Feliz Cumpleanos Elder Raven 💙💙💙

Hi Elder Raven,

HAPPY BIRTHDAY WEEK!!!! I have been thinking about you all week! We hope you are doing well!  A couple of questions we have for you...

• How are you doing?
• How is Elder Santiago doing? Any news about how his knee is doing? Elder Santiago is lucky to have you as his trainer.  YOU are amazing!
• Did your internet short out last week? It's the first time we didn't get a group email from you. Is everything ok?
• How are your investigators? How is the Grandma you found the beginning of December?
• We sent you more fish oils...are you taking fish oils? It will help with the demands placed on your body. 
• I wanted to share that Blake was ordained a Deacon January 6th, Braxton has ordained a Teacher Sunday, January 20th. Mckinley went to the Temple with friends on Monday and she came again with Blake on Friday so she could be with him on his first time to the Temple.  Blake passed the sacrament for the first time in Church and he gave a youth talk about "Some of the Privileges of being able to go to the Temple." Dad also spoke with Blake in Sacrament meeting.  They did a nice job!
• The kids want to use your hoverboard, but I put the charge cord away so they can't use it. So it will be in good condition when you get home.  I told them they need to get permission from you before they can use it. You can tell me your honest thoughts if you want me to keep it safe for you... I will. haha 
• IS there anything we can help do for you? We re here to support you.
• Do you have any pics you can send for your blog?  Thanks for the pictures you already have sent.  

You are constantly in our prayers. We love hearing from you!!!! Keep smiling!

Love, Mom 💙💙💙

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Mom,

Thank you so much for the birthday wishes, keeping me in the loop with all thats going on back home, and for the many blessings I have received through your emails!

First off, I am so excited that Blake, and Braxton advanced in their priesthood responsibilities!  Make sure that they understand that they have an access to the power of God and that they have the power to be instruments of great good in school and in every aspect of their lives!  Teach them about their divine identity and destiny, and help them continue to be the wonderful boys that they already are!   I am truly blessed with the greatest family on the planet, and for your wonderful examples in teaching me the principles of the gospel!  They are doing so much good in the ward back home, and I hope they can recognize how wonderful they truly are, because they have learned from your example and that of our dad as well!

So this past week was honestly great!  It was full of challenges and adversity like normal, but we have grown closer as a companionship and for this reason, it is much more bearable!  We are truly striking up a great balance and I believe that we will be great instruments for good here in the branch of Alianza Real! 

We bought a knee brace for Elder Santiago, alongeside some pain medication to help him keep working in spite of the cold related pain!  So he´s been doing a lot better!

So last week we ran out of time from the Zone Activity in the stake center, and so we were booking it, so we only sent a message to the president, to family members and friends, and then left to return to our area a little bit late!  We were only writing for like 20 mins because we really ran out of time!

Everything is fine down here, and don´t worry I am going to explain everything in the massive group email!

Our investigators are great, it is just really difficult to work around work schedules in our area, because most of the people don´t have an education beyond la prepa or high school equivalent and for this reason they are very humble and good people, but they are unable to have a lot of control over their work schedules because they all work in factories where they literally don´t know their schedules in advance until the week of and they are only able to life and plan in the moment so that makes things complicated to plan our lessons, but they are really ready and progressing in all their commitments except for attending the church!

Yeah I have been taking the supplements and fish oils you have given me, and I still feel tired all the time, but they help me to maintain the energy until the nightime, haha!  

The broskis can use the hoverboard all they want, really I don´t have any need of it,  just make sure they stay safe that is my only concern, but for all I care they can have it.   One thing the mission has taught me is to not be so overly concerned about things, but rather how I can help other people, and if it makes them happy to use the hoverboard, let them at it, so long as they don´t try to do flips with it, haha!

Really there isn´t anything more!  Thanks for all that you are doing to send inspirational messages to help me press forward one day at a time!  The time is truly flying here and it is so wild to think that I have been in the field for exactly 5 months as of today!  I feel so blessed to be able to give to those around me, and center my life so that one day I will be able to end this mission with honor, to begin the true everyday battles of an everyday member missionary!

Love you so much mother!

Thank you for raising me in the principles of the gospel, and teaching me of the power of the Atonement of Jesus Christ!

I love you more than you can imagine!

Elder Raven

A Quick Email after Zone Activity

Mom,

We had a zone activity today and we are short on time, but we did see to check on Elder Santiago's knee, but he´s been battling a lot, and it is a long story but we are hoping that he gets better and can keep working. Thanks for searching for the book! I am excited to read Saints, Articles of Faith and Miracle of Forgiveness. I appreciate you sending them to me.  You are so sweet, thank you! You have helped me in so many ways to be here on the mission! Thanks for the photos!

Sorry, I can´t send any, we really don´t have time!

Love you guys so much! 

Elder Raven

Dia de los Reyes Magos (Day of Three Kings!) 1.6.19

Specifically, something that was truly incredible was on Saturday when members from the Felipe Carrillo Ward asked if we had some time available on Sunday to help out with the Reyes Magos (The Wise Men, or literally the Magical Kings) here in Alianza Real.  They had received a ton of toys and clothes for young children and they were wondering if there was anybody that could use a little bit of help by providing gifts to the young children of more financially troubled families!  It was so cool to see these young children freak out because here in Mexico, the Reyes Magos pass by and deliver gifts to every child, and they are often more revered than Santa Claus so just being a part to help some families that were literally saying, I just didn´t know how we were going to provide gifts for our kids this year, thank you so much! was truly very humbling and beautiful experience!

Dia de los Reyes Magos (Three Kings Day) is always celebrated on January 6th

I truly have a testimony that much like King Benjamin taught us that if we are in the service of our fellow beings, we are only in the service of our God! And that as we are out serving, we are being cleansed by the Spirit and are able to maintain our souls clean and worthy before He who is perfectly loving and pure!

But for any of you who are confused about what went down, just think of the Sub for Santa program, but with less preparation, a lot more soccer balls as the gifts, and everyone speaking Spanish, haha!

Elder Santiago and I both found the babies in our Rosca bread so we are supposed to bring Tamales to the party on Feb 2nd!

Megan Briggs just got home from Mexico City from a Wedding and she invited my family over to celebrate Dia de los Reyes Magos! My Dad, Braxton, and Caleb found babies in their Rosca. So they want to have the Briggs family over for Tamales on Feb. 2nd

Spiritual Thought:

Extranar vs. Extranarse
With my limited Spanish knowledge from spending four months with the wonderful people of Monterrey Mexico, I have learned something really interesting about these two verbs.  The first one of extranar means to miss something or someone, while the other signifies something that was unexpected or surprising to you. It is really interesting to consider because the only true difference is the reflexive se part of the second verb which makes the verb being acted upon the individual.  Or another way of phrasing that very confusing sentence is that one is to miss someone or something while the other is to be missing ourselves which translates in Spanish to the unexpected or surprising parts of life and I think there is a beautiful doctrinal principle about this.

David Cardenas Sanchez thought it was funny we both found the babies and we are supposed to bring Tamales for the party on Feb. 2nd!!! Hopefully, Elder Santiago can help me make Tamales! JaJa!

The Savior invites us several times to lose ourselves in his work in building up his kingdom.  He asks us to overcome the natural man in each and every one of us and in essence miss or forget ourselves in order to truly experience the beautiful blessings that surround us!  Many joys and wonders await us if we are willing to let go of the picture we have for our lives and follow the program that an all-knowing God has for us!  It is much like the rich young nobleman that was unwilling to submit himself to the will of Christ and receive the treasures of Heaven.  So I would like to invite each and every one of us to seek to align ourselves more with the two great commandments that our loving Heavenly Father has granted us!  To Love Him, and our neighbors, with every ounce of our beings!  I guarantee in this time of evaluating, planning and changing, that the more we can centralize our lives on these ultimate goals of our Heavenly Father, the more we will be at peace with ourselves, gain a sure understanding of our mortal purpose, and be able to overcome the temptations of the adversary that are so abundant in our world today!

For if we can truly apply ourselves to try to see through God´s eyes, I promise that we will never lack the spiritual and emotional strength to endure to the end.

Quick recap of the week:

Tuesday: We had a beautiful lesson with a menos activo family from the branch and we were able to see them in Church so that was really amazing!  They are a young couple with a young son that has been battling with sickness and we have been able to give him a blessing and it truly is such a wonderful experience to help everyone align their lives more with Christ, and experience the many blessings!

Wednesday: The cold became really intense and we had to come home early a bit because Elder Santiago was really struggling with his knee!

Thursday-Saturday;

Study and planning basically, haha!  Also making some quick intercambios with other Elders of Alianza Real to be able to make quick visits with some of our investigators!

That´s bascially everything going on down here in the sometimes freezing, sometimes blistering hot metropolis of MTY, MX, haha!

Cuidense Mucho!

Hasta la proxima semana!

Elder Raven

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)