25 February 2019

We had a missionary devotional yesterday, and that was the big thing for the week. Well, we had stake conference 50 miles away, so we got permission to work with the Raeford elders all day. It was super nice to be able to talk to a whole bunch of the old members that I hadn't talked to for months. But in the devotional, every missionary had to sing in a choir. They asked for some volunteers a week or two ago to sing in a small group or do solos. So I decided that I'd like to sing in a small group, and went to the auditions. About 8 or 9 elders showed up, and Sister Goodman (the senior missionary in charge of it all) started having people sing different things. So, I got called up and I sang a part of Savior, Redeemer of my Soul. Evidently it was good enough where I ended up being voluntold into being in the small group and the solo thing. The small group was 4 elders singing the chorus of the second verse of How Great Thou Art, and I ended up singing the higher part. Sister Goodman asked who could sing a high G, and apparantly I can. With the solo, I sang the first verse of Savior, Redeemer of My Soul with Elders Schmidt and Oberstadt. Second verse was just me as a solo and then Elder Oberstadt was alone on the third verse. I was shaking pretty badly, but everyone I talked to said that I did a really good job still. (There were about 500-600 people there.) One member said that my future wife was probably in the audience, so I'll take that as I did well. The whole devotional was really spiritual and had lot of great speakers. It was interesting though, there were no conducting officers or anything. It just flowed from one part to the next. But it was super good.

25 February 2019

Dear Parents,

I hope you are enjoying this wonderful new opportunity to visit more regularly with your missionaries. They are such a delight.  We are in the midst of doing multi-stake/zone musical devotionals titled Joy in Christ right now and I wish you could see their smiles and hear them sing and pray and bring the Spirit to the room with such power. 

As we move into this new era of communicating home, I wanted to share a mix of my personal observations and reminders from the Brethren that I hope you will keep in mind.

--The length of your calls is up to you and your missionary, but please remember not all missionaries are in the same situation when it comes to family support and relations.  Be mindful of how keeping your missionary on the line might be affecting their companion.

--The principle is one call home (or two, if parents are not together).  Others family members at home may join in the call.  In that spirit, other family members may also join that call electronically (conference call, or video link).  What should not happen is multiple calls to multiple family members throughout the day.

--Remember the principle the Brethren had in mind when they changed the name of the day to Preparation Day when it used to be called Diversion Day.  The day is meant to get the missionaries ready for the coming week to do the work, not as a day to divert or distract them from the work. Please know that the missionaries have many things to do on P-day to get ready for the work and please do your part to help keep your missionary mentally and spiritually focused on their purpose of: “Inviting Others to Come Unto Christ.”

--Missionaries are to initiate the contact during regular PDay hours, not you.  If you need to reach them please message me or the Mission Office directly and we will facilitate whatever contact judgment warrants.

--While virtually all of the missionaries are excited with the option to call home every week, many have already expressed that they may not want to do this every week.  The Brethren have indicated that it is not their expectation that missionaries will call home every week. 

--There will be no increase to mission budgets for these calls. Missionaries are not authorized to make long distance calls which incur additional charges on their mission phones. Missionaries without easy internet access would typically buy a phone card with their own funds. 

--You might be interested to know I send this as a mission president, but also as a father with a daughter on a mission.  I was giddy with love and excitement as I got to speak to my daughter last week.  We will do so again, I am sure.  But, we (meaning me, my wife and my daughter) have all agreed that mission letters are a treasure and should not be discontinued or be entirely replaced by calls.  You say different things (often better things) when you write, rather than call.  We are also agreed that part of the mission experience is to grow in individual maturity and independence.  Just as a great cake cannot bake with a constant opening of the oven door to check on it, a great mission experience is often only achieved after some period of individual struggle without direct, parental observation and intervention. 

I pray for heaven’s blessing upon you and your missionaries as you thoughtfully and prayerfully consider your communications in light of these reminders.

It continues to be the finest honor of my life to serve your noble sons and daughters who give so much to the work of the Lord and the salvation of the people of North Carolina.

Best,

President Holland

18 February 2019

So, in brief, this was an odd week. We're teaching a man who had a flesh eating bacteria infection in his groin and had tons of surgeries and is constantly in pain, and he talks about it every time. He originally was Irish Catholic but it pretty skeptical about almost every church. Fortunately, ours isn't one of them! So he's really interested in learning a lot more. He's not super sure about joining the church, but we'll work with him.

Our weird story for the week is about going to the local HerbaLife to contact the owner again, Al. Well, an older millionaire Rhodesian street preacher came in and started talking to us. He tried to get us to join his ministry, but we politely declined. He later praised us and kissed our hands because "it's a hard job and nobody gives us praise." It was just a weird time. He also bought us shakes. So, that's the week's story. 

4 February 2019

So I now have done my first week in Clinton. It's bigger than Wallace, but that isn't a very difficult feat. Still, it has some more stuff. We'll just have to figure out something to do on P-Days now... Anyway, on to the week.

It started off with getting the apartment cleaned out and throwing out a lot of food. Wallace got shut down due to a lack of missionaries, and we had to clean out everything, and the APs were very insistent that everything be taken out. Nothing was allowed to stay. The rest of the day was saying bye to the members and finishing up our cleaning. 

Tuesday rolled around and that meant it was time for the hour and a half drive to Raleigh. I'd picked up quite a bit of stuff in my months in Wallace, and Elder Reynolds also had a lot, plus all of the stuff that had to be taken out. (Mostly the food.) So, the Malibu was riding pretty low. And got terrible gas mileage all the way to Raleigh. But we made it, and I got my new companion, Elder Rivas. He's from Utah and has been out for eight months. So we went and headed off to Clinton, where I was almost overwhelmed by the size. A whole whoppin 8,600 according to Google Maps. It did feel a lot bigger though. The apartment is interesting. We're next door neighbors to our branch president, and it's not an apartment. It's actually a little stand-alone house. That's really nice because we don't have to worry about loud neighbors or anything like that. 

Throughout the week I've mostly been getting to know the people we're teaching. We've got some really good people, and we set a baptismal date for someone named Cornelius. He's a really nice guy, he just needs to stop smoking. I also had my first online lesson with someone named Esther. She's been learning from the missionaries for a long time now, but just hasn't taken the steps to develop her faith all the way. We're trying to encourage her to read the Book of Mormon, as that's been the hardest thing for her to do. She's a college student with a kid, so it's understandable that she's busy. The lesson was just us reading the Book of Mormon with her, and that was interesting. Doing it over Facebook Messenger gives you kind of a weird seperation, and the connection dropped at one point. Still, she liked it and ended up coming to church. 

Speaking of Sunday, we went to someone's house who we'd set up a return appointment with only to find that there were a bunch of 20 ish year olds there as well. We were pleasantly surprised at how well they received us, and they had a lot of good questions about what it was like to be a missionary. Two of them were 20, and it was hard for them to think about what it would be like to just give up two years of your life to go and preach the gospel. This was made even better by the baliadas the mom had made us. We won't be able to keep teaching any of the kids because they had to go back to school the next day across NC, but hopefully they'll remember what they heard when other missionaries find them down the road. 

I think that's all the major news for this week, I'll keep you all informed!

(Oh, yeah, I hit my 18 month mark this week too. I forgot about that.)

28 January 2019

So, I am getting transferred out of Wallace and onto Clinton, North Carolina. Funnily enough, This is where my MTC companion is now leaving, continuing our string of areas that we've both served in. The weird part about all of this is that Elder Reynolds is also leaving. In fact, Wallace is getting shut down for a transfer. Someone didn't make it out of the MTC leaving us one companionship short, and Wallace got the ax for a transfer. Hopefully it'll be up again soon, we have some people we're concerned about, namely Diane and Tom. Both were doing well, but now they're going to be missionary-less for a while. They know some people in the branch, and we've passed on news of our leaving. The branch president said he's going to keep up with them, so I've got some hopes. But for interesting things of this week....

On Thursday we had a first for the mission: A Spanish missionary summit. Basically all of the Spanish missionaries all got together with the mission presidency and a "guest star," Sister Voils from The District, who now lives in the mission boundaries. For those of you who are unfamiliar, The District is a set of missionary training videos from a mission in Texas, and we all have to watch them. Anyways, in the meeting we basically discussed the unique challenges of Spanish work and how we could solve some of them. It was a really good meeting, and you could really feel the Spirit in the discussions. Afterwards, we had a lunch and it was really good to just be able to be with all of the Spanish elders and talk. They're some of my favorite people in the mission, and it's the first time that the "Furious Five" have gotten together all at once since starting our missions in the mission home. The Furious Five is the nickname that the group of five Spanish elders who are all starting and ending their missions together was given. I'm gladly a part of that, but it'll be interesting when we all leave. We'll have about a quarter of all the Spanish elders leaving at the same time, so there's going to be a lot of people who have to train. 

In other news, we went to the Mt. Zion branch for the first time yesterday. President Holland wanted us to go there to see if they would be receptive to having missionaries again, and they really liked having us there. It was a lot of fun to be with all of them, especially because I recognized some of them from helping out with the hurricane cleanup. We were going to start going every other week or so, but now there aren't any missionaries in Wallace to go there at all. The branch is disappointed, but they'll get some new ones soon. President Holland knows how excited they are now, and so I hope that they'll get the missionaries they want soon. They're a really great bunch of people.

And finally, we went around and started saying our goodbyes to the members around here. I'm really going to miss a lot of them, having been here for so long you really start to get close with them. So, pictures. 

 

 

This is the Furious Five all together, (from left) Elder Hull, Elder Schmidt, Elder Clement, Elder Rasmussen, and myself. I've served with all of them but Elder Rasmussen, and we're all hoping to be able to serve with each other in the time we have left.

 The Verdin family

 President Roper (his wife wasn't there for the picture)

 Matt, the one who gave me the bullet casing last week

 One of my favorite streets to go down in Wallace

 

And one of my favorite signs here. There's not a lot to get pictures of here, so you have to make the small things count.

21 January 2019

So transfers is next Tuesday, and so this might be my last week in Wallace. We'll find out on Saturday/Sunday as is the norm. Anyways, ....

This wasn't an incredibly eventful week. However, there is some good news. As of Saturday, Aaron (Diane's husband) was still holding on. We visited them and prayed with them. They had a few people over and she was still understandably distraught, so we didn't stay too long. We're hoping to be able to visit again tomorrow and see how they're doing. 

Speaking of Tuesdays, we got up with Tom again (it's been about a month) and he said that he wanted to be baptized. He still won't set a date, and we're still really confused about him. He pays tithing, but is still iffy about doing anything else. It's odd. We're also going to go by him tomorrow to read in the Book of Mormon with him and introduce him to Come, Follow Me. 

We've not been able to meet with Ozzie again lately, and he couldn't come to church because his car got totaled. Hopefully we can get a member to give him a ride again, but the member that he's friends with has to work every other Sunday. 

And in more fun news, we had a really nice lunch with a family yesterday. I mentioned that transfers were next week, and Matt (19, and we're good friends) went to the backyard as we were leaving. Then, we heard a huge bang, and Matt comes running around to give me a 30-06 casing from the bullet he had just fired as a way to remember him. That was pretty funny, and it scared his dog to death. As he did this, his mom apologized and said that it was his redneck coming out. Speaking of which, I think Wallace is the most Southern feeling place I've served. Raleigh just doesn't have that Southern feel, but it's very strong out here. I think it gets more and more the more rural of an area you're in. 

That's about it for the week, adios!

 

 Oh, the things you see driving around Wallace. Yes, that's a little girl riding on a giant tortoise. Don't ask me why.

 I believe we found the world's biggest Steeler's fan. The car is impressive, but the suit he wears is a sight to behold. I didn't take a picture of him, I thought it'd be weird.

 And finally, some awesome member decided to grace us with pizza, and pasta, and cinnamon twists, and soda. That was a good dinner. (And then lunch.)

 

14 January 2019

I had to start out with that because this last week has absolutely flown by at record pace. I don't know where all the time goes, really. We got to visit Diane this Wednesday and teach her about the Plan of Salvation. She has been recovering well from her surgery, but her husband is in really bad shape and isn't expected to live more than a couple more days. So, it would be great for y'all to continue praying for her this week. But in some cheerier news, we also had Zone Conference this Wednesday. That's always a bunch of fun. It still surprises me how funny President Holland is. It was a little strange afterwards because I was asked to translate between him and another elder in the zone who doesn't speak English yet. He and his comp were having some issues and President wanted to help him learn English faster, so I kind of ended up being a mediator in all of that. It was definitely one of the stranger moments I've had with President so far. I had wondered briefly why I had been picked to translate, then remembered that I'm the only Spanish assigned missionary in the Wilmington Zone. So I guess I'm really his only option. I did pretty well, but he had to rephrase a couple of things because he uses some more complex words. I've got a good grasp of most Spanish, but when you're throwing around words like "syntax," that's not something that I use often in Spanish. Or at all. So I was caught a little off guard with some of the words. But I got through it okay, and just hope that I don't have to have a repeat performance. But back to the work side of things, we found a couple of sisters the other day who are really excited to learn more, Lexi and Nicole. They've got a big religious background, and want to know more. One of them said she'd invite her boyfriend the next time we visit, so hopefully we'll be able to start teaching him as well. I think that's all of the news for the week, until next time!