Elder Jones week 77

Hey guys! Glad you all had a great thanksgiving! Wow I think I really miss pad thai, I don´t even remember what it tastes like but I remember that I really liked it haha. Everyone looks so different in the pictures. I had a great thanksgiving. We went to Bolivar to interview someone for baptism, but the sister missionaries could never find the person when they went to pick her up, so the interview didn´t happen, but we met a man from Cajamarca with his grandmother and they told us that they had been robbed in Callao and they needed money to return to Cajamarca. We couldn´t give them money but we offered to buy them food because they supposedly hadn´t eaten anything since the morning. So we bought them food and we got back to the apartment at 9:30 and we weren´t able to eat anything for dinner on thanksgiving. But it didn´t really bother me because I wouldn´t have known it was thanksgiving if I hadn´t asked last week hahah. 

On Tuesday we went to ChacraRios to study with Elder Martinez and Elder Yates, and afterwards we went to the institute building where the family history center is. They work there a few hours a week. We called Mario and asked him if he wanted to come over and do some family history. So he came, and now he has almost his entire 4th generation full and he found two of his great great grandparents! He was so happy because his family is big on family history but no one could find the names of those two great great grandparents. Now he has a lot of names to bring to the temple. On Wednesday we had our meeting with the stake president and President Larson, and while we were waiting outside the church for the meeting to start, Elder Montoya contacted a young man in the street. His name is Alejandro. He said that he lived two buildings away from the church and that he always wanted to belong to this church. So the next day, Thursday, we taught him in the church and he said he wanted to get baptized but he had to ask his mom. On Friday he came to mutual, and had a great time. On Saturday morning he came to a baptism with us with his mom, and he really enjoyed it. His mom gave us permission to teach and baptize him, but she doesn´t want to listen to us because she goes to another church. On Sunday he came to church for all three hours. Today we are going to have a family home evening with Elder Godoy and his family and Alejandro is going to accompany us. The have a son, Taylor, who is 16. On Tuesday he is going to play football with the ward. I am so amazed at how prepared Alejandro is and how willing he is to sacrifice so much of his time to pursue something that he beleives to be right. We hope that his family supports him. 

On friday we weren´t able to do very much proselyting because we were  busy doing administrative things and other bits of service. We were happy to serve but at the same time I felt a little bit overwhelmed because we are expected to find and teach people in our own sector as well as help out the other missionaries in the zone, and I felt like I wasn´t dedicating enough time to service in our sector. At the end of the day we were walking back to our apartment, and a man who looks like Wayne Rooney stopped us asking us if we had a book. He said that he had a friend from Utah that had told him that Mormon missionaries would visit him within the week. We gave him a book of Mormon and he said that this was the book that his friend had been telling him about earlier that day.  He told us that it couldn´t have been a coincidence because he never gets home from work at this time. We told him that we don´t normally work around here and that we could send him the missionaries that do. He was so amazed, and he felt like it had to be from god. It was a good testimony to me that if I complete with my assignments to serve I will be doing what the Lord expects of me. 

I hope you guys have a great week!

Elder Jones week 76

Hey guys! I had such a great week! On Saturday there was a multi ward talent show. It was a huge success. We were afraid that no one was going to come, but about 150 people came! many of them were investigators. The missionaries did a sketch on how it is better to find people to teach through members than by our own efforts. It turned out really well. I realized that on the mission, one can really develop acting skills, because every morning we do practices where we pretend to be one of our investigators and try to understand how he or she would act in certain situations. 

On Sunday morning right after ward council and right before church started we were a little bit discouraged because we were calling our investigators that told us that they were going to come to church and none of them were answering. So we decided to start asking people that always come to church if they are actually members of the church, with the hopes of finding someone that hasn´t been baptized yet. We found 2 people that I definitely always thought were members. One of them, Paulino, is the happiest old man I have ever met, and he told us that we could visit him this week. Also 3 different members out of the blue brought friends to church, and we have appointments with them this week. 

On Friday we had multizone conference from 9am to 6pm, but it honestly didn´t feel that long. I learn a lot from President Larson each time I´m in a meeting with him. The zone seems more excited to go out and work hard after the multi zone conference. Afterwards I went on a companionship exchange with Elder Hulet, the personal secretary of the president. We found someone that has listened to the missionaries many times in her life, and has gone to church several times when she was living in another part of Lima, but she was never willing to accept "the book of John Esmith" (the Book of Mormon). But she wanted us to visit her because she has a family now and she is going through some problems and she believes that our message can help her and her family. Her husband is in the Peruvian air force, and he comes back December 6th. They´ve been married for 5 years, so that´s one hurdle less. We feel like they can progress. 

This week we had to accompany the mission technician to an apartment in the zone that didn´t have light or hot water, and while we were waiting in a corner to meet him I saw one of my old investigators from Rímac!! It was Ricardo. He attended church as a little kid and his parents are members, but they went inactive before he got baptized. Now he´s 18 and living in our sector in Magdalena and he wants us to visit him again. We have an appointment on Saturday. I take this as my second chance to teach and baptize Ricardo because it has to be for some purpose that he moved to Magdalena. Out of all the people in Lima, it can´t be a coincidence. I hope you guys have a great week! thank you for your emails and I promise I´ll let you know when I´m coming home. Love you guys!

Snowy day clearing off beehives

Elder Jones Week 75

Hey guys! so exactly the week that you asked me when I´m coming home, my release date changed. President Larson is going to push back my release date 1 or 2 weeks, so I will probably be getting home either the 7th or the 14th of June, haha sorry. Hopefully I´ll be home for Courtney´s wedding, but president Larson is going to confirm my release date a month from now. But yea that´s great news! 

My week was great! On Tuesday we helped the 4 sisters in Pueblo Libre move to 2 different houses. It took 7 hours. But it was a great opportunity to serve. On Wednesday we had the zone training in the morning and I think it turned out pretty well. I could feel the spirit. And then I went on a companionship interchange with Elder Berrios from Tacna, Perú. We were in ChacraRios and we had a lot of success. I had kind of forgot what it was like to be around people that aren´t super rich. 

In the mission, we have a goal to contact 15 people every day, and on Wednesday with Elder Berrios we had contacted 15 people and it was 9:20pm and I was ready to go back to the apartment and Elder Berrios contacted someone else and he knew that we didn´t have a lot of time so the first thing he did was talk about baptism and he invited the person to get baptized, and she said yes! She has never been baptized, and she has 4 children that are above the age of 8, and she said that she felt like she needed to get baptized. So yeah, I learned quite a bit from that experience. 

We had a training this week from president Larson about the Sabbath day, that it is something that the first presidency is concerned about in the church in all the world. We talked about how we can help our investigators better understand Sabbath day observance before baptism, and as we put that in practice this week we were able to bring many more investigators to church. The entire zone improved in church attendance of investigators. The Astete family came to church and another family immediately invited them to a family home evening this week. 

I hope you guys have a great week!

Elder Jones Week 74

HEY GUYS! I´m so happy for Courtney and Stephen!!!! That´s such great news. Did he talk to dad first? haha. My release date is June 1st. When does Tyler graduate? That reminds me, I need to know if I should keep my return plane ticket to O´Hare or if I should change it for a ticket to the Indianapolis airport or any other airport near there. Yea I´m done thinking about that now, I´ve still got a lot of time left in the mission. 

Transfers were last week and it looks like I´m going to be in Magdalena for 3 more months because Elder Montoya goes home in 5 weeks. 

We had a great week! We went to the temple with Mario and his brother Mickey. Mario was baptized for his grandfather, and he had a great experience! Lucio and Zulema also came to the temple with their 4 year old daughter, Ariana, and they had a great time. They also had some great news! Ariana is going to go to a school where they require the parents to be married, so they are going to get married! woo. But they still haven´t done anything yet to get married to I´m trying not to let myself get too excited because this is like the 6th time they´ve told us that they´re going to get married. 

We spent all of Friday and Saturday cleaning, painting, and fixing the house where the sisters in Pueblo Libre are going to live. It was a lot of work, but we´re glad that everything is finally ready for them to move in. I should have taken a before and after picture of the house like how they do in Hoarders. 

 Because we live so close to the offices and to a lot of hospitals, normally when someone in a hospital needs a blessing they ask us to do it. This week we had the opportunity to give a blessing in a hospital to a man named Gregorio. The Assistants told us that he has been anti-mormon for many many years, and never wanted to receive the missionaries in his house. His brother is a returned missionary and his sister and father are recent converts. When we entered his hospital room he was reading a Liahona and he was glad to see us. He was hospitalized because his blood pressure had been rising uncontrollably and he wanted a blessing. We gave him a blessing and we talked to him for a while and we could tell that he had been humbled by this experience. I could feel the spirit very strongly in the room with him and we taught him about Jesus Christ and baptism, and he accepted to be baptized on the 28th. When we left we both felt really good. He doesn´t live in our mission boundaries but he´s going to attend church where he lives. 

Thanks a lot to Grandpa for the line of authority last week. I sent it to Ernesto this week and he really enjoyed it. His wife is a returned missionary and she remembered Howard W. Hunter from when she was baptized some years ago. I´m really happy here, and I´m really enjoying the ward. Have a great week! 

Elder Jones week 73

Hey guys! I hope you all had a great week. This week was great. It was the last week of the transfer and we took a picture of all the missionaries in the zone. There is a tradition in Peru to hit people with eggs on their birthday, so after taking the picture we all nailed Elder Yates, a new missionary in the zone, with a kilo of eggs for his birthday. He had no idea what was going on, but he was a good sport about it, and his companion brought an extra shirt for him. This week we were 30 missionaries in the zone! because 2 of the new secretaries are being trained. Elder Dyches and Elder Montenegro. They`re awesome. Elder Dyches likes to run so we`ve been running together almost every morning this week. I am so out of shape. We went to the temple this week! I hadn`t gone in a really long time. We`re also going to the temple on thursday with the recent converts in the ward, so that`ll be exciting. This entire week we`ve been really worried about finding a place for the sister missionaries in Pueblo Libre to live because the owner of the house where they are living is going to sell the house on november 10th. An elderly woman that attends Pueblo Libre offered her house because after the death of her husband she moved to live with someone else in the ward and she wanted to offer her old house to the sister missionaries. On saturday we went to go check out the house and we learned that she is a hoarder. She doesn`t throw out anything. Her house is a very narrow  4 story building and she wanted to offer the first 2 floors to the sister missionaries. But both floors were full of things that probably have sentimental value to her and also a lot of things that I`m sure didn`t have sentimental value. But she wasn`t willing to throw away, or give away, any of it. So we spent about 4 hours on saturday carrying things from the first and second floor to the 3rd floor. We`re not so sure how hygenic it is to live in a house where the other floors are full of trash, but at least the first 2 floors are looking pretty clean. 

We found several awesome people to teach this week. We found the Chaman family. The father is less active and the mom and 15 years old son, José, are not. The father, Enrique, is really good friends with our ward mission leader. Yesterday we went with him to visit Enrique for the first time and he was alone, but his wife and son were going to arrive soon. It really helped us gain their confidence that our ward mission leader was there. They listened to the missionaries about 2 years ago and José almost got baptized but they found out that their uncle was dying of skin cancer and the grandma was in deep stages of Alzheimer´s and they just stopped listening to the missionaries. Right now Enrique wants to come back to church. He`s been reading the Book of mormon since June when his mother died. They had a piano in the room and Enrique wanted me to play something on the piano when José came in to gain his confidence, because he likes piano, and I didn`t know what to play because they didn`t have any hymn books so I just started playing Clocks by Coldplay when he walked in and it turns out that he really likes Coldplay so we sucessfully gained his trust. He`s also really good friends with one of the daughters of Elder Moscosso. So we`re very confident that they are going to progress. José is going to play basketball with us and the Secretaries on saturday. 

Elder Jones week 72

Hey guys! We had a great week! We taught very few lessons in people´s homes because almost all of our appointments fell through this week. But we talked with a ton of people in the street. I started to get a little bit discouraged  because we weren´t finding anyone to teach and we hadn´t brought anyone new to the church in a few weeks. But we had a lot of opportunities to learn how to be persistent with the people we contact and do all that we can to share our message with them even when they are a little hesitant to listen to us. On Saturday we met a family and we invited them to church. They said they wanted to go so we said that we were going to come by half an hour early to pick them up. We did and an excuse came up and they said they were going to go by themselves but a little bit late, but we just waited for them to be able to bring them to church. We ended up arriving at church 30 minutes late, but at least they came! and we have an appointment with them on wednesday. Yesterday there was a multi stake conference broadcast for all the stakes in Peru and Bolivia. They really liked it! 

Also on Friday we visited Lucio and Sulema to invite them to a stake activity for married couples. They really didn´t want to go because they were going to have to wake up early the next day. We asked them when was the last time the two of them went out to do something fun without their children. They said 15 years. And when they said that they realized that they needed to go. and the other ward members that were there said that they looked like they were having a good time. Also they went to a stake devotional yesterday for married couples. Elder Godoy (an Area Seventy from our ward) and president Larson both spoke with their wives. We hope that it helped them. They are so ready. Their daughter in Utah was baptized on saturday. 

I hope you guys have a great week. 

Elder Jones