Elder Jones week 71

Hey guys! We had another great week. On wednesday the zone leaders and sister trainers were supposed to have a meeting with Elder Waddell from the Area but he was called to the presiding bishopric so he wasn´t able to come. So we just had a normal mission conference. Last month our mission was the lowest mission in the area for new investigators, but this last week our mission came out as the highest in the area in several key indicators. The zone is doing a lot better. We were supposed to have 4 baptisms as a zone on saturday but all 4 of them fell through. The district leaders are making sure that they´ll get baptized this week. This next sunday there is going to be a conference for all the stakes in Peru and Bolivia, so no one is going to get confirmed this week and the next sunday will already be november, so October is pretty much over already. We´re meeting a lot of new people every day and a lot of them tell us that they want to get baptized but they just don´t show that with their actions, like coming to church. Lucio and Sulema were thiiiiiis close to making the decision to get married this week but something happened and they changed their mind. This week for the first time in the time we´ve been teaching them they read the book of mormon together as a couple, and that is what made them want to get married. On thursday we were on a companionship interchange and I was with Elder Torgersen and he asked Lucio how much time he has attending church and he said 5 sundays, but when he gets to 10... baptism. hahaha. I was soo happy. They started planning their wedding and their baptism and everything, but when we came back 2 days later something had happened and they felt like they needed to wait more time before they make the decision. The bishop talked to Arantza on sunday about it and he told us that Lucio has the desires to do what is right but he made a bad decision a couple of days ago and that discouraged him a little and it made him feel like he can´t change and that he´ll never be ready to be baptized. So this week the bishop is going to visit him to try and help him out a little. Their daughter that is in snow college in utah is getting baptized on saturday! so that´s exciting. We´re planning a trip to the temple with all the recent converts and we want to bring the Ortiz family. We think it will really help them. Also speaking of the temple. Jesus Pachas completed a year of membership this week and I called the elders in Caja de Agua to ask about him and they said he´s almost ready to get his endowment. He just needs to finish up some of his temple preparation classes. I hope you guys have a great week!

Elder Jones

elder jones week 70

Hey guys! I had a great week! This week we`ve been trying to talk with everyone possible and invite them to baptism with a date. I can feel the change happening in me. I feel like any sort of remaining fear I had to stop people in the street to talk about the gosple has been uprooted. The entire zone is getting better at it too. This week as a zone we had more than six times more invitations to baptism with a date than a couple of weeks ago. I feel happier and more satisfied with my work at the end of the day now that we are really pushing ourselves to find new people to teach. We had a few crazy experiences this week with finding new investigators. So it turns out that Cruz and Ubaldina actually live half a block outside of our ward boundaries, so we passed the referral to Pueblo Libre, and they are going to get baptized in Pueblo Libre. But in the same corner where we met Cruz we have found various new investigators. Without fail everytime we pass by this corner of Arnaldo Marquez and Rio de Janiero someone stops us to tell us that they want to listen to the missionaries or some family member wants to get baptized. It`s insane. But we`ve had several experiences on the same side of the same corner. On that corner we met a guy from Switzerland that attended church for 3 months in Switzerland and never got baptized because he never prayed honestly to know if the church is true, and now he`s willing to try again but with real intent this time. Also this week while we were on the bus to go to Breña to interview someone for baptism, an old investigator, named Luis, that I had never met called me and told me that he wanted us to visit him as soon as possible and that he wanted to get baptized. We visited him the next day and he told us about a series of events that have caused some big changes in his life and his priorities and that he had made his decision to get baptized! So that`s good. Also this week we were on our way to an appointment that we weren`t very sure about because it seemed like the person wasn`t that interested when they agreed to let us come by, and a man asked us if we had anything to read. We started talking to him and we were there in the street talking to him for about an hour. He said that he wanted to get baptized. we made another appointment to visit him and his family( his wife and 2 kids) and gave him our number. yesterday his wife called us telling us that she is a less active member and that after her husband talked to us the other day he felt a lot better and that he is really interested in joining the church and now she wants to start going to church. The only thing is that this week they are moving to another part of Lima outside of our mission. We`ve noticed this week that as we talk to more people we find more people that are willing to accept the gospel. It sounds pretty simple but it is the truth. I hope you guys have a great week!

Elder Jones   ps.     Oh and also my mission president and his wife know the Lex family from chicago. Sister Lex is sister Larson`s cousin. Haha small world

elder jones week 69

Hey guys! glad you all had a great week and enjoyed conference! We had a great week! We worked harder than I think I`ve ever worked on my misison this week, but still it`s not even close to the vision that President Larson has for the mission. On thursday we had mission council with President Larson and the other zone leaders and I`m really excited about the new changes that are going to occur in the mission. They`re going to help me stay more focused on my purpose as a missionary.

So we`re teaching Cruz who is the woman who found us in the street saying that she wants to get baptized. She attended the Saturday afternoon session of conference and she really liked it. She told us that she was going to be able to go to the session in the morning but didn`t show up and she showed up a little late to afternoon session so we didn`t see her come in. At the end of the session we were disappointed that she didn`t come and when they turned on the lights and we stood up we saw her! She`s still going strong for her baptism on the 24th. Also we met her ex-mother-in-law who lives with her this week. Her name is Ubaldina and she`s about 80 years old. When we came into the house to teach Cruz and her grandson, Ubaldina walked in and told us that she couldn`t listen to us because she`s catholic, but we invited her to come listen to our message about Jesus Christ, and she did. At the end we invited Cruz to get baptized on the 24th and she said yes, and before we could even ask Ubaldina she said that she wanted to get baptized too! She came to conference and she was sleeping through a lot of it but she said she felt the spirit. I think just the fact that she came to the conference is enough to show her faith in wanting to find out if the church is true despite her physical limitations. She has a really bad gambling addiction. She will leave her house and be in a casino for 3 days at a time, and sometimes lose up to 20,000 peruvian soles or 7,000 dollars. The baptismal interview doesn`t mention anything about gambling but we definitely want to help her out with that problem. We have also been teaching Cristian, who is japanese, and is a referral from the sisters in Pueblo Libre. We gave him a tour of the church this week and taught the gospel of jesus christ because he doesn`t know very much about Jesus Christ. When we showed him the baptismal font and explained baptism and extended the baptismal invitation, you could feel the spirit very strongly and he accepted. He wasn`t able to come to conference. 

I got a lot out of conference this time. While I was watching, I tried to write down introspective questions that came to my mind that I can meditate on later throughout the week and in my studies, instead of feverishly writing down every interesting sentence that I hear in the conference. I hope you guys have a great week! 

Elder Jones 

Elder Jones Week 68

Hey guys! I had a great week! I have a new companion! his name is Elder Montoya. You killed his father, prepare to die. (Ha, ha, ha  - joke) He´s from Juliacán, Sinaloa, Mexico.  He´s awesome.  He´s also about to finish his mission. He has 21 months in the mission.  I´m learning a lot from him.  

So yea, to catch you guys up on what happened last week, I was putting in the zone achievements in the morning and we received news that one of the young men in the ward had tried committing suicide and he was in the hospital.  So we went to the hospital to give him a blessing and then the entire day I was with Elder Anderson while he said goodbye to people.  

On Saturday Arantza and Mario were baptized.  And afterward Mario invited us and the mission secretaries to go eat chifa.  He´s so happy.  Arantza told Elder Dayton in her baptismal interview that the week before she met us she had been praying that someone would come to help her repent and feel closer to God.  So that´s awesome.  We´re still working on getting Lucio and Sulema married, they´re going through some problems right now that we don´t understand and we can´t figure out what is going on, but they don´t want to get married for now.  But some good news is that Eugenio and Doris from Rimac finally got baptized on Saturday! I met them in March and I baptized their daughter Sofia and I got to go back to Rimac to baptize them. They were so happy.  I´m glad things finally worked out for them.  

We´ve met a ton of new people this week.  The referrals have just been coming like crazy.  So we should be having quite a few people progressing this upcoming week.  On Saturday we were walking towards a referral´s house and since I´m the one showing Elder Montoya where everything is, I accidentally took a wrong turn and we could do one of two things; keep walking and take the longer route and at the same time keep my pride from getting hurt, or we could turn around and take the shorter route.  We took the shorter route, and while we were on the shorter route a woman came up to us asking us what she needed to do to get baptized in the Mormon church.  She had listened to missionaries in the past when she lived in Ica, but she never wanted to get baptized.  When she saw us and she felt like she needed to get baptized and she wanted us to prepare her to get baptized as soon as possible.  So that was the highlight of my week. 

Also the Luis that we were teaching when I first got here, the one who almost got bapitzed and changed his mind after a few days.  He lives with his aunt and uncle and cousin.  His uncle, Leonardo, is inactive, his aunt, Rosalía, attends church every week with her nephew Lyon who is 11 who was baptized in August.  Rosalía wants to get baptized but she can´t because Leonardo doesn´t want to get married.  They´re really hard to teach because Leonardo and Luis don´t want us to enter the house.  But this week we offered to do service and they let us in.  We helped them put a ton of books into bookshelves in their library. (they´re super rich and love to read).  And after that we taught them something short, and they came to church yesterday! So hopefully that´s not a one time thing and they´re actually interested in progressing.  I´m learning a lot and I´m really excited for this next week. We´re going to have a lot of people to teach.  I hope you guys have a great week! and congrats to Dan on his cross country meet!

Elder Jones week 67

HEY guys so sorry about writing so late, and I`m really going to have to write more next week because I don`t have a lot of time.  In the morning we came to write but there was an emergency with one of the young men in our ward and we had to go to the hospital, then Elder Anderson had some appointments with people from his old wards to visit them because he's gone tomorrow. 

But the highlights of this week which I will expound on next week are that Arantza and Mario got baptized!!! wooo!  They are soo happy.  Also, I got to visit Callao yesterday and all of Elder Anderson`s old sectors.  Tomorrow I`ll have a new companion.  I love it here.  I`m growing a lot.  I`m also figuring out how to learn from the spirit.  I hope you guys have a great week and sorry for not being able to write very much today.  I promise that next week I`ll be able to write more.  Love you guys! 

Elder Jones

Ps. Elder Anderson lives in American Fork. 20 minutes from BYU and he and his mom have offered to let me rent out a room with one of Elder Anderson`s other companions Elder Soria from Argentina. It would be a lot cheaper.  Just wondering what you guys think about it.  Love you.

Elder Jones week 66

Hey guys!! Glad to hear that everything is going great! Oh my gosh, Dan is so grown up now.  I can´t believe how much he´s grown while I´ve been on my mission. He did a great job too in the cross country meet! Congrats. 

We had a great week. Still working with the Ortiz family. Last Monday we had a family home evening with them and the Godoy family. Tonight we have another one with them and the Moscoso family. The ward is still working with us really well with the Ortiz family. Arantza is getting baptized this Saturday!! Her parents will soon follow, once they get their marriage figured out. This week we were teaching the Ortiz family about the Word of Wisdom and it was really hard for them at first because the mom really likes coffee, tea, and wine but two things really helped them out. 1: that we had Manuel Ramos there teaching with us.  He´s 18 and he´s preparing to serve a mission.  He was able to bear his testimony and he helped them out a lot. And 2: We reminded them of their testimonies of the Book of Mormon. Joseph Smith was a prophet because the Book of Mormon is true. And thus the Word of Wisdom is a commandment inspired of God. So they´re willing to keep the Word of Wisdom now. And to bury their weapons of war they got rid of their cabinet that was full of fancy alcohol bottles and glasses. 

Mario Gonzales will also get baptized this week! It´s kind of amazing how quickly this change has been brought to pass in him. We met him a little over 2 weeks ago and he´s a completely different person. He loves the Book of Mormon and church. We´re really happy for him and excited about the change that is going on in his life.   

This week I was on a companionship interchange with Elder Martinez and something he and his companion Elder Adams are doing is every time they see a father with his children they talk with him.  So we saw one who was about 23 years old and he went over to talk to him. He wasn´t actually a father, he was just playing with his older sister´s child.  Then then his younger sister who is 22 came running over saying that she´s Mormon too and that she moved here from another ward and stopped going to church when she moved. So we were able to teach her, her brother, her older sister with the 2 year old son, and their mother. They almost got baptized a while ago but just didn´t do it, but they´re really receptive and they want to get baptized now that a lot of things have changed in their lives. So we have another family that we are teaching! The Astete Family. 

So yea I´m still happy. I´m learning a lot. I participated in the mission council for the first time in my mission this week. That was fun. Well I hope you guys have another great week love you all!

Elder Jones Week 65

Hey guys! So I had a great week!!  We saw so many miracles.

So news about the Ortiz family that I told you guys about last week. They still want to get baptized as soon as possible AND also their daughter that lives in Utah.  Last Monday we visted them and they told us that they had just gotten off the phone with their daughter in Utah and it turns out that the exact same day that we started teaching the Ortiz family, their daughter started listening to the missionaries in Utah, and she attended church for the first time last week as well!  This entire week they´ve been Skyping their daughter in Utah to tell her what they´re learning from the lessons and she tells them what she´s learning. They´ve also been on mormon.org a lot this week, trying to learn everything they can about the church they´re about to join.  They´ve been going to all the church activities. They´re proactive with getting their marriage ready so we don´t even need to help them with that.  In short, they are becoming their own agents and they are learning by faith.  I can already see the change in them.  We visited them with Ernesto, a recent convert who is about 30 years old, married with a wife and a 2 year old son name EJ.  He´s really interested in their progress as well as every other member we see.  They always ask us how the Ortiz family is doing, and everyone wants to invite them over for family home evening.  Today they have a family home evening with the Godoy family.  We´re really excited for them.  Mario also went to church yesterday and he´s getting ready for his baptism the 26th. 

I´m really greatful for the opportunity that I have to be here in Magdalena, even though it´s different from every other area I´ve served in before on my mission.  I´m learning how to work more effectively and discovering new tools that weren´t available in other areas (for example easy access to mormon.org and strong member families).  I have  to rely a lot more on the Lord than on my own ability.  OH also Elder Tejada that was in Callao with me is going to be one of the mission secretaries so he`ll be in my ward now! 

I hope you guys have a great week!