November 10, 2014

This week we traveled a lot. We had our Zone class and Zone conference this week which meant we were on a bus to Chillan 2 days in a row for about 3 hours round trip. And the buses here are not too comfortable… One morning we got onto the bus and there was barely no one on…I sat down, fell asleep, and about an hour later when we were almost at our destination, I woke up to a man’s butt inches to my face. The bus was jam packed, making it impossible to move any part of your body without awkwardly touching people. I didn't know where all these people came from... I felt like I just sat down blinked and then appeared multitudes. The worst part was trying to get out of the bus... We sat in the way back (just like all the cool kids do) and to get through all the crowd we had to squeeze our way out, climbing over and crawling under people IN our nice suits. BUT we made it to our conference alright, and on time!

Our Zone conference was very good.

One thing that struck my attention is the message that Hermana Arrington gave to us. She is the wife of the president and the mom of the mission and lately she has been focused and worried about missionaries that are discouraged and down heartened.

She looked back at her notes of General conference and found a quote by Utchdorf that he shared in his women’s general conference address

He said that ¨It doesn't matter if your are 8 or 108 but you need to know that God loves you today and forever.¨

God is not waiting for us to be better before he loves us. He is not waiting for us to achieve greatness before He loves us.

He is never waiting to love us… He loves us today, for who we are now...

And he will continue to love us as we grow and fall, as we experience success and challenges.

This week we had a focus on finding new investigators to teach. So part of our work was to go back through the area book and look through all the futures and contacts that we have had in the past couple weeks to call and set up appointments. In my mind I have been thinking of a woman that we have talked too awhile back but she told us that she lived very far so we didn't bother passing by thinking it was impossible to get there.

But her name kept going through my head for a day or so... so we called and set up an appointment, She happily accepted and gave us the directions to her house (because she live in the forest on a farm without street names or numbers)

We set out walking to her house at 4 in the afternoon, and then we kept walking and kept walking, then got lost.

We walked through wheat fields, forest paths, crossed streams and fed a horse that I named Sterling, but still could not find this house. We called her and tried to explain where we were but all we could see is trees and hills so she didn’t know how to help us either.

She told us on the phone, “I set my three kids to go looking for you, ones on foot and 2 are on horseback¨

We kept looking for them but then our cell phone ran out of service so we found some dirt road and prayed and a car came to take us back to Yungay.

Feeling that we still needed to pass by her I called a member who had a car and asked him to help us get to her house.

FINALLY at 730 we made it to their house and taught them a lesson. They are an amazing family of 6 who only have the desire to be an eternal family and be baptized in the church which has the truth.

Being guided by the spirit feels so good.

This week we had an activity with the branch called minute to win it! And it was very successful. We had people try to bite a hanging Apple, get a ping pong ball out of a tissue box on their backs and a lot of other challenges that had to be completed under a minute.

Last week, which I forgot to mention in my other letter is that we had a Halloween party and karaoke night... the members made us costumes.

Here are some other pictures of our new house, activities and other adventures that we had embarked on.

Love you family and friends.

And we went to a gym to work out... it was really small and pretty lame but we were super excited to WORKOUT and GET YACKED

We got permission to get a membership and go in the mornings early... we did it for all of last month but we didn't re new the membership because I might be leaving in a week