September 9, 2013

September 9, 2013

Hey, Everyone! 

It has been a fun week, pretty busy. Had a great zone activity on Monday, playing volleyball on the beach. Good times. Also some service on Tuesday morning, basically digging and pick-axing dirt for a couple hours. Ah, good times. 

We had another conference this week (conf on conf on conf!) and a good mini-cambio with the assistants. Learned a lot from them, very inspired leaders.

I had a very funny, humbling experience with Elder S this week. He recently bought some pants from a local store, and tried them on two days later and they didn’t fit. So we go to return them and get a different size and the lady insists that he hadn’t bought them there. He insists he did, and for about 5 minutes they went back and forth arguing--not quite to the point of accusation, but getting there. I try to mediate a bit (been doing a lot of that this week), and we go back to the house to see if maybe there was a different pair of pants he had mixed up. Turns out there was, he was wrong, and so we go back to apologize to the lady. Ha ha, she was still ticked, and he felt super stupid, and me, too, a bit, just by being his comp, but it was super funny. Been teasing him about it all week.

So my skin is kind of getting bad again, same weird rash, not sure what is going on. Might be about time to call in a real, actually certified dermatologist. Hopefully that works. So far, we could entitle my mission, “How to puzzle every single Chilean doctor with your skin 101.” Not so much fun--hopefully gets better with the summer. They keep saying it’s right around the corner, but then it starts raining again. So much fun.

Other than that, not much going on. Fun stuff all around--we have some fun FHE´s planned for the week, Chile is getting excited for 18 de Sept, their big celebrations of independence. Should be tons of fun. Heard first Christmas song already... wow. That makes me scared. The time is flying by. And there is so much to do... never a dull moment in Tome! 

Been studying a great talk from President Uchtdorf from the Priesthood session of 2012 May, I think, about the why of Priesthood service. How important that focus on the why is--it is so easy to always just focus on the what and lose ourselves in the business, but if we can keep a focus on the why everything resolves itself better, we see more lasting changes. Definitely applies to leadership--teach the missionaries to fish instead of giving them fish and the zone is never going to be hungry again! So trying to focus more on that, a little testing on the patience, but my patience was needing testing anyways! Que bendicion mas grande! Que felicidad! 

Having great times, pray for it to stop raining!

Elder Brown