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!
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| 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.
