July 22, 2013

July 22, 2013

Hey, Everyone!

It has been a fun week--got a letter from the Durham YSA ward, from Christmas, I think—thanks, Chilean mail! But that was still cool. Thanks, Durham YSA!

It was a pretty fun week, same old same old. We have been teaching a young family, and the parents are unfortunately not married but they are super nice and have a lot of desires to learn. Their names are Pamela and Cesar. So keep them in your prayers that they can receive responses to the truthfulness of the Gospel.

Elder Durrant gave his first talk in church yesterday--it was awesome! He is progressing so much and just has a lot of desires to be really diligent, which is super awesome. And his Spanish is finally starting to come together a bit--more than anything, I think he is just gaining confidence in himself.

The health is okay, lots of skin problems, and it has been super cold--the tradeoff with less rain is that it is freezing, add that the mission told us we couldn’t use our electric blankets at night anymore, so there have been some cold ones. Rough stuff. Don’t let me ever complain about summer again.

The Lirquen sisters are baptizing! It’s awesome! They have made a lot of progress and are seeing lots of blessings, so that’s neat. We are hoping next week they will have another; the lady, Jamie, just needs to keep from smoking! But she is doing great. Elder Durrant and I gave her a priesthood blessing. Great family.

Anyways, this week we have interviews with President and tomorrow Elder Rees is going to come do a minicambio with me! I’m super excited; Elder Rees is my hero. If I were Catholic, I’d probably have an Elder Rees shrine. Real solid guy who knows his stuff. So that should be a great chance to learn from the best.

So this week we are going to be working with Pamela and Cesar and keep finding those good prepared people. I have been thinking a lot this week about what I wish I would have done to prepare for my mission more. I think learning to recognize and follow the promptings of the Spirit would have been the most key thing to practice and really internalize. I was just thinking about that the other day. I have also been reading in the New Testament--gotta love Timothy. Good old “fight the good fight,” interesting how that is what we are called to, and it’s really talking about covenants there. So, through our covenants, we can fight the fight of faith, which is what we have all been called to do. Neat stuff.

That’s pretty much all that’s been going on here for the week. In three weeks, the cambio ends, Elder Carter goes home, and I’m almost positive I will be leaving Valle Hermoso. So we only have a few more weeks to find families and to leave the sector better than I found it! Working hard and smart and really just loving the people more than anything!

Elder Brown