Week 61- October 13, 2014 - Pomona

Dear home,

This week was another fast one. But a good one. For starters, we got

to watch meet the Mormons, which was awesome. I definitely enjoyed it

and recommend everyone to go watch it!

This week, we had MLC and zone meeting. We focused a lot on less actives and personal conversion in our zone. We took time to establish

what our Vision, Goals, Plans, and Accountability for ourselves on

what we want to become. I focused on trying to become "the man of

Christ" (Hel. 3:29). So that is what I am working on. We finished the

meeting with having the three new trainees that just came in bear

their testimonies and it was awesome. The spirit was very strong. I

can tell that they will be way better missionaries than I am. The

world is in great hands!

This week, we had exchanges with the Azusa elders, they cover a very

white part. It is always interesting to go to those areas because I

feel like I'm back home haha. But while I was out, ,y companions had a

great lesson with Sara. She admitted that she needs to change the way

she treats Luis and acts, so things are looking great there. Luis is

doing awesome, as well. My companions taught him as well. His

fellowshipper, Alfred (he is an RM who served in the mission that

 Hunter Roeller is in), has been doing really well with him. He invited

him to hang out with a group of the young single adults from the stake

and had a really good time. And we didn't even know about it til then!

Apparently, Luis was really happy about it and couldn't stop smiling.

Goes to show that a small invite and some quality time goes a long

way. They shared with him the strength for youth, primarily focused on

the language part. He had a bit of a sailors mouth, but he is doing

awesome. It's been pretty great to see him progress and change. It'd be cool if he could go to BYU-I with Alfred (that's where he goes),

but he has a 3 year old daughter, so I'm not sure what he could do

there. The only thing holding him back is smoking. He has reduced to

it to 1 cigarette about 4-5 days out of 7. He always calls us though

and let's us know what his trigger was so that we can work on it.

We're trying to help him pick up some habits like working out or

drawing. Overall, he's doing great.

I'm going to send the Man of Christ talk as well, you should read it.

But yeah, I can't really think of anything else. Love you!

        

Week 60- October 6, 2014 - Pomona

Dear home,

This week went by pretty fast. I do not have a lot of time to write,

but I really liked General Conference. Something that stood out a lot

to me was personal conversion. Lately, we have been focusing mainly on

the conversion of our investigators. But I feel that something that is

really key, and also fixes a lot of problems, is our personal conversion. 

We are really excited especially because our zone is

really young and ready to go. It's weird because I feel like all the

people I knew and have been around my whole mission are all home!

But that's all I really have time to write right now. We've seen some

great miracles along the way and are excited to continue. Love you!

Week 59- September 29, 2014 - Pomona

Dear home,

This past weekend was transfer call weekend. And I got called to:

(drumroll) stay in Pomona with the same companionship!! I am still a

ZL as well. I probably say this everytime, but I definitely expected

to be released and transferred this time, but it seems like I always

end up getting surprised when these come around. But it looks like,

once again, I have a lot more to learn.

This past week, all three of us in our companionship were absolutely

exhausted. We all ended up getting a bit sick because of it too, so we

had to take some time to rest. Right now we are feeling a bit better,

so that's good.

This past week went pretty well. We have been working with Luis,

Sara's son, a lot. He is progressing really well towards baptism. He

came to church yesterday and for some reason, as his mom said the

opening prayer in gospel principles class, he started crying. I didn't

ask him about it since he kinda likes to play the tough guy image

sometimes. But I feel that he felt the spirit as his mom prayed. 

This past Sunday Jenny, Sara's 9 year old daughter, gave a talk in primary!

We helped her write it and she asked us to watch her give it. It was

really cute haha. She said that when she got baptized she felt like

"there were 100 happy people smiling inside of me." They are doing

great. We are focusing a lot on the relationship between Sara and her

kids because she can be a bit impatient with them. But we think as

Luis keeps changing, she will have her heart softened a bit more.

Other than that, not too much out of the ordinary has been going on.

With Rigo, we have set a goal for giving up meth for 21 days and he is

about 5 days away from that, so we are focusing on that before we

start teaching him in depth. Things have been going well, we are

really excited to continue working in this trio.

Love you All!

Week 58- September 22, 2014- Pomona

Side story before the big email. I went on exchanges with the APs this past week and I got to go to visit Boyle Heights. We were teaching this guy who is about in his 20s named Jorge. He is originally from Boyle Heights, but for the past year almost, he was living in San Francisco due to work. A friend introduced him to the church and he was right about to get baptized, but he had a setback and ended up moving back to Boyle heights. So where am I going with this? In that past year or so while he was investigating the church, he visited his family in Boyle heights for a weekend and decided to go to church on Sunday (this was in December when I was there). He went to the Boyle heights sacrament and after I talked to him! In the middle of the lesson he stopped and said: Hermano: you look really familiar... Were you at the church in east la in December? And I said yes, of course. And then he explained how he visited that day, but no one talked to him. Apparently I was the only person that had talked to him at church and that made his day haha! After the lesson he gave me a big hug and we took a picture together, I will send it in a bit. Pretty cool!

Temple visit with the Nava family

Someone is taking a nap!

With the Nava family at the Temple

Dear home,

This week went by pretty fast and at the same time pretty slow. We

had 2 exchanges, one with Elder Tovar, the Pomona district leader. The

other one was with the assistants in Boyle Heights.

And then on top of that we had zone conference towards the end of the week.

The first exchange went alright, I stayed in my area with Elder

Stuart, Elder Tovar's trainee, in my area. We had to do a lot of stuff

on the computer so it wasn't super eventful. Then that night as we

finished that exchange, we started the exchange with the assistants. 

I got to go back to my hometown Boyle Heights haha! The Assistants cover

the one Spanish young single adult Ward in the mission as well as

Boyle heights. But this day we got to teach just all YSAs. It was

definitely a lot more different than teaching the older people who are

stuck in Catholicism and refuse to be open. It was a pretty great day

full of finding prepared people. 

We contacted a 21 year old guy fixing his car. We asked him when we could come by and he said right now, but we had an appointment to go to so he said we could come back after we finished. The appointment wasn't there so we went back and he opened the door and said "where do you guys want to go to lunch?" You can imagine how happy I was since I was getting hungry. But he just took

us to subway and paid for us! We talked to him as we ate and he said he is looking for a church where he can belong to and develop family values in which he can start his own family. For those of you who are not familiar with the people of east LA, that is extremely uncommon for a 21 year old guy to have desires like that hahah. 

The day just kept going like that, which was pretty fun haha.

The day after that we had zone conference. It was pretty good to get

to hear from president and his counsellors. The main focus was on

obedience. Recently, president took away sports since a lot of people

 have been getting injured and have been going home because of that.

Even though he said it's just temporary, a lot of people sent him some

less than kind emails because of that. So he just helped us understand

that we need to realize why we have rules. (A lot of those came from

English work).

Then in the weekend we had a temple visit with Sara, Jenny, and Luis.

It was pretty cool to see Luis come to even though he had just gotten out of work and was super tired. It went pretty well, it was great to see all the family together. Jenny and Sara got confirmed this Sunday as well. Elder Merrill gave

Sara a really powerful blessing. It seemed to had made such an

impression on her that this morning she called us asking if we could

write it down for her so she can remember it and share it with Luis (he wasn't able to go to church).

So all in all, it was a pretty good week. This is the last week of the

transfer, so we'll see what happens!

 Love you all!