Hey Everybody!

Well, another wonderful work week come and gone! It started out a little bit slow but it picked up some steam towards the end of the week. But, because of the things that transpired in the latter half, we have a good foundation to build off of for this week.

Like I mentioned, we started off a bit slow this week. We sadly had to drop a couple of investigators that we had been teaching for a while but just weren't progressing fast enough. I just can't explain how hard it is to drop someone as a missionary. In all seriousness, when you start teaching someone, usually the first time you meet them, you begin to form this bond with them. You begin to give them little pieces of your testimony and your heart because you want them to enjoy the happiness you have. When you drop them, it feels like you are making a whole in your heart where they used to be. Of course they are still there and you still care for them but....in all honesty you miss them. They literally become part of your extended family. So, when a missionary drops an investigator it literally is an act of faith. You have faith that you are doing the best thing for them and leaving them in the hands of Heavenly Father to prepare them a little bit more until that time when they will accept the gospel of Jesus Christ.

As the week went on we ended up dropping a couple more people that we were teaching. I'm not really sure how to explain it but I felt that there was something else that Heavenly Father wanted us to do. When I talked to Elder Giles he said he felt a bit of the same thing but he wasn't really sure what the "other thing" was. We spent a bit of time during our weekly planning and our companionship study reviewing Preach My Gospel, the scriptures, council from the prophets, and some other sources we had to try and figure out what we needed to do. We came to the conclusion that there were people in our Former Investigators file that were ready for another busy. During all this time we were tracting trying to find those that Heavenly Father had prepared for us to find. Upon our review of our week yesterday night, we came to the conclusion that the about half of all the people we found this week show more promise than all those we may have found in the past. It truly strengthened my testimony of the power of faith and really relying on the promptings of the spirit.

As another awesome plus this week, I did a split with my dad Elder Bingham on Friday. It was SO awesome! we were able to get a lot of things done and it gave us a chance to review the past, laugh at good times, and to also have some really good discussions on how we could more effectively train our trainees. All in all, I feel extremely blessed to have a connection with him and am convinced that he will be a lifelong friend. Also, with the time that we had appointed to tract we found this AWESOME family of 6 that have huge interest in the gospel. 5 of the 6 are of age with a 7 year old girl that will be there soon. Elder Giles and I have an appointment with them on Wednesday and are praying for the guidance we will need to help them the best way possible.

In other news for the week, the weather is starting to warming up. People on the streets are telling us that we only have a little more nice weather left before the hot summer sun comes in. We are trying to take as much advantage of the cool weather as possible and, honestly, are starting to prepare little by little for the heat that is to come. With the welcoming of the warm weather comes the wonderful stinging creepy crawlies that live down here in AZ. That's right! Scorpians!!! Elder Giles found one of the little guys chilling out in our bathroom one night after we came in from proselyting. I'll be sending a picture for you all to see!

But, my dear friends, my time is again gone and I need to close. I hope that you all had a great week last week and that you have a safe and wonderful one this week to. We have our interviews with President Beck tomorrow so wish me luck! :D I am looking forward to sitting down and talking with him and for the council he will give. Anywho, I love you all and you are in my thoughts and prayers daily. Thank you for the love, support, and prayers that you all give to me, it is really appreciated!! Hasta Luego!

 

 

 






"Would ya looky here!": This was the little guy relaxing in our bathroom one night after work. He squished quite nicely :)
  

"Easy now..": This letter pepper doesn't look to threatening but he is one of the hottest peppers in the world. I thought jalapenos were bad. :) Just one of these little guys can make your food spicy enough to make you sweat and possibly cry too! :) :)

Hi Everybody!

Well, it was a pretty interesting week this past week. Full of ups and downs. But, hey! Such is the life of a missionary! ;)

I guess to start off with the post, I hope that everyone had a safe and fun Valentine’s Day and (hopefully) had an enjoyable day off for President’s Day. We did have our P-day yesterday but, because of the holiday, we were given an hour today (Tuesday) to write.

Last week, like I said was a pretty roller coaster week. On Tuesday we had our Zone Conference up in Phoenix North. It was FANTASTIC! It was exactly what I needed: A High Powered Spiritual Boost. Our focus of the conference was “ How to Follow the Spirit”. Sister Beck started the conference by speaking to us about being bold missionaries. We discussed what types of characteristics are those of bold missionaries and how we can better develop them to further progress our work. It was really interesting, extremely helpful, and since receiving and putting into effect that council we have seen an increase in our spirituality and progress of our investigators.

After Sister Beck, President Beck talked to us about the importance of personal revelation in our role as missionaries. As always, it was extremely powerful and brought a lot of things to our attention. It was incredibly awesome for me…mostly because there were a lot of things he spoke on that I (personally) needed to hear.

Our skill training that afternoon was incredible. We focused once again on extending baptismal commitments. We were split into companionships of three and each individually practiced extending the “Customized baptismal commitment” found at the end of each lesson in Chapter 3 of Preach My Gospel. It took about an hour and a half to complete the training but it feel it has put both Elder Giles and I on a higher level of preparation for the future.

From that point on the week went fairly well. We set another baptismal date with our little grandma, Norma, that we have been teaching. She was actually the only investigator we had at church on Sunday but she just drank so deeply from the spiritual jug that was there. We feel confident that we will be having her baptism fairly soon! J However, with the sweet comes a little bitter also. We have had a bit of a hard time with our investigators keeping their commitments and had to take the step of dropping 3 investigators. I wish I could explain how sad it is for us a missionaries to do this. BUT, we know that they aren’t being taken care of. Elder Giles and I have added emphasis on bettering our Area Book record keeping and feel that, because of it, they will be found by future missionaries when they are ready.

Also this week, I had the awesome opportunity to conduct and Personal Progress Evaluation. It was extremely helpful for me and I now feel that I will be able to progress to a higher level of mental and spiritual maturity (at least that is the hope! J)

To end the post for this week, we were blessed to have another baptism this past Sunday evening of a girl named Perla. For those dedicated readers, Perla is actually the friend of our newest recent convert Grisel. For a time we taught the two of them together but Perla decided she wanted to take things a little bit slower. So, we baptized Grisel at the end of January and now Perla on Sunday. It was an incredible service. The whole relief society room was full of people and a BUNCH of Perla’s family (who are not members of the church) attended. The spirit was incredibly strong and we are praying that, by Perla’s example, others of her family will express interest in learning more.

Alright my friends, my time is up for this week. I hope that you all are alive and well! ;) Know that you all are always in my prayers. As always, thank you for the prayers you offer for the missionaries. I can truly tell you that they are felt. Have a great time and be safe this week. Until then, Hasta Luego!

 

 












  “The field is white”: The baptism of Perla Garcia. I have a feeling that she will be a major tool in the missionary work for her whole family! 

 












“Little Luis”: I taught Luis my very first transfer in the field before we were taken out of the Vineyard ward. I wish I could explain how awesome it was to see him enter the waters of baptism this Saturday. He truly is one of God’s elect!

 












“Uh…What?”: So we are welcome but it says no trespassing….a little contradictory don’t you think? 

Hey Everybody!

So, I only have about 10 minutes to write this so I will apologize beforehand if this is a bit short. However, we have a Family Home Evening we need to get to with one of our AWESOME investigators! :D

This week seemed like a bit of a slow work week. We had Zone Meeting on Tuesday which was extremely good and a bit shorter than usual. We had a great discussion on planning and on setting effective goals. The Zone Leaders gave us council to make sure that we can say "SMAC" for each one of our goals. S is for Smart, M for Measurable, A for Achievable, and C for Compatible. All in all it was a great training and really made us think a little bit more when we do our weekly planning. I guess we will see how we did come this Sunday!

Because we lost a bit of work time on Tuesday for the meeting, we had to work a little bit harder to try and make up time. We made plans for lots of member presents, tracting, other appointments, etc. As the week went on we saw some lower numbers than usual which kind of put us into a type of "Holy Cow! We need to work harder!" mode. We were pretty low until Friday rolled around until we were blessed with some INCREDIBLE tracting time and lessons. As a side note, we weren't able to get the door to open but one of the houses we tracted on Friday had MONKEYS inside!! You make think I'm kidding but monkeys make a very distinct noise and there were monkey noises coming out of the house. We were shocked and had to take a couple of minutes to bring us back to our senses but when it was all said and done, we had the best tracting story of the day! :)

Saturday seemed to be a bit of a slower one than usual but we were still able to get quite a bit of stuff done. We have been toutering some Spanish kids for our weekly community service we do. But Saturday we actually went over and had an English class for the parents! It was a lot of fun and a great learning experience for the two of us.

Yesterday was an incredible day. EXTREMELY busy but very productive. We had a couple of investigators at church and had a baptismal interview for a girl named Perla (she passed!) PLUS we finished our 20-10-2, finished our 7 member presents for the week and found 3 REALLY good new investigators. I have high hopes for each and every one of them.

Other than that things have been going really well. It's been colder than usual but we are grateful for that. It sure beats the 120 degree weather we will have come June and July. However, I am looking forward to frying an egg on the sidewalk! :) But, I hope that you all are fine and well and I deeply appreciate the prayers that you offer in behalf of all of the missionaries in the world. Believe me, they really are felt! Know that you all are loved and are in my prayers. Have a GREAT WEEK!!









 




"GOTCHA!": To put it simply, we caught a mouse. It was quite a scene. :)

 













"Somewhere over the Arizona Rainbow": We were riding to an appointment but had to stop and grab a snapshot of this sunset. This is just one of the few blessings we are blessed to see while serving in good ol' Arizona!

Hello Everybody!

Well, another week has flown by and I’m sending another post home! Sadly to say I don’t have a lot of things to write about but I’ll see what I can think of.

Well, I guess I should say that we were able to set 3 baptismal dates this past week. One of them is a bit of a soft date. Her name is Isabel, she’s 17, and she’s waiting to get approval from her parents so she can get baptized. The other two were a couple of ninos who have had the lessons a ton of times, know the baptismal interview questions like the back of their hands, but their parents will NOT bring them to church to save their lives. We went by on Saturday to talk and see how they were doing. The kids had expressed big desires to go (and even told us the last two weeks they got ready by themselves and were ready to go) but the parents woke up late. We haven’t been able to go by and see them yet to see what happened yesterday. The thing is, in order for investigators to get baptized they have to come to church twice within a reasonable amount of time. The kids came once about 2 weeks ago so we are working really hard to get them there one more time. In order to help out the situation, we are planning on using a member of the ward with kids about the same age as them AND to try and get the parents re-activated into the church. It’s been a bit of a struggle but, hey, who ever said missionary work was easy? J

I’m also really happy to say that it rained a little bit the early part of last week but, since then, the skies have been clear and we haven’t had any more problems. I took my suits in last week to get dry cleaned but, when I got them back, one of my suits had a couple of tears in the pants. I was a little upset but I patched them up the best that I could. Thank goodness it happened to my every day work suit! J

All in all things are going really good down here. We have seen a bit of a decrease in the amount of work that we have which, crazy enough, has been pretty nice. We now have the time to put a little more focus into each one of our investigators instead of running around trying to figure out what we are going to do. We actually have this investigator named Laura that we had an AWESOME lesson with this past week. We brought one of the convert members of the ward to come with us. We sat down and talked a bit about faith, the lessons we teach as missionaries, the Book of Mormon,… a lot of things we hadn’t planned on talking about but we did. Towards the end of the lesson, she came right out and told us that “There isn’t a doubt in my mind that this book [The Book of Mormon] is true or that Joseph Smith was a prophet. The book talks about God and Jesus Christ, teaches us how to be happy, and things like that. Also, I do want to come to your church. I really like how, when you two (referring to us) come over with someone all you do is talk from the scriptures. I can tell that you have studied them and you know what is in them. I like that a lot!” We were shocked out of our mind when we heard this. In response, we shared paragraphs 8&9 from the Book of Mormon Introduction with her, committed her to pray to Heavenly Father to help her know what to do (or help her know what he wants her to do about the church) and to a little bit of The Book of Mormon every day. We have an appointment with her tomorrow so we will see how it goes! We’ve been praying really hard for her and have faith the Heavenly Father will touch her and that she will recognize/follow the prompting. Pretty Awesome! J

One last investigator note, we passed by Yolanda’s (she’s been an investigator for about 2 years and has had about 7 baptismal dates) on Sunday. We wanted to see how things were going and to see why she didn’t come to church…again. When we showed up, this guy came out and started to talk to us for a little bit. About two minutes later, Yolanda came and told us that the guy was her “husband”. The same “husband” that has been in prison for the past 10 months because he was caught by immigration! We were so super excited to see this because this has been one of the biggest hold-ups we have had with her. She wants to be baptized SOO bad but, because of her non-married, raising 4 kids by herself situation it was really hard for her to keep her commitments. Now, with her husband back, we hope to get the married. Re-teach both of them all the lessons, and get them baptized this month. This is another investigator that we have been praying SOOO HARD to know what to do. Sunday, we got her answer. They requested that we give them a week together (understandable seeing that it has been 10 months since they lasted saw each other) then to come by and teach them. We plan on stopping by this week to check up on them so we’ll see what happens! J AWESOME!!!!

Alrighty, that is all that I have for this week. I hope that my college friends are having a good semester so far and that my other regular readers had an enjoyable January. Remember that you all are always in my prayers and I deeply appreciate the prayers you offer in behalf of the missionaries. They are felt!!!! Have a FANTASTIC WEEK!