Esteban the Cafeteria Guy, who was a good friend to Elder Ridge Raven! He is awesome

Thank you all so much for your loving letters of support and encouragement, they always boost my day!  This week has been kinda difficult in all honesty but I have found peace in the final week of the CCM!  I finally have pictures so I´m going to send all of them to you, and then be a little more selective on the mass email, haha!  Anyway, we have a beautiful devotional about repentance on Tuesday and has led me to discover several insights that may not be new to you, but I hope can be of some benefit!  So Repentance is the second principle of the Doctrine of Christ, and the scriptures often define that those who love God, will wish to repent and become in greater harmony with his will!  Often, we develop this sort of negative connotation with repentance that it should be avoided or only be done with very great sins, but the reality is that Repentance is a sign of humility and with such our love becomes greatly attached to God!  The scriptures state that the man who is repenting is righteous and the man who is not is wicked!  This profound truth has caused me to pray every day to receive a forgiveness for my wrongs because I wish to remain on the right side of God!  Sorry for all of these tangents but in essence, God loves us so much, and He desires for us to return to Him, and if we love Him, we will do all in our power to receive the blessings of his righteous people, the repentant! I love you guys, and I hope that we can all be the Proof of His Love in our daily actions! (For King and Country Song). 

Elder Raven, Elder Ellis, Elder Holmes

 I love you guys, and now I am going to give a few more details about the week! so I have been running into Elder Ellis and Elder Holmes all the time in the CCM, but I also found Elder Buhler this week, and he is a great friend from EFY a year ago, and it has been so good to laugh with him about that amazing experience! I also had to say goodbye to Hermana Ramos because she was assigned to another district this past week, and we had Hermano Jimenez fill in this past week, and he has been the greatest teacher because he served in Oaxaca just four months ago he got off from the mission!  So he understands us completely and he is incredibly energetic ... and we think that there might be a relationship going on between Hermano Jimenez and Hermana Ramos because although they are assigned to different districts we see them chatting all the time, and it is not very uncommon for teachers here to marry other teachers ... so we´ll see if we get an announcement, haha!

Now back to the spiritual, I have found that no miracle in our lives can be wrought in less we are exercising faith, I was reading Ether 12 and was reminded that if we wish for God to change our lives we must do as directed in D&C 123:17 and it says

17 Therefore, dearly beloved brethren, let us cheerfully do all things that lie in our power; and then may we stand still, with the utmost assurance, to see the salvation of God, and for his arm to be revealed.

God will reveal His arm in the midst of our trials if we but seek to do everything (including repentance) and receive the Salvation that comes to all His righteous children!

We love to play volleyball with our district!

I love you all so much and I pray for each and every one of you!

I will be flying to Monterrey on Monday at 6:05 a.m. but I will have to leave the CCM at 2:00 a.m. in order to be on time, I might have the chance to call you guys, and I don´t know how much it could charge me, but I am going to try anyway so hopefully you guys will be up around then so that I can talk to you for a bit!

So excited to enter the fields that are white and already to harvest!

Elder Raven