John 3:10

 Welp everyone I can't believe I am already writing my weekly it feels like I wrote my last one yesterday! The mission is like that sometimes. They say that days feel like weeks and weeks feel like days. Kind of trippy not gunna lie haha. But all is well here in Cusco! We had a Multizona (Zone Conference) between the 2 zones of Cusco and it was super cool! We learned a ton and planned a trip to a place called Calca in the Sacred Valley. Super pretty and completely covered by mountains so it was even cooler!! We spend the day Friday there preparing to do "Open Doors" at the church and contacting the people that lived there. We went back to Cusco for the night but returned all day Saturday to do the Open Doors at the church. I'll attach pictures below of the church but man if you were inside the walls you would not even begin to think it was a chapel haha. 

Our Investigators are doing INCREDIBLE and people keep falling into our hands haha!! I started an English Class program for the entire District of Cusco which is the entire mission and we had a member contact us and give us a ton of references to his friends!! We then went looking through to find out which people we could contact from the paper records and we found this guy who was the only member of his family and his mom had a date to be baptized but never was... so we called him and he is the SAME GUY that gave us a bunch of references!!! Basically through this 1 member we have doubled our teaching pool! We also got referenced by a relative of one of the Branch presidents and the entire family wants to be baptized soooooo things are looking great!!! We also have plans to put 5 other people on date for baptism that we are teaching. We are just trying to get solid lessons with them first. SUPER COOL!!!

I was reading the Bible in John (because it's awesome) and Christ answered one of Nicodemus' questions by saying "Art thou a master of Israel, and knowest not these things?" The reality of it all is that no matter who you are, where you have been, or what is happening in the world, the only place we will be able to find the answers to the things we are looking for is through the scriptures and prayer. Those two things literally create our life and give us the information necessary to continue. SO INCREDIBLE!!! Now I know that I'm living this life full of gospel stuff but the people we teach aren't and this is what we tell them to do and it WORKS!! We think of the word "convert" as someone who is fresh in the church who just got baptized but in reality I became a convert long after my baptism because I came to an understanding that what I was reading and had been taught was the truth. My invitation is to do all you can to know all things under God so that you will be the most prepared for the things we won't be able to expect. 

Love you all and hope the life is moving smoothly!!

PICTURES!!

1. My super Stressful presentation to all of the leaders haha

2. We went contacting at the top of our area and welp... the view

3/4. Our drive to Calca through the fog

5-7. The church and baptismal font haha

If You Know What is Right....Don't Justify, Just Do It

 CRAZY WEEK

Wow this week was quite the adventure!! This email will be a little more of a reflection. So to give a little bit of a back story... I was having a ton of doubts about the little things like "Does God hear my prayers" and I couldn't find the motivation to get up and keep going. I would dream of being home and talking about my mission and then wake up a missionary. Not to be dramatic but it hurt to get up and get going in the morning and I didn't know why. So I put myself aside and prayed... maybe more intense than I ever had in a long time. I sat there and thought and did everything in my power to put my mind to rest with all of the things that were circling around in there. I didn't receive an answer or anything super crazy, just a simple calm. 

That was something I had gotten used to over the years so I went to sleep waiting to see what the next day had in store. For those of you who know me know that I think... A LOT. So I woke up Tuesday and did not want to work out because well... it is super cold in the mornings haha. However, I put myself aside and worked out or at least tried to get going and about 30 minutes into the workout I got more info in my mind about what I wanted to do with a mission wide idea that I am now in charge of. This is one of the small things that happened this week. I'm not gonna lie, the biggest thing I learned this week is that God is not just going to give us what we want without a bit of work. I struggled Thursday and Friday to keep the miracles that we were having going but it felt like a relapse of what I had felt earlier. Again, I put myself aside and accepted the will of God and kept moving forward. God will provide if we let him prevail. 

This week we found 13 new people and put 4 of them on date for baptism.  One family we called and put them on the second lesson. One family we called and they told us they wanted to be baptized. Another texted us and asked when we were going to set up a lesson with them. Another was a reference from a member. Basically miracle after miracle after miracle. There are more families that we are going to call and put on date for baptism so we hope to have 10-12 people on date for baptism by the end of this next week. 

Now I could go on about how crazy and exciting and rough this week was but at the base of it all I wanted to convey a SUPER important lesson and that is "If You Know What is Right... Don't Justify, Just Do It."

Love you all and I know 100% that God loves you too he just wants to mold us into the best people we can be!! 

PICTURES!!

1. I am SOO sorry but I forgot to mention I baptized someone 2 weeks ago but it was an investigator of another companionship.

2. I killed my Companion Elder Albitres (Missionary vocab)

3. We had a leadership training in a city called Quillabamba and boy was the trip there vomit town but there was this part that overlooked a HUGE valley so that was cool

4. We went running as a leadership group at 6am and this was the view from the top (Quillabamba)

5. THERE IS A FULL MALL IN CUSCO like with Converse and Sunglasshut and Chili's it's crazy!!

6. We played a ton of Games in Quillabamba and this is a foto one of the sisters took

7. TINY BANANA it's seriously the smallest Banana I have ever seen!! They call it "Platanito" or tiny banana hahahahah

Make Room for the Unexpected

 I think one word to give this week would be packed! It seemed as though every companionship needed something haha. We were gone all morning every morning trying to fix windows and buy glasses and all sorts of stuff and barely had time to get to our sector to do the missionary work. There were a lot of times where I felt bad for taking time away from missionary work to help and serve other missionaries. We tried to do what we could to at least get to texting a lot of the people we had in our contacts and that seemed to work pretty well. Overall I'm glad that today is a bit of a rest from all of the things we have had to do during the week. Also, because I showed up super late we are in week 6 of the transfer and will figure out transfer info saturday!! I really don't have a ton of expectations for the transfer but we have another gringo living with us named Elder Babbitt. He is from Mesa too and went to Desert Ridge soooo small world!!!

Like I was saying about the area we haven't had much time to get to our interested people but yesterday we decided that we need to do a bit of a flush of all of our contacts so we did lol. We sent a picture and a small question to everyone who had an "I" next to their name which simply means "Investigator". In total it was about 25 people and we got a ton of responses. These are all people we lost contact with so it was super awesome to see that they were responsive to our messages. Hopefully this week we will get going with some more calls and people that we can teach. OH I forgot to explain something we've been doing in the Zone. We call it invasions and basically it is where we choose 1 sector a week and we spend 2 hours street contacting and then we give all of the references to the missionaries over that sector. The first time we did it here was my first time street contacting and it was SUPER fun. 

I have learned 2 things this week. First, I have learned how to create a balance because life is going to give us a big load and if we don't know how to handle it, well... problems... In the last 2 weeks that I have been here we have had about 6 different people stay the night in our house and 2 different companionship changes just within our companionship. Basically the last 2 weeks have been the definition of unexpected. The second thing is to "Make Room For The Unexpected". If we constantly fill our lives with something and never leave an emergency space for the unexpected, we are going to be overfilled with things and as I can imagine... life has been a little unexpected lately to say the least. Just always make sure you make room for the unexpected because the sooner you do, the better off you'll be when the inevitably unexpected comes around.

Thank you to all who have sent emails and I hope things can get a little less unexpected in the future!

Talk written to be read in home ward (Before he left for Peru)

 Good Morning Friends and Family of Fremont Hill, I wish I could have done some of this in person but the opportunity to share a few experiences from the last year of my mission is something I couldn’t pass up. I have been in Utah now for 8 months and a missionary for 11. I have loved just about every moment of it! I am sad to leave Utah and I will be departing for my original assignment to Cusco, Peru April 8th.

I would like to start my talk off with a story but I would also like to give some background. Many of you know I left on my mission the week of the very first in-person church meeting for this ward. I was able to get up and give somewhat of a farewell with the time that I was allotted. Previous to this meeting I had been released as a missionary for 8 weeks and had gone on vacations and met up with friends and had even gone on a few dates. Overall... not preparing myself for what was about to come my way. Those 8 weeks made the MTC feel a lot like an EFY. Something that just came... and went. I definitely paid the price for my lack of preparation.

Just about 2 weeks into the first transfer in the mission I broke. Everything I had done or said or experienced weighed itself heavily on my mind. I spent many months studying Spanish but any time someone asked me a question it was as if my mouth was forced shut. I couldn’t speak and it drove me insane because all of you know I LOVE to talk. I also had just come out of a lesson where I had no idea how to explain the story of Joseph Smith in Spanish... or in English. At that moment it occurred to me just how little I knew. I felt small, incapable, fake... How was I supposed to teach the gospel to everyone I interact with if I have no idea how to explain the story that started the gospel? I went to see my Zone Leader and good friend on the mission to ask for some advice. After I had explained everything that was going on and what had happened and how I felt he simply asked the question “How is your scripture study?” I replied

with a shy “well... I mean I read the scriptures”. He said “Yes but do you STUDY them?” As I thought back before High School all the way up until that moment I realized that scripture study was the 1 thing I hadn’t focused on. So I made it a goal to STUDY the Book of Mormon. A good friend of mine had given me the Book of Mormon Journal addition as a gift and so I used it as such. The first day I opened the book and read it intently everything came together. Everything I had learned in my Spanish had caught up to my ability to speak. I wrote on the margin what I thought about each section and what scriptures I liked and wanted to use in the mission. I made a timeline of the book chapter by chapter with as much detail as I could put in without taking up too much time and room.

After finishing the last chapter of Moroni I was ready to know if this book was true or not. I got on my knees and prayed to know but received nothing... absolutely nothing. For 20 minutes I sat waiting for an answer but... nothing. I won’t lie, it scared me a lot. I had just put all this time and effort into reading and studying and writing and learning only to have received nothing. To this day that moment confuses me. I’ve looked at it from every angle to try to figure out what went wrong.

So, for those of you who know also, I am someone who works and works and works and if something doesn't work out I figure out why and I change, adjust, adapt, and work. That has been something I have learned how to embrace on the mission. So let’s fast forward to last week. I completely ran out of steam. I've been in this area for 6 months and have tried to help members see missionary work as important and I've trained twice and have been district leader for 2 transfers over a city that can't seem to baptize. In this area I’ve taught 30+ different people and put 3 of them on date for baptism, all of which passed their date and were not baptized. We've worked to figure out the most efficient route but it never seems to yield the results. Like I said I

work to figure it out so I wasn't going to give up because the only guarantee to giving up is that whatever you give up will NEVER succeed.

So in my frustration I decided to consult the people who know me better than anyone... my parents. I called and explained what was happening and how frustrated I felt not knowing what to do next. I said what I needed to and man did I get some good feedback but one thing stood out that I would like to share with you all. As I finished the call my dad asked me the simple question “Why did it take Nephi 3 times to get the plates?” I began to think “Well maybe it was some sort of preparation or a way to test his faith.” He simply looked at me and said “I don’t know... I have no idea why it took him 3 times but it did.” Now Brothers and Sisters for those of you who have served missions you know I could go on and on about my experiences here. I have learned so much about myself, others, God and his son Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith, and the Gospel as a whole. I may not be able to testify perfectly of everything I have taught to others out on the mission or even all of the basic concepts of the gospel but I can testify of 1 thing and that 1 thing is God’s plan for us. I don’t know why COVID-19 is a thing or why it happened, I don’t know why I stayed in Utah for a year before getting called to depart for my original assignment in Peru, I don’t know why all of the things we have suffered in the last year were necessary but I KNOW that they were. I also know that we are all here for a reason and the influence from others in our lives is there for a reason. The simple invitation I wish to give is to be that reason for someone else. Treat others the way you want to be treated. One of the greatest quotes is simply “No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.” Love, Share, Invite Brothers and Sisters is the simple invitation given to us as missionaries but it is meant for all. I am so grateful for the influence you have all had on me and my family in the years we have lived in this ward. I will always remember the leaders and friendships in this ward

and I hope to pick things back up where they left off when I return. I don’t know why it took Nephi 3 times to get the plates but maybe the first time wasn’t going to strengthen him much so don’t. give. up. because you may be exactly what someone needs... in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.