormon, and Modern Prophets and he loved it. He thanked us for helping him and knocking on his door. He wants us to teach him more, and invited us to come back and explain the Plan of Salvation and help him study the scriptures.

It was an amazing miracle to me. Sometimes we knock 20, 40, 60 doors and never find anyone interested. This time, even though the promptings seemed confusing or illogical at first, we were led directly to this very prepared man because we both followed them. We knocked probably 4-6 doors, talked to 2 people, and the second one was ready to listen. I'm so grateful to Heavenly Father for guiding us, and it built my testimony about the importance of working with the Spirit to be effective.

2. We got hard juked and decided to go make some needed calls across the street at a small park, but the park was closed. The park was right next to a small mall/grocery store. Heeding Sister Renlund's advice ("if you want to find more people, go where the people are") we decided we ought to go "where the people are" (and also where the was air conditioning). Fighting the urge to sing the first lines of "Part of Your World" from the Little Mermaid, ("I want to be where the people are"), we walked in. A little ways into the store, a large security guard stopped us, and pointed at my companions tag. "What does 'Jesucristo' mean?" he asked. We explained that it meant "Jesus Christ" and introduced ourselves as representatives and servants of Jesus Christ. We talked for a while, and learned that his name was Kunle (Koon-lay), and he is from Nigeria. He said he lived near one of our churches in Nigeria, and that he always loved the way that they looked. "They are beautiful, and draw one to them," he said. He had been taught previously a year ago, but didn't remember much about the Book of Mormon and had some questions about tithing, so we exchanged information and he said he'd come to work early the next day so he could talk to us.

The next day, we came back and he arrived later than expected so he asked us if we could come back later. We told him we could, and he said that he would take his break at the hour that we could come back so we could talk. We came back in the evening and he was sitting on a bench outside the store waiting to talk to us. We talked and answered his questions. He was amazed by the Book of Mormon. He was amazed by Joseph Smith's story as a prophet and that he was given the authority of Christ's Apostles. He curiously asked, "Did Joseph Smith do miracles like Jesus did?" We told him that he did, that he translated the entire Book of Mormon by the power of God. He was shocked when we told him that Joseph Smith died at such a young age. "He translated all of that in so few years of his life before he was assassinated?" He was even more shocked when we told him that the Book of Mormon was translated in about 90 days. He wanted to know who Mormon was, and when we explained it he said "Oooh, so Mormon was one of the last prophets in the Americas?" We said yes. He sheepishly asked, "So, is Mormon different than Mammon?" (In his accent, it sounds almost the same. Moamon and Mahhmon). We said yes. He explained "Oooh, that was the thing that drove me away from your church in Nigeria. I thought the brothers were saying it was the Church of Mammon. Even though it was beautiful and amazing, the Bible says you cannot serve God and Mammon." With that cleared up, he was excited to learn more and read the Book of Mormon. Whoever covers where he lives is going to meet a really amazing man, and I hope they love this gentle giant as much as we do.

That's been our week! It was super-energizing and refreshing. I'm really excited to apply of these teachings and teach some more great lessons.

Love you all!

-Elder Reyes

Glossary of a few terms for my less mission-knowledgeable friends:

Former: someone formerly taught by missionaries who hasn't been taught in a while.

Stop-by: when we stop by the house of a member or former to try to see how they're doing

Juke: when we set an appointment with someone and they don't show up to it

Hard juke: when someone confirms the appointment hours before it's supposed to happen and then jukes

One Year Left D:

This week has been pretty awesome. We had a ton of different appointments which was pretty fun. Not a whole lot of new stuff to report, but we met some interesting people. A couple of people came to church this week! They are:

1. Luis - An awesome Peruvian guy who used to be a surgeon. He's an older gentleman who had been going to church in Peru for like 25 years but was never baptized. He told us that he's already taken the lessons 2 or 3 times and he just wants to be baptized now. We're going to review the lessons and set a date pretty soon.

2. Elvis - Yes, like Presley. He's an awesome Dominican man who we've never even had to ask to come to church. He comes by himself because he likes it. We did a lesson with him in his friend who's a member's house and he had a great time. He came to church again this week.

One funny thing that happened this week was that a group of older Hispanic guys stopped us. One of them said, "Your guys' boss is smart, putting you in pairs of one Hispanic and one Gringo like this." It was hilarious spending 5 minutes just trying to convince this guy that I'm not a native Hispanic. He didn't believe me and was like "No. You have a Hispanic accent, not like gringos and you have a Spanish last name."

He was not convinced. I tried really hard. It was a great confidence booster. We made some Lomo Saltado this week which was real good too.

We met a blind Colombian man who was awesome and super happy and wanted to learn. He lives a block outside of our area, so we had to give him to the other missionaries, but are super excited for him.

We're super excited and preparing for Elder Renlund to come this Friday and Saturday. We're going to have a great time.

We taught some great lessons this week, but not a whole lot of new people. We're still teaching Marlene, Luz, and trying to meet with the Mendozas. I'll include pics from the view from Marlene's apartment because it's awesome and a couple of other photos.

Hope you all have a great week!

Union City

Hey everyone! Great week!

I'm here in my new area of Union City. This place is amazing. It's almost completely Hispanic and is super densely populated. In fact, it's the second most densely populated city in the entire United States behind Guttenberg (which is a few blocks North of us). You can Google that. New York City is #6. The diversity is awesome. We've got EVERY country from the Hispanic world. Lots of Cubans and Venezuelans here, which I haven't had before. Very fun. People keep asking me what country I'm from. I ask them to guess, and so far I've gotten Chile, Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina, which is basically just all the whiter people.

Elder Mortenson is awesome! We have a great view of the NYC skyline from the edge of our area (we cover Weehawken), and we've got an amazing ward. They are absolutely great at fellowshipping and go out of their way to help the people that we bring. This week, a person that we brought disappeared after Sacrament Meeting and we were like "Darn, they must have run away." They had been taken by the members and brought to Relief Society. Golden. In second hour, all of the members just bore powerful testimony to everyone. It was beautiful.

The food here is amazing too. 7 dollars for a Lomo Saltado, soup, and Inca Kola combo. Yum.

Here are some people we're teaching:

Anabel: Came to church this week! We met her on Saturday and she came on Sunday. Super cool Mexican lady. She wants to learn English so we're splitting it half and half with the Gospel.

The Mendoza Family: Ecuadorian family. They're super nice and want to feed us so bad. The missionaries hadn't visited them for a while, but we went in and they're awesome. They've got a family member in Utah and were talking about moving there. Lot's of potential, but we just need to have more effective lessons, so we're setting expectations up front. Shout out to Elder Harris for helping us to keep the lesson short.

Elvis: Dominican guy who wears all Lacoste. Not sure if it's real. There's an older man who lives with him who went on a rant last time they visited and got a sword out and started swinging it around and saying that he was slaying Catholic priests and that we're the only true church. He's not a member and we have no idea who he is, but it's hilarious.

Luis: Peruvian man who had been involved in the Church for 25 years but has never been baptized. Asked us to be baptized. We asked him about all the different requirements and he was like "Of course I'll do all of that." Total baller.

Don't have a lot of time, but this weeks spiritual thought is on forgiveness. There was a great talk in Sacrament Meeting about it and how repentance isn't complete without forgiveness. Forgiving takes weight off and helps us to love those around us more. Let's try to forgive someone this week, whatever it is that they did to offend us.

Cool News: We're going to have an All-Mission Conference in August with 1 or more General Authorities which will be pretty cool. Stay tuned for updates!

That's it chicos!

Love,

Elder Reyes

Goodbye Motown

Hi everyone! Happy Monday!

This week was awesome. Transfers are tomorrow, and I'm being transferred to Union City! I'm super excited, but it's definitely been hard saying goodbye to all the amazing people that I met here.

We had a really prosperous week! We went over to help do some spackling for a member's ceiling, and were able to teach Diego and Andrea about the Gospel! They had a lot of questions and were super awesome about it. They came to church this week.

Felipe also finally came to church! He called us on Monday night super excited about the fact that he had gotten the time off and he came this week and seemed to really like it! It was hard saying goodbye to him after almost 6 months of teaching him.

We went and said goodbye to Jenny today. She brought her friend Rita over to learn about the Gospel and learn English. Rita was very interested in both, and Jenny is super elect. She got us commemorative Chick-fil-A and brought her kids in to say a prayer with us. She said she'd love to have us at their family's house in Ecuador should we ever end up down that way. We may have to take her up on that.

It's really weird to picture leaving Morristown and not being with Elder Rasband since we've been working together for 4 and a half months. We pretty much finish each other's sandwiches at this point. He's a great guy, and we're going to have a lot of fun hanging out after the mission. I'm just super used to going day-to-day here in Morristown so a change of surroundings is going to be crazy.

I've learned a lot here. I've learned how to trust in the Spirit more. I've learned to work harder, and that I've still got pretty of room to go. I've especially learned a lot about faith and obedience.

I had a hard time understanding faith before. I could define it. I could quote scriptures about it. I could tell you about it's importance and the power that it has. However, I feel as though this transfer, the concept of faith has really clicked for me, especially with obedience. I was told that never actually got around to explaining that, so here you go:

It is said that faith is belief. That is true. However, faith is true belief. It is said that faith is action. I think that is true also, in that true belief leads to action. Let me illustrate that briefly:

Imagine I'm sitting at home with a friend.

I tell my friend that there's enough money to change their life up for grabs on the front porch outside. First come first sirve, no strings attached.

I ask if they believe me. They say you do.

I would say that they're lying. Why? Because they're still sitting there talking to me. The answer is in their actions.

If they truly believed that the money was out there, they would be sprinting out the door to go grab it. Perhaps they don't believe that the money is there. Perhaps they believe that it's not enough to truly help them. Perhaps they believe that someone else will get it first. Whatever the case is, they don't believe that going out to find it is worth their time. They lack faith in my statement. They don't truly believe it, no matter what they tell me with words.

The same is true with God's promised blessings and his commandments. When we hear the commandments and promised blessings (reading your scriptures will bring you significant blessings), we can say that we believe that. However, if we're not reading our scriptures, we say with our actions that we don't believe it's worth our time. If we truly believed that the blessings were real, and significant enough to impact our lives, we would be doing it.

I urge us all to think about what things we say we have faith in, and then analyze if our actions say the same. I bear testimony that the blessings connected to the commandments are real, and they are significant. I share my testimony of that in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

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

See you in Union City!

Diversity Day

Hello everyone!

This week was great! I've had so much fun here in Morristown that it's hard to believe that I've been here for almost six months. I'm entering what will likely be my last week here and I honestly wish I could have more time here.

Elder Rasband and I have been on a roll this week, and I'm pretty exhausted. I've seen so much divine help. We visited Jenny like three times and she's still the nicest person ever. We came to teach her English, but she keeps asking us Gospel questions which we're more than happy to answer.

We talked with Felipe again this week and he's still fighting to get his schedule open but he's been reading a ton of the Book of Mormon.

We talked to Gerald who is awesome and showed us some of his antique firearms and a silver dollar from the 1700s. I talked to his son about computers for a good while.

The crowning event of the week was our event yesterday in Morristown's Central Park. We had a Diversity Day where a ton of different religions and community organizations had stands in the park for the day. We spent a lot of the week (mostly Saturday since we had to do normal proselyting) preparing for that event. Saturday was an amazing day with so many miracles. We were trying to prepare the stand and get posters and volunteers and it came together perfectly. We were going to try to go by our friend Romaine, who we haven't had contact with. As we were driving, we saw him walking down the street past our apartment so we pulled over and were able to finally talk to him. We probably won't teach him, but we managed to get some things back from him that he borrowed from members which they were grateful for. President Hess called us with an idea for a poster for the stand and asked if we could make it. Our run-in with Romaine saved us enough time to head over to the mission office and start designing some posters. At this point it wasn't possible to get a poster printed same-day, so we were going to order one and have them leave it for us for the next day (the day of the event). We hustled to make the poster and then sent it in to Staples, but didn't know what we were going to put it on. As we were leaving the office, we saw two A-frames that were being worked on for another project. When we asked about them, they weren't going to be used for a little while and upon measuring them they were the exact size of the posters we had just sent to be printed. We grabbed them and a pavillion that just happened to be the perfect size for our tables. When we got to Staples, the employee (who had been nice enough to even start the project for us) said that if we waited 20 minutes we could walk out with the posters. We took them home, and instead of eating dinner (we hadn't had lunch) decided to get them prepped on the A-frames before we visited Jenny. We were starving, but we knew that the work came first, so we finished those and went over to teach her. When we showed up, she brought over a giant bag of Chick-fil-A that she had gotten on the way home from work with meals for all three of us to eat while we taught. It's amazing how if we're prioritizing how we need to be, Heavenly Father will make everything else fall in place. We just need to have faith to make it the priority.

I don't remember if I talked about faith and obedience last week, so I'll skip that and come back to it next week if I didn't. This week we talked a lot about the Gift of the Holy Ghost. Fun fact: Joseph Smith was once asked by the then-President of the United States (Van Beuren) what distinguished our church from other churches. His answer was the Gift of the Holy Ghost. Because of the authority that we have, this is something that only we can offer. Our Spiritual gifts are manifest through the Gift of the Holy Ghost based on our faith and obedience. We started a challenge as a mission last week to cut things that are impeding us from feeling the spirit more for 40 days to see the difference and change our habits. I encourage you all to do the same to have that Spirit with you more strongly. We're going to need it more and more. I testify that this is true in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

I love you all,

Elder Reyes

Chiltepe Peppers

This week was pretty slow.

Felipe finally read like 4 chapters in the Book of Mormon after we gave him a loving push last time on exchange with Elder Holly. Elder Holly told me today that he thought Felipe was a member, and that's why he was going so strongly on him about his responsibilities and needing to be an example for his family. In any case, it worked, and Felipe had a lot of great questions and was marking scriptures that he liked.

The Fourth of July was great. We sang a lot of the patriotic songs in the hymn book, ate some amazing Guatemalan food with the Morales family, and went with them to see the fireworks that night.

They had some pretty spicy salsa made from chiltepe peppers that they told us we shouldn't eat. So we ate it. Then, a couple of them ate peppers raw, and were sweating. They told us these peppers were hotter than habaneros (according to Wikipedia they can be) and that they made a gringo Elder throw up before, and that we shouldn't touch them. So of course we each ate one. I'll try to send video home of that. Yesterday when we went over for a meal appointment we ate more, and I wrote my name with the stems to prove that I'm a 100% certified chapin (Guatemalan). They were pretty impressed with us.

An interesting scripture I read was about the plainness of the truth. In 2 Nephi 33:5. He talks about how when we speak plainness, it might be hard at first, but after a little bit it's actually more beneficial. Sometimes loving someone means lovingly correcting them. It may be strong at first, but like the sting of the chiltepe peppers it will subside and they'll be grateful for the experience.

Love y'all!

Fireflies/Luciernagas

Short update:

We've talked to a couple of cool people this week. It's been pretty crazy now that we cover both the Spanish Branch and the English Ward. It's been a good excuse to knock more hood areas because we get to teach everyone we come in contact to instead of having to refer the English speakers to the other missionaries.

Some cool people we talked to this week:

Walmer: Jenny's second oldest son. He's super golden. We met him and taught him on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday back to back to back. He's already reading and marking up his Book of Mormon and asking us a lot of different questions. He's college age and school is starting up this week so we're hoping to be able to squeeze in his schedule.

Gerald: Not a member. He's already read the Book of Mormon 3 times and just finished D&C and loved it. He says he knows it's true and wants to be baptized and his family to be baptized but they make up a large part of their current church and feel guilty leaving it.

Miriam: From Holland. Super nice. Meeting her this week.

Fun thing this week:

I saw fireflies for the first time and my brain broke. I just sat there staring at them. I thought people had some really elaborate lawn decorations or something and Elder Rasband was just laughing and asking me if I was okay. Fireflies are pretty awesome.

Spiritual thought is about forgiveness. We've been helping members be closer to their families and each other and one of the biggest things is just forgiving others and giving them a chance to have had changed. Forgiving others takes a weight off of ourselves as well.

Hope you're all well!

Elder Reyes

9 Months Out & Already Wishing for More Time

Interesting week this week! 

This is going to be a quick update because we actually have 3 appointments during our preparation day time. Update: just kidding, they juked.

People that we're teaching:

Ana and Giancarlo (her son): 

We came for our appointment and they weren't home. So, we decided to stop by a member family who lives across the street. That turned out to be great because we haven't been able to get an appointment with that family in a while and they were both home. We taught a 20 minute lesson and then went back to Ana's house. She had gotten back, and even though Giancarlo was sleeping. It actually worked out really well because we were able to talk about her concerns more openly without her son there.

Kike (pronounced Kee-kay):

Really wants to turn his life around. Sent us a text asking for help, but keeps kicking our appointment down the road. I think it's because he feels a little bit embarrassed by the things he's going through. He's a super sweet guy, and isn't much older than I am. He genuinely wants to be happier, but just needs a bit of help. We've got an appointment set for 5 today, so I'll get an update on that. Please keep praying for him. 

Update: He moved to 8pm then rescheduled to tomorrow. Again. If he thinks he's going to get rid of us by just rescheduling over and over then he's going to have to keep doing it for a while. 

Felipe: 

We were honestly planning on dropping him, because he seems to be progressing very very slowly. However, our last appointment with him was pretty good. At the beginning, there was a little bit of disagreement about the Plan of Salvation. Felipe said he doesn't believe that anyone can become perfect like God or Christ. There are actually some great scriptures that speak fairly explicitly about that in the Bible, so we took him through them and he was pretty accepting of it. He says he knows he needs to be baptized, but we can't get him to church because he works on Sundays. We committed him to try to get the two hours on Sunday morning off and come to church, but he didn't come. We're not exactly sure how to help him, but we're going to teach him about the commandments next so that he at least has a straightforward understanding that he's breaking one.

Dilena and her son (whose name we thought was Christian but it's actually Gelson?):

Weren't able to meet with them this week.

Jason: 

He had some questions on baptism, so we did a quick lesson with him focused on that. 

Our week: 

Monday:

Taught Jason about baptism.

Tuesday:

Got a call from some missionaries in Inglewood telling us that they'd volunteered us to move a member who was coming into our area. Turns out they're not actually in our area, nor in the English ward, but they were super nice so we had fun getting a refrigerator into the third floor of a storage unit complex.

Got juked by a guy, so we knocked next door on the door of a former named Charlie. I've heard he's super cool, but he hasn't responded at all and didn't answer the door.

Wednesday:

Kike moved his appointment and our member appointment moved, so we went by Felipe because Kike lives in the same house. We taught Felipe a pretty good lesson on his porch. It was kind of funny, because as we were teaching him a lesson, a large group of Jehovah's Witnesses slowly walked by canvasing the area that we were in. They saw us teaching Felipe on the porch and skipped the house. 

Thursday: 

Super fun day! The member who usually teaches English Class and his son were out of town, and asked if we could cover the class. However, we also had an appointment with an inactive member who we've been working with. In order to balance them both, we ended up going on splits. I went with the new senior couple in our area, Elder and Sister Harbertson, to English Class. Elder Rasband went with President Hess to go teach the member (it was his turn as I taught the last lesson on exchanges). It was really fun! I led English class and we practiced conversation and pronunciation.  Elder Rasband had a lot of fun taking President Hess to teach. President speaks French, but is learning Spanish, so he was bearing his testimony and sharing some scriptures. We took a group picture at the end of the night (photo cred to our neighbor's dad). 

Friday:

During his brief exchange with Elder Rasband, President Hess talked about the fact that he'd like us to be doing more work with Facebook to find people for the whole mission. So, on Friday we just sat down and started trying to find people who were interested on Facebook for most of the day. We've got a better grip on things now: we usually knock doors for a while and then take a break to answer Facebook messages. 

We had a couple of appointments juke, but were able to teach Ana and Giancarlo as well as the member family that we had wanted to pass by. I was feeling pretty good, because after Ana didn't answer the first time, I felt impressed to go by that member family even though it was a weird time of the day. I'm glad I've got a companion who backs me up when I feel like I'm getting revelation, because we were going to leave when I was like "Should we stop by X family?" He said if I was feeling it that we should do it even though he was hesitant. I had had a few promptings earlier in the week that seemed to not turn out, so I was honestly starting to get discouraged. They commented after the lesson that we came at a "super lucky time" because they're rarely ever home at the same time before late as they both work two jobs. Then we got the bonus afterwards of being able to teach Ana because we went back. Trust promptings even if they seem not to turn out. It's for a reason. 

Saturday: 

Some of the things that the mission office used weren't working. The APs called me to see if I could fix it. I ended up going into the code and managing to get things in order. 

We did some good knocking and some more Facebook contacting. 

We had a lesson with this lady named Yenni. She was pretty hesitant to let us in. She talked about how she loved the Bible and already reads it. I asked her if she was cool if we came and read the Bible with her. She agreed. We found out that the previous missionaries apparently made it sound like we don't believe in the Bible. I clarified that we very much do believe in the Bible, and we backed it up by teaching the lesson from the Bible. She was pretty recepetive. It ended up being like a 2 hour lesson (not recommended), because first question I asked her was "Who is God to you?" and she told us a 35-40 minute long summary of her life story centered around different spiritual moments in her life. Not sure if she's got enough interest to have us back, but it was definitely good to clear up her confusion and we taught a lot of principles.  

We met a really cool Jamaican guy named Winston. We talked to him for a bit and he said he'd take a Book of Mormon. He said that the reason that Usain Bolt is so fast is because he had a diet of good old Jamaican yellow yams. We felt bad because at the end we wanted a picture with him because he was so cool, but after we took the picture he assured us that he was an American citizen. We felt horrible that he thought we were immigration or something trying to take picture for records or something, and reassured him that we were missionaries. 

 Sunday:

We had a man who's not a member give a talk in Sacrament meeting. The husband of the Relief Society President isn't a member, but was asked anyway to speak. We were pretty interested to see how it was going to go because he comes to church almost every week, but we haven't been able to go over there and teach them and missionaries haven't really had a lot of success teaching him in the past. Also because he had trained to be a Catholic Priest, and this was the first talk he was going to give in our church. It was really good! His family brought 3 different non-member friends to come see and they really enjoyed themselves. 

He had a 10 second moment of silence at the beginning of his talk for Memorial Day in remembrance of all of those who gave their lives for our freedom. He then gave a talk on how to better show our love for Jesus Christ, citing the story of Jesus and Lazarus and expounding on it. He tied it back into Memorial Day at the end. He talked about reading the Book of Mormon and the Bible. At the very end of it he just said "Que Dios les bendiga!" (God bless you all!) and walked off to his seat. It was pretty fun. 

That night we were supposed to have a bunch of different member appointments for our 2 hour power. However, pretty much all of them canceled or juked last minute so we just did a bunch of member stop-bys. At the last one, I felt like we should go to a certain member and we stopped by. A man answered the door and said she didn't live there. We were walking back to the car when I saw a man on the porch of a nearby house. I did a double take and then ran over to the house and up the porch steps while Elder Rasband internally questioned my sanity for a moment. I asked his name and he said it was Charlie. It was the Charlie from before that hadn't answered his door! 

We had a great conversation with him and his friend Vicente. Vicente is an older gentleman who knew a lot of Biblical verses, and then revealed that he doesn't know how to read. Charlie had a bunch of questions about the fact that we have a living prophet, which was explained by previous missionaries. Vicente stopped me talking about it by putting his hand on my knee and looking me in the eyes very seriously (which he did several times throughout the course of the conversation in regard to various topics). He said "I don't believe in prophets. Only in Jesus Christ. He is light and life, and there is none other than Him." I tried to explain that there are tons of prophets in the Bible. The Bible was written by prophets. As I explained, he placed his hand on my knee again and looked me in the eyes very seriously again, and explained again that he didn't believe in any prophets. One of my favorite exchanges of the conversation followed:

I asked him if he knew who Moses was. He said he did. I told him that was awesome! I asked him who Moses was to him. He gave me a blank stare for a long moment. 

"A prophet." 

The conversation went great. Elder Rasband powerfully explained authority and the need for it. Frequently, Vicente would put his hand on my knee to stop the conversation and ask us a question that he had. For example, "I'm going to ask you a question I have, and I want you to listen to it, and then answer it: We need to be baptized in order to receive salvation from sin. Yes or no?" 

We would answer: "Yes, we believe that baptism is an important step in the Gospel of Jesus Christ." 

Then he would give us a short round of applause of agreement before again grabbing my knee for another clarification question:

"Are you Jehovah's Witnesses?'

"No."

"Oh, good, I thought this whole time that you were Jehovah's Witnesses," etc.

By the end, Elder Rasband was talking to Charlie, and I was talking to Vicente. They were both very impressed. Vicente wanted to know where are church was. He asked if we baptize again, and I told him that we do and let him know that if he would like to be baptized, we were happy to help him get there. He said that he felt that one has to prepare first, and I told him that our job as missionaries was to help people do just that. He said that his father had died in the Gospel and that he hoped to be able to accept it himself.  Meanwhile, Charlie was so impressed while talking to Elder Rasband that he invited us over again to "talk for 3 or 4 hours and eat pupusas." 

Anyway,  that's a summary of our week! We're excited for the coming week and working hard. I've been learning a lot this transfer that a lot of times, promptings only come when they really need to and we're left do to our best for the rest of the time. We always pray for guidance, of course. However as I've been more confident in myself, in doing what I think is right and following promptings when I get them (instead of trying to wait for a prompting for everything), I've seen more miracles. 

In essence, the Spirit is less like a GPS--which tells you directly step-by-step what turn to take or when to keep going straight to get to where you want to go--and more like road signs--which you have to look for while you're driving, leave it up to you to follow them, and are usually only found where they're needed or where there's potential danger ahead. When we see them, it's obviously very important that we follow their directions exactly to get where you want to go and avoid problems. 

If you're worried that you're not getting promptings when you're doing everything you're supposed to to get them, it may be that God trusts you to handle this part of the drive by yourself based on the knowledge you've already been given. Like Elder Bednar said: "Quit worrying about it!" Just "be a good boy or a good girl" and do the things you need to in order to be able to vigilantly watch for direction that comes. Then, have the faith that He'll give you that direction you need to get where you want to go. 

That's my spiritual thought for this week. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

I love you all! Talk to you next week!

Elder Kai Reyes

Small Weekly Email

I've had a really good week! Things are picking up a little bit. We picked up a few new people this week that I'm excited about. One was Kike (Key-kay) who is a boss and just a super sweet guy who wants to change his life. He was waiting at the door for us to arrive and was all smiles telling us about how he feels so much better praying every night. The other is Ana and her son Giancarlo who had a baptismal date before and are referrals from the Relief Society President. 

Elder Rasband and I still click really well and we both work really hard. We got a new Senior Couple in our branch which will be awesome. They're super nice. They're going to be working in the office so we'll probably go train them in some different things there this week. 

The weather has been pretty great here which is nice. People are a lot more friendly when it's sunny outside. It's also much easier to contacting when everyone's out and about. 

I went on exchange again this week with our Zone Leader Elder Kim, who's dying (going home) at the next transfer. It was pretty fun. Two little kids wanted to help us knock doors and hand out pass-along cards while we were knocking their street. They were showing us different peoples' houses and knocking the doors. They were running up to people and handing them cards. It was hot outside and towards the end they disappeared and reappeared with Otter Pops for us. 

We had a member who told us that because of our lesson and advice to her, she's going to get her patriarchal blessing, which was super cool. 

All the members loved my bag too which was awesome.

Doing lots of member work, had interviews with President Hess, so that was good.

We were feeling pretty bummed last night because we finally were able to make contact with this less active who was a super strong member before and fellowshipped like 25 people, most of whom are also members now. He basically said he knows he's going to come back some day but just distanced himself from the church. He said he still has a testimony of everything and doesn't really have a reason for leaving. He said that he's not coming back right now though. He doesn't even want us to visit him. He's a young guy, and it was super sad. He said the only thing wrong that he's doing is not coming to church.

Were gonna keep working on him.

Transfer Time

Good afternoon everyone! I hope you're all getting through your Monday pretty well!

This week was pretty fun. We ate spicy ramen, stood up President Hess at a lesson, and finished this transfer working hard. The transfer call was on Saturday night and we're both staying in the area and are super excited. We got super psyched and were high-fiving when we found out. This transfer is going to be super awesome. 

We're finally almost done with all of the Facebook stuff that we were doing so we have more time to focus on the branch and finding new people, which is honestly awesome. I've grown a lot this transfer and can't wait for another. I've finally started to get the hang of setting goals and being accountable. I've been setting much better goals, and I've been seeing a lot more motivation when I have my goals right in front of me and I take time to measure how I did at the end of the day. I've made several spreadsheets to keep track of how well I'm doing in all my different goals. 

One thing that's interesting this coming transfer is that our district will now just be Spanish missionaries because the First Presidency wants to try to group languages for districts. That means our District Councils will be in all Spanish and I'll have to do training and conduct the meeting in Spanish now. 

We've got some cool people that we're working with. We found this guy named Edgar who went to school with the Branch President. He told us he was Catholic, and then summarized his beliefs—which were all very different than Catholic beliefs—and asked us which church was true, so I think he could use some guidance in his life right now. He has a really great knowledge of the Bible and loves reading from it. We blew his mind by showing him that there are books that are mentioned in the Bible that aren't contained in it (Jasher, Iddo, Nathan, etc.). We've got an appointment with him tonight. It seems like he's got a lot of promise. 

We're still working with the Acosta family, but they totally juked us yesterday. That was unfortunate because President Hess wanted to come to an appointment with us and we told him that they'd be super solid. Then we got the text from her like 15 minutes before he was set to meet us at their house. We sent him a text to tell him not to come and went back to what we were doing, then realized as he called us that the text never sent. So he was basically just chilling out in front of their house waiting for us, which was super embarrassing. We're probably going to bring him cookies or something.

We had to take Felipe off of his baptismal date because even though he's finally reading, he doesn't super understand what we're teaching him and we want him to fully understand what he's doing. 

Today we had a great time going through different historical sites from the Revolutionary war. I'll put some pics on. 

Spiritual thought this week is about the Plan of Salvation, which is a lesson we've taught a few times this week. It clicks with so many people. If God is our Loving Heavenly Father it makes sense that he'd want us to be happy and help lead us to happiness. We've been showing a lot of people the video "Earthly Father, Heavenly Father". It's been cool to watch the dads connect the fact that God loves us like they love their kids. My invitation is that if you ever feel that God isn't there or doesn't love you, to kneel and ask him. I promise that you'll feel of that love. 

I leave that promise in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

I love you all! Hope you're doing well!

Another Quick Update

This week was pretty great! It was awesome to have people so focused on Christ with Easter. We had a lot of fun this week in making some trainings about how to use Facebook to talk to people as missionaries, as well as contacting people in fun new ways.

One of the companionships in our district challenged us to sing with 3 people that we contacted, so we did! We sang Jesus Es Mi Luz with a man who we contacted who turned out to be a less active member of the church. The missionary who taught him most passed away fairly recently, and so when we let him pick the hymn, he chose that one because he used to sing it with her. It was a really amazing moment to sing the hymn together with this man and see how many memories it brought back for him as he sang the words. 

We had another contact where we sang Asombro Me Da (I Stand All Amazed). We had seen him around before and just walked up and asked him if he wanted to sing a hymn with us. He was totally down and it was hilarious because there were a ton of other people by us, and he wasn't exactly sure what was happening, but he felt the Spirit and gave us his phone number and address to come visit him. 

We've also got another challenge currently out from another companionship that is to get someone we're contacting to do a push-up with us and talk about Faith. It's honestly been refreshing to have some variety.

We're still teaching Felipe, though he's not showing a ton of progress (though he finally did read). We're also teaching the Claros-Acosta family and the Canterero family.

That's pretty much it for this one! Spiritual thought this week is about Easter. We have a lot of people who talk about how much faith in Christ they have, but then balk at doing the things that they need to do because they feel like it will be to hard. I just bear my testimony that if Christ could overcome death, then he has power to overcome the challenges that we face everyday in our progression towards God.

Love you all!

Elder Kai Reyes

Quick Update

Time just keeps going faster and faster. I feel like I'm going to be home before I know it, so I've been working hard. 

Quick update on some of the people that we're teaching that y'all can pray for:

The Claros-Acosta family: super cool! We taught them an official lesson this week and they were pretty psyched. They want us back on Sunday.

Felipe: One of his family members is in the hospital right now, so we're mostly trying to support him.

Juana: Came to Conference and loved it! She thought it was super beautiful and has basically been defending us to her anti coworkers.

We're trying to do more work with the members and show our love for them more. We're really good at calling people to repentance. Right now we're trying to help them feel how we're doing it because we love them. We're bringing some cookies to some of the members right now. 

Conference was awesome! Lots of talks about preparing for more persecution which was interesting to me. The quote about not being able to survive spiritually without the constant companionship of the Holy Ghost was brought up like 4 times. 

Spiritual thought this week is about the Book of Mormon. We've been reading a bunch of different scriptures to people highlighting all of the Books that are referenced in the Bible that aren't included in it. If you want references to those scriptures, please let me know! After gaining a testimony of Christ, a testimony of the Book of Mormon is really the way to know that this is Christ's church. We talk with so many people who are confused and have no idea which church is right, but aren't willing to read it and find the clarity within. They identify that what they're currently doing isn't bringing them direction in their lives, but aren't willing to try something different. If they want different results, they need to make a change in their lives. Even with members sometimes it's the same. I'm so grateful for this guide that we have. 

Every now and then, we can totally pray and try to renew our testimony or ask for a renewed witness from God of it. I highly recommend it even if things are going well! It's like changing the oil in your car. Even if it's running well right now, it just ensures that everything is flows even more smoothly. 

We were also really psyched about the new temples in Honduras and Chile! We have a lot of Hondurans here, and it's great to see how excited they are about their families being able to go!

That's the quick update! Hope everyone has a great week!

Included below: This great tiny park where it is legally prohibited to play anything but baseball.

Motown Chapter 2

Hi everyone! Happy April Fools!

The last couple weeks have been great! We've been working really hard and trying to clean out our records and getting our District and Zone hyped up.

My new companion, Elder Rasband (Answer to your question: yes, his grandpa's cousin), is awesome. He loves golfing, shooting, and is a really powerful teacher. He's from Alpine Utah. He's pretty straightforward and great at focusing on priorities instead of dancing around issues. We're doing a lot of good work.   

This week we had a lot of passing by people who had been taught by missionaries before and trying to filter out who was interested and who wasn't from the people that we were teaching. We've cut a lot of people out. 

We found a couple of awesome families this week though! We're super excited because they seem very prepared and also cook really good baleadas. 

I also contacted a guy in Russian this week. He and his friend are from Ukraine and we got his friend's contact info and gave him a Ukrainian Book of Mormon! 

We're really excited for Conference this week! We're going to try to get some people to watch it with us!

We went mini-golfing today and it was super fun! Elder Rasband loves golf so we dressed up in our golf gear and went out, but their course was pretty muddy so we went for some mini-golf instead. I'm terrible at golfing, but not bad at mini-golf, so I had a ton of fun and actually pulled out a W. 

Other than that, I'm doing really well! I'm gearing up for this week when we're going to start finding more people really hard. I'm really psyched to work. 

Big email next week post-conference!

Have a great week! 

Transfers!

Elder Winters is getting transferred on Wednesday! :( Today’s post is strictly pictures:

1. Exchanges

2. Our boy Conrado broke his arm.

3. One of our families

4. Sightseeing!

The Bieb Room

Hello all!

This week had some fun crazy highlights and some awesome miracles!

This week we had exchanges with the English Elders. I was in the English area with Elder Lacanienta while Elder Taggart and Elder Winters had some cool miracles in our area.

Elder Lacanienta told me that I met all the weirdest people that they know. I can't tell if he was excited about that or apologetic. I had a great time.

We got a call from a less active member for "help moving a table," so we went over to his house after lunch. His walls (and ceilings) are plastered with posters of Justin Bieber, Michael Jackson, Justin Timberlake, Seinfield, and hundreds of other celebrities. He has the pictures of all of the missionaries who have been to his house up as well. He has a specific room affectionately called the "Bieb Room" with even more Bieber memorabilia including cardboard cutouts and signed Jerseys. Turns out he needed help moving the table so that he could put a ladder in its place. This was because he had just acquired a glorious new poster of Justin Bieber, and wanted to mount it to the ceiling of said "Bieb Room". He was struggling, and a rather short fellow, so he insisted that yours truly do the honors. So, I struggled for like 20 minutes trying to tack a poster of Justin Bieber to this man's ceiling. I will attach pictures. He gave me a signed picture of himself as a child. 

We had an amazing miracle while on exchange. We had been knocking gringo doors all day which was pretty discouraging. We had a loose appointment at the end of the night and when we got there he had juked. Another guy answered the door and told us he wasn't interested and couldn't receive us anyway because he was eating dinner with his family. We asked if he knew anyone else that might be interested in our message, and he pointed out a couple of houses. We went to the first one and knocked it. A guy came out and said that he couldn't listen to our message right now because he was just sitting down with his family for dinner. We were persistent, and bore testimony about the importance of our message and how it could help his family and help him find more happiness. He thought for a moment and said:

"Well... are you hungry?" 

We said, "Absolutely!" 

So we went in and taught his family (his wife spoke Spanish and had recently seen 17 Miracles and loved it). 

As we left, he walked us to the door and told us "I feel like God has been speaking to me a lot recently. He says 'no' a lot when I'm messing up, but he also says 'go help this person' or 'go do that'. It's been very humbling." 

I asked him "I have a question. Did he tell you to let us in?"

He thought for a moment and then nodded, "I know he did."

It was a miracle for me.  

We also had a District P-day today which was awesome! We went bowling and got Peruvian food which was awesome!

Other fun things:

We saw a really unsubtle, over-complicated drug deal yesterday.

Elder Taggart accidentally knocked the nose off of a porcelain garden gnome, and then had to explain it to the Latino whose house it was (he doesn't speak Spanish).

We found some really cool people this week:

Margot (pronounced MarGOAT):

Elder Winters and Elder Taggart found this lady who practically wants to baptize herself right now. She was asking them about a lot of different doctrinal topics. Do you do baptisms? Yes we do! Do you pay tithing? Yes we do! Do you keep the commandments? Yes we do!

Sergio:

Sergio called us out of the blue and said that he wants help in having more light in his life. Apparently the last Elders taught him twice, and then he told them that he wasn't very interested. He told us that he is willing to do whatever he needs to feel more peace and less darkness in his life and that he thought of the past Elders as soon as he started going through hard times because he knew they were real messengers of God. He said he knows that we can help him and that we're angels sent from God to help him in this time of his life, and he wants to get closer to God. He also told us that he needs our help, because he just got a new tattoo that he feels really bad about getting and wants our help finding a place that he can get it laser removed because he doesn't speak English very well. He seems very humble and very repentant right now, and I just want to help him feel better.

Cristian: Came to church again! 

Today's spiritual thought is about miracles. The miracles that we've seen this week have been really great, especially during the hard times of lots and lots of rejections. We've been trying some different finding approaches too which is fun. 

I promise that miracles still happen. Satan tends to attack us right before they happen, so a lot of the time they come right after we push through when things seem super hard or we feel really bad. If you're having a really bad morning, it's probably because something really incredible is about to happen.

I bear that as my testimony as something that I've learned out here from a lot of experience, in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

See you all next week! 

Elder Kai Reyes