Answer to Mom's ?'s ❤️❤️💓

Celebrating Happy New Year with David and Alma Cardenas Sanchez Family 1.1.19

Elder Raven!

I have a couple of ?'s  I LOVE YOU! ❤️❤️💓

Love, Mom

1. We love to read that you are finding less active families. Who are some of them? 

We have been working with the families Pucheta Jara, Hoyos Hernandez, Cruz Cruz, everyone is really amazing, and we´ve been seen an increase in attendance, so I am really excited to see how the rest of January goes!  I pray that we can have a full chapel on the 27th as a kind of birthday present for me, jaja!

2. How is it going being district leader?

It´s tough to take the time out of the day to check how the other Elders are doing, and see if there is anything I can do to help them. Then have their numbers not be very good and getting chewed out a bit by Elder Powers for not producing better numbers every week ... but the upsides are truly awesome because I get to prepare capacitation that literally is just sharing gospel principles, inviting the spirit, asking for the patience of the other Elders to bear with my Spanish, and so many wonderful spiritual experiences there!  In fact, Elder Powers and Elder Santos are going to do intercambios with us tomorrow and they are going to drop on in on our district meeting, but I hope it's going to be great and I am hoping that they are impressed!

 3. What are some of your responsibilities?

 I really love Elder Santiago, Elder Basurto, y Elder Aguilar, and Elder Aguilar received his Dear John letter this past week so he´s really hurting, but we are hoping to animate him and get him functioning fully!  The funny thing is that he has more experience in the mission that the other three of us combined but sometimes we have to direct him to be more focused or more hardworking, haha!!

4. How is Elder Santiago doing? 

Yes we have been able to connect a lot better these past few days, he is feeling better, but like my mass email shared, he´s knee has been really hurting so we´re struggling with that but we will be up and running soon!

5.Did you figure out your code for your luggage locks? 

YES I FIGURED OUT THE CODES; THANK YOU SO MUCH; jaja!

6,  Is there any other books or supplies you would like? I will send miracles of forgiveness...Weight doesn’t matter when we mail you packages.

I would also like Articles of Faith by James E. Talmage if you have that one, or Saints if you have a spare copy!

7. Was Jose Luiz confirmed? 

Yes, Jose Luiz was confirmed the last Sunday, and he is doing really well, we are just battling with his work schedule to get him to come to church!

8. Do you still have your towels that say Raven on them? 

Yes I have been using my Raven towels, they are AWESOME!

9. Did you open some of your birthday gifts that were in the package or are you waiting for your birthday? 

I did open my presents just because I wanted to see if there was anything useful, but thank you so much, and I really loved all the presents they have helped make missionary life a lot easier and more exciting!  Specifically, the hymnal arrangements!

I love you guys so much! Thanks for the encouragement, love, prayers, and all the spiritual thoughts that you guys share to strengthen my testimony and encouragement to do my best here in the mission!

Love you to the moon and back, then multiplied by a googleplex! 💙

Love,

Elder Raven

4 mil pesos (A Christmas Story, kind of, haha!)

Feliz Ano Nuevo (Mas o Menos)!

How´s things for you guys back home? I hope you all have been able to enjoy this festive season with many wonderful miracles that we are witnessing every single day!

So this past week has been one of the strangest and most miraculous weeks of my life, and I don´t have a ton of time to explain everything, but I am going to give it a shot!

So we have been teaching Jose Luiz for a while now, and he got baptized two Saturdays back, but immediately after his baptism he had an incredible amount of opposition with a lot of stress on his marriage, finances, and general family relations as well, and he literally felt like his life was never going to be able to recover, and we were totally unaware of this because we had tried to get into contact with him numerous times but it could never work out until this last Wednesday we decided to just pass by his house and see if he was home, and miraculously he was and we were able to resolve a lot of his concerns, testify of the truthfulness of the gospel, and we gave him the promise that if he stepped forward with faith that all of his problems would become manageable even if they didn´t fully go away!  But then the following day he went to check his account which with his work and everything remained should have only had 600 pesos but he went and checked and had an additional 4,000 pesos which was the exact amount need to pay the rent for the next month, to keep his family intact, and to eliminate the stress in his life!  Although it might seem like a coincidence, I believe it truly was a miracle of God that permitted him to be confirmed this week and received countless blessings!

Jose Luiz was confirmed a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints Dec. 30, 2018

We really have been blessed this week in finding families that disappeared off the face of the earth, receiving many member references, and overall being blessed, and I would like to declare to each and every one of you that there truly is a principle that when thing are going incredibly wrong that it is just exactly when our loving Heavenly Father can reach down and bless us in a way that we recognize and appreciate beyond anything else, and that we will be more inclined to depend upon him more fully to receive the blessings we so desperately need! 

I love you guys so much! Thanks for the support and all the encouragement you have given and are giving me!  You are truly a secondary source of motivation after the primary goal of serving my Savior through bringing his brothers and sisters unto Him and our Heavenly Father!

Thanks for your kind thoughts with the Cardenas Cano family, they really are the greatest, and I hope that I can find families like them to teach and have this gospel change their lives! I wish I had more time to write, but hopefully this will suffice for this week! 

I love you all so much, and I promise to send more next week, but for now ...

Cuidense mucho!  Echa la ganas!

Love,

Elder Raven

Zapoteco (Didxazaa)

Hey My Wonderful Friends and Family,

This past week I figured out who I am going to spend the next three months with, and its Elder Santiago from Oaxaca, Mexico!  He is a really timid personality, but has a very powerful conversion story that happened at the age of Ten, and he has a very powerful testimony of this gospel and this missionary work!  My goal is just to keep him enthused and have the Spirit direct us in this missionary work!  He is from the area of Litsmo and his first language is Zapateco which is a really ancient dialect that I have been learning during our language studies together, as well as studying Spanish, haha!  It is a super interesting language, because there is a lot of hard consonant sounds as well as the n sound is very popular in the language, but I have seen a lot of parallels with English in the pronunciation structure, and its kinda nice because now we have a secret little code between us to help us say something important without being offensive!  We have been really working hard to try and expand our teaching pool here, and locating those families that are willing to listen to the gospel, and we hope to see a lot of fruits throughout this week!

1st Day with Elder Santiago from Oaxaca Mexico 12.20.18

Spiritual Thought:

Proverbs 23: 7

So as he thinketh in his heart, so is he

I have been placing a lot of emphasis in where my thoughts have been directed this past week because I really believe that the core of who we are originates in our thoughts!  If we are looking for happiness and success, we will find it by focusing our thoughts and thus our lives upon the gospel!  If we wish to be miserable and stressed the fastest way to do so is to focus in on our own lives, and what has been happening to us.  I have found a common pattern in the mission is that many more experienced missionaries reach a certain point where all the rejection and lack of numerical success boggs them down to a point of disobedience and rebellion, and this normally comes about as a result of getting caught in Satans favorite trap of focusing on all the things that are happening to us, and not seeking to act towards the future days and events that we want!  It is like many wise people have told me, If you are looking for success, you will find it, and if you are focusing on the failures, you will find a whole lot of it!  I really love this principle and think it is very important that we recognize that our Savior was someone who was constantly living in the moment striving to act in a way that would create the greatest difference and serve according to the will of Heavenly Father!  His example is really evident in this Christmas season, and pray that each of us seek to strive to emphasize the positive in life, find joy in the simple things, and I promise you as a representative of Jesus Christ that you will find it, if we can keep our thoughts focused on Him and how we can build up our fellow brothers and sisters whom we have been given the special privilege to know, serve, and build in our race to our Heavenly Father, who stands beckoning with His Son for us to ultimately find an embrace in their infinitely strong and merciful arms.  

Breakdown of the Week:

Tuesday:

So we went to the offices early in the morning, and I said my final goodbyes to Elder Brown, and Elder Agla, and then sat anxiously in the mission office room for a solid hour, chatting with the other soon to be trainers, while Presidente Maucotel was finalizing the process of receiving revelation for this change!  It was such a crazy moment when President capacitated us as to how we should really train a new missionary, the basic stuff, and then we had the trainers on the left side of the room, and the trainees on the right, and one by one, they selected the trainees and announced their companion for the next three months, and I feel so excited I wanted to yell, but in order to keep the Spirit in the room I thankfully refrained, but I am so incredibly excited to help Elder Santiago learn and grow with me, and I have complete confidence that he will be a phenomenal missionary!

Wednesday:

We did a lot of member visits in San Miguel, trying to find some partial member families, as well as reactivating those who haven't been attending lately, and thankfully we saw a lot of the fruits of our labors this week as our attendance included a bunch of individuals that hadn´t been in the space of several months, with one family almost 2 years of inactivity!

Thursday and Friday:

We really honed in on working with the youth around here in our area which meant playing soccer with them, getting to know their names, and figuring out a bit of their background, and what their interests are!  We have been planting several seeds for being able to teach them the lessons with their whole family, so we´ll see where this goes next week!

Saturday: We had our Christmas Devotional, which was comprised of us singing our hearts out to all of the Christmas Hymns in the Hymnbook, listening to Presidente Maucotel´s song play the violin in an absolutely beautiful way to different Christmas hymns, as well as watching some Christmas videos that are absolutely beautiful with basically all of our Zone crying in the end of one video where the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sings infant Holy, Infant Lowly while showing a quiet narrative of a man being liberated from jail after much time, and the parallelism of how our Savior truly has redeemed us from the prisons of our sinful lives and offers us a chance to greater freedom and joy than we can possibly imagine!  I highly recommend that all of you look up this video if you have the chance because it truly brings the Spirit in such a powerful way!  Then we went out and worked trying to find a reference we received from the system but found out that He lives in Tamaulipas so that ended up being an almost waste of a trip until we found this youth named Enrique that is a devout Catholic but is very interested in hearing what our Church believes, so we will see what happens in our appointment on Wednesday!

Sunday:

We finally had Erik in church on Sunday after two failed attempts to get him there, and the really amazing thing was that he was really curious during sacrament meeting, and he kept asking about worthiness and what we need to do to be able to partake of the Sacrament which is super sweet, because I can see these desires working in him to be baptized, he just has a handful of doubts, but hopeful we can get him and his pareja (almost wife) married legally so  that they can be baptized!  The sad thing is that it is a really difficult process to get married civilly because it costs so much, but we will keep praying and see that God will prepare the way for them to enter into the fold!

Today:

I was able to chat with the family after four months of service, and it was truly beautiful to see their smiling faces, and be able to share some of the experiences that I had forgotten about, or that are too difficult to share via email, but all in all its been a wonderful day, also we did the finishing touches on the upkeep of the house, so it feels absolutely pristine!

That´s all from this week!

Merry Christmas and Festive Season!

Hope you guys can echa la ganas (not sure how to translate this, but basically, just keep on keeping on, and get the success you need!)

Love, 

Elder Raven

PS. It was so fun to get a Christmas surprise and get more photos from David Cardenas on Skype!!!

Elder Raven surprised David and Alma Cardenas Twin girls with a gingerbread house.  Brother Cardenas sent these photos to us after our SKYPE conversation with Elder Raven.  

Atlantis Real (Alianza Real)

Familiares y Amigos!

How´s it going(insert question mark cause I can´t find it on this weird hybrid of an english and spanish keyboard, haha) 

I am going to keep this email kinda short, cause we don´t have a ton of time, but this past week has been absolutely crazy in terms of temperatures because we have had absolutely freezing temperatures and then been chilling in the 80 degree temperatures so la clima (climate) here can´t seem to make up its mind, haha!
It has been raining a ton here, and the street we live on was getting borderline flooded from the massive dumping going on, so I told my companion Elder Brown that it seems like they might have to change our area name to Atlantis Real, haha!

Spiritual Thought:

Recently I received the Christmas package from my family which was absolutely wonderful, and I am so grateful for their wonderful support, and one thing that they gave me was a small artificial christmas tree with a 12 days of christmas gift wherein are 12 different ornaments each one with a different name of Christ and a small excerpt about the characteristics of the Savior.  The one that really impacted me this week was reflected upon the title of Advocate.  Personally, this is one of the most beautiful titles that He bears because an advocate is somone who defends someones rights, voice, and them as a person in a court case, and it seems absolutely beautiful to me that in a coming day, every one of us will be called to stand before the Judgement Bar of God, to be tried of who we have become in this life. (side note: I believe it is a beautiful principle that I believe that we will be judged based off of who we have become in this life, and not a massive list of the good and bad things which we have done)  Anyway, in that day we will have our Savior, with nail-scarred hands pleading for our cause, standing in defense of our helpless souls against the demands of justice, and joyfully, lovingly, and proudly declaring before God our cause, if we have applied his atoning blood, we can joyfully receive the highest degree of celestial glory!  This is a day that I yearn for, and this perspective is what gets me out of bed early in the mornings as a missionary, so that I can work to earn my salvation and strive to apply the blood of Christ to all those around me so that we can reap the wonderful blessings together!  I testify of these eternal truths, and pray that each and everyone of us can come to trust in the Atonement of Jesus Christ, and make the changes necessary to find peace in that we can receive all that Heavenly Father has in store for us, if we but stay true to the small things, and serve our fellow men, love our families, pray, study the scriptures, and receive the guidance of the Spirit!  Keep going forward, because you have legions of angels cheering you on, and pouring out their hearts and souls to help you, if you but accept it by meekly praying for the strength that is one reach through the veil!  This is my testimony that I wish to share with you all, and hope that you have a wonderful Christmas season, loving and serving those who surround you!

Also, things have been really good down here, and I am going to give you a breakdown of some of the crazy wonderful things that have gone down!  Don´t have a ton of time, but I will give the basics of the past three days because they have been super eventful!

Saturday: BAPTISM DE (OF) JOSE LUIS

Wondeful day, and I have attached photos below of this wonderful day!  Being able to baptize him was great, and we did have to do it two times because his fingers didn´t quite go down below, but we got it right the second time, and the spirit was beautifully strong in the testimony that his wife, Anabelle, bore about the truthfulness of the gospel!  Such a wonderful young family with the two kids Fabian and Victor are really sweet kids that can be phenomenal future missionaries after activating this family and hopefully getting them to the temple in a year!

Sunday: Primary Program

I realize that I might have confused some people two weeks back about the primary program, but we were practicing the past few weeks and we finally had it this week, and the spirit was beautifully strong, and I am so grateful to have been able to help so many sweet kids bear their testimonies through song and memorized words!  The really wonderful thing is that they didn´t give the kids assigned topics, but they had each kid pray with their family and write up a specific topic together!

Also Elder Brown gave his final testimony and it eletrified the branch with the Spirit, and I just sat there and thought that I wish to become the kind of missionary who can honestly say that I served faithfully, lovingly, and with all of my heart, might, mind and strength, and leave the mission without any regrets!

Monday:  CAMBIOS ARRIVE (CHANGES)

I am going to be training a new elder, as a district leader as well this next cambio, which has been extended to 7 weeks, so my trainee is going to have 13 weeks of training with me!

This is absolutely crazy, and I am really kind of nervous about how everything is going to go down, especially since I just barely finished my training!  But I have faith that the Lord will strengthen me to be able to fulfill this assignment, and I have complete trust that if I am being obedient, trusting in the Spirit, and striving with all my heart to follow his will for me, then I will be a success, no matter what the outcome may be!

Love you all, and pray that you can find simple ways to rely upon our merciful Savior this season in which we can remember him!

-Elder Raven

Also there´s the burrito sabandero video that I promised to send that Elder Brown took on his camera during the ensayo (practise that we had at the casa de oracion (house of prayer-chapel that we have in the branch)

So Many Changes!

This is the Cardenas 6 year old Twin girls from the Rama Alianza Real Christmas Party

Mom,

I am honestly kind of freaking out about this, but I have been called as a district leader, and training a brand new missionary, just after having ended my training this cambio!  I am super stoked for this next transfer because its seven weeks long, and I am going to be able to spend 13 weeks with this next companion, and I pray that we will be able to get along, learn together, and that I can inspire this new missionary to go onto greatness!  I am honestly super happy and just loving life right now!

I FINALLY GOT YOUR PACKAGE as well, so that was so wonderful and THANK YOU GUYS SO MUCH! You are literally the best and your presents were so thoughtful and I am honestly going to get diabetes from all the candy that you gave me, haha!

I have figured out that I am going to be able to eat lunch on Christmas with a family that has a computer so hopefully we will be able to use that to chat with you guys on the 25th around 2 or 3 oclock in your guys time, or 3 or 4 over here!

I also have been pretty sad about saying goodbye to Elder Brown, because he is such a good missionary, very patient, kind, spiritual, and I have learned a lot from him, and I plan to learn so much more from first hand experience, the best teacher of all, haha!

Anyway, do you guys have anyquestions that I can try to respond to in the family email!

Love you all so much,

Elder Raven