15 Abril 2013

Mi Querido Familia,

Well this week has been pretty good! We have been finding some new people to teach lately. Ana Jazmin´s familiy gave us a reference of some other family and we started teaching them. The dad seems a little crazy, but at least not mean, and the mom and 2 daughters seemed pretty interested. We´re going to see how things go this week with them but hopefully they´ll come with us to church this next coming sunday... We stopped by and visited Vidal and Flor (another reference from an Hna). Vidal and Flor are both preparing for baptism but haven´t been reading much in the Book of Mormon yet so we decided to read some with them. We read in Alma 7 and it seemed like they were able to understand a little bit more about what Christ has gone through to free them from their sins. They both have the desire to recieve a remision of their sins and have commited to read daily in the Book of Mormon to know that is true and learn more about what God has in store for them personally. Are Ward Mission Leader went with us to that lesson and it was pretty cool... His name is Hno. Nieto and he´s a really good guy and he was telling us stories about his mission later on.

Besides that things are getting a little bit hotter here but not too bad. The house was pretty dirty so I was cleaning it and thinking about how we feel so much better when a house is cleaner. We feel the same way, but even better, when we´re clean spiritually too... Elder Snow and I want to start running in the mornings this week so we´re hoping to form that habit. We get along super well and we have been joking around a lot together (when it´s appropriate) but at the same time we´re making sure to keep working hard. We have been praying to find more investigators that are willing and able to go with us to church on sundays! I´ve really noticed throughout the mission that the people who go to church always progress while they are going. And those that have a really hard time going to church take much longer to progress.. The example we put sometimes is that the church is like a hospital. People go to a hospital because they are sick and need to be cured. People that go to church, don´t go because they are perfect, they go so that they can be cured spiritually too! I know that Heavenly Father loves us no matter what, but we are the ones free to choose whether we´ll let him in our lives or not. There is a scripture in Luke 15 that I really like that talks about the joys of repentance.

6 And when he cometh home, he calleth together his friends and neighbours, saying unto them, Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which was lost.

7 I say unto you, that likewise ^ajoy shall be in heaven over one^bsinner that ^crepenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.

Thanks for all the love and support from home. I´m thankful for all the answered prayers of Heavenly Father and for the help that he is always willing to give us.

Love,

Elder Carlson

 

8 Abril 2013, La Paz, Mexico

Mi Querido Familia,

Well yet another busy week has passed by! Things are going well here. We went up to culiacan for the concilio and came back here to la paz. I am with my companion Elder Snow now. He´s from Utah. We had the chance to go to the general conference this weekend too.

The beginning of the week I was with a couple different missionaries working with them in the areas until we went to culiacán on wednesday. The concilio was thrusday and we flied back that night in the afternoon. We had several missionaries sleeping over at the house to because they we´re heading over to their areas the next day on friday... Then on friday we had our Zone Meeting. It went well and it´s pretty exciting having Hermanas in the zone now. They seem like they´re already helping the areas progress very well! A couple of them were in my district from when I was in culiacán too so that´s cool.

We got to teach a few people yesterday though and E. Snow got to meet Ana Jazmin and Carlos´ family. We taught them about the word of wisdom and the husband commited to start living the commandment. It was great to see that he could understand the importance it would be in keeping this commandment for the good of his health and his family.. Vidal came with us to the conference sunday morning too and is excited for his baptismal date. He´s preparing to be baptized and reading in the Book of Mormon. We´ve got an appointment with him tomorrow and I´m excited to teach him, since this week we didn´t have the chance to visit him too much.

In the conference we learned a lot about the spirit and the Gift of the Holy Ghost. We all have the ability to the feel the spirit, because it testifies of the things that are true. We all have something called the light of Christ too. For example, a person might see an old person boarding a bus and offer the elderly person to take their seat up front. Some people might say it´s just good manners or human nature, but it´s the light of Christ that inspires us to act out of love and care for others. It´s a force that inspires us to do what is right... The thing is that a person who recieves the Gift of the Holy Ghost has the ability to make someone else feel that spirit and recieve personal revelation for their own lives and those who correspond under their authority. This gift is something that we have to earn though. We have gift after we recieve it through the laying on of hands, but it is not active in us unless we a worthy of it.. I learned a lot about the importance of continually repenting. We have to be actively repenting and keeping the commandments to be worthy of such an amazing gift.

I´m thankful for all that God has given me and I hope we can see a lot of movement here in our area these next few weeks. I´m excited for things that we have to come and know that the Lord loves each and everyone of us... Have a great week! I love you all and pray for you as always.

Love,

Elder Carlson

1 Abril 2013, La Paz Mexico

Mi Querido Familia,

Wow! Well, it´s time for changes yet again. My companion, E. Hernandez, left this morning for the airport at 9:30 am. I've been with one of the other E. Hernandez's in the zone today and things have been going well. We got to walk around and take some more photos by the shore and what not.. There were lots of changes here in the zone and there are going to be Hermanas (sister missionaries) here now! They haven't been in the baja for the whole mission from what I've heard so that's cool news.. I'm going to be with E. Snow this change. The funny thing is that I won't actually see him until thursday most likely when we head to culiacán and then we'll come back to la paz after a meeting there in culiacán.

This week we got to do some divisions again and I stayed here in the area with yet another E. Hernandez, haha. There were 4 different ones in the zone. This week was semana santa here and that's when a lot of people remember about when Christ died and resurrected, but the most common tradition is to go party and camp on the beach this week. Although many people were at the beach we had some success finding people and teaching them. We got to teach Vidal more and he's progressing really well! He promised to read in the Book of Mormon and agreed that it would make sense for God to continue showing his love unto ALL his children in these days, and in the times of the Bible. He came with us to church this sunday for the second time... During the week my companion and I also got the chance to teach Ana Jazmin and Carlos' family. They both are excited to prepare to have an eternal family and reading and praying together more often. They're getting legal documents from chiapas gathered so that they can get married in June. We're way happy for them and I hope I have the chance to be here when they get married!

I've been learning more and more about the importance of familys in Heavenly Father's plan for us. I'm glad that God has given us the chance to live with our familys here in this life and know that he wants us to live with them after this life to and to return to him. Everything that comes from God allows us to have a better, happier, and more unified family. Everything from Satan on the other hand makes are family relationship worse, unhappier, and less unified. The way to judge whether something is good or bad can be so clear to us!.. I know that the most important attribute we can develop in this life is charity and the pure love of Christ for our fellow brothers. The best way to do that is by serving them and putting our faith in the Lord... I hope everyone has a great time reflecting about Christ and what he has done for us.

Thanks for all the love and support. I'm glad to hear that things are going well at home and pray that even when we are having hard times, we can choose to be happy and press forward... I love and pray that we all can focus on what's most important and see what great joy there is to come as we choose to have faith, keep the commandments, and love one another.

Lots of Love,
Elder Carlson

P.S. Photos: 1) Our District 2) Companion and Ana Jazmin's Family 3) E. Mejia and I

25 Marzo 2013, La Paz Mexico

Mi Querido Familia,

Hello! Well, this week has been pretty good. In the beginning of the week a lot of our appointments were falling through. We met a few new people and put appointments with them too but those appointments were falling through. Friday we went on divisions and I went to a different area with Elder Rodriguez. We started out the day very well visiting a man they had just met that week before. We taught him and he seemed to have a lot of good questions and we began to teach him and a family member there, who happened to be a member of the church, she was in town visiting him. He told us he had been to many churches before but was interested in finding out more and coming closer unto God. At the end of the lesson we invited him to pray and he felt a special sensation afterwards. It´s amazing to meet people who are prepared to hear our message like him.

When I got back to my area we were really hoping our luck would turn around, or that we could make some changes to see more success in the area. Elder Hernandez said ¨we´re not going to teach many lessons today¨ hoping that would make us teach more, because everyday he´d been saying it looks like we´re going to teach a lot of lessons and then it didn´t work out as planned haha.. Saturday we ended up having several great lessons and it definitely made up for all the slow days in the beginning of the week... We meet another investigator named Vidal. He´s from culiacán and he has been living in La Paz for a little while for work. A lot of the people we meet here aren´t from here, so it´s kind of funny. But anyways, he told us about his life and how he is seperated from his now ex-wife. He said he has a friend in culicán that´s a member and he´d talked with him about the church before and even went with him a couple times. He wasn´t really interested in the church at the time though. Then sunday he showed up to church with us and we´re excited to see how things go from here on!.. We had a great lesson with Ana Jazmin and her family this week too. We read together with them and they're progressing well. Hopefully her husband Carlos can get off work soon though and come to church with us again.

Besides that same old stuff going on around here. Next week there will be changes/transfers and my companion E. Hernandez is finishing the mission. I think he's excited to see his family but feels weird at the same time. I've enjoyed my time with him so far and it seems like it's gone by way fast! It's awesome how many people you get to know in such a short amount of time being on a mission.. We're starting to visit more members of the church to try and help strengthen the ward and get to know more people. We've been seeing some progress there and hope to plan more and more lessons with them! Our ward mission leader, Hermano Nieto, has been awesome and we got an appointment and family home evening activity he's going to go to with us... Glad to hear all is well at home. Have a great week and remember that Heavenly Father loves you!

Love,
Elder Carlson

18 Marzo 2013, La Paz Mexico

Mi Querido Familia,

Well yet another week has passed by. This week was pretty interesting and things are going well!

I ended up going on divisions in a trio (3 missionaries) for 2 days this week while my companion went to a part called comundu. It was pretty fun and E. Mejia, E. Hernandez (his comp), and I had some pretty good experiences. They have some great investigators in their area right now and we got to teach one of their investigators friends. He had a lot of good questions and is already eager to read the Book of Mormon and learn more about the gospel. He put a goal for his baptism right there in his first complete lesson too and it was pretty awesome to see how prepared he was! Those people always remind me how the Lord prepares people to hear our messages... I think one of the things I learned during those couple days is the importance of just focusing on the basics. We can talk a lot just about the nature of God being our eternal father and when people really begin to understand that, they know that they are important. They know that God loves them and that their a worth a lot more than maybe how they view themselves from a worldy point of view. For our Heavenly Father all things are spirtitual and eternal. He doesn't see things the way we see them sometimes, with their temporal and earthly attributes.

My companion E. Hernandez and I later on also got to teach a few of our investigators. Unfortunately not all of them were able to come to church for different reasons but Isaac went again and is progressing pretty well. He has a goal to get baptized this week and he's doing what he can to prepare for that goal and we're hoping he can read some more of the Book of Mormon this week. If not we'll read it with him! :) .. We have some goals to work a lot more with the members this week. Our ward mission leader, Hermano Nieto, is going to come with us to visit Ana Jazmin and her family. She's doing great and so are her kids, but we haven't been able to teach Carlos too much because of his work schedule he's had with his military service. They have a goal to get married this year and we're hoping to teach them the importance of being sealed together as a family for eternity in the next lesson.

I'm glad everybody seems to be doing well at home. Things are definitely always changing but I know that all our experiences are for the better. Challenges in life are just opportunities to progress and become stronger spiritually (also can apply mentally/physically). I'm glad that Heavenly Father has given us this opportunity to learn and is so very patient with us! If only we could all, remember to feel his love. Have a great week! You have all my love and prayers!

Love,

Elder Carlson

4 Marzo 2013, La Paz Mexico

Mi Querido Familia,

Well it´s been quite an eventful week and things are going very well. We started out the week going to a zone conference in Los Cabos and it was really cool. There were 3 couples of old mission presidents that had served in different parts of mexico. President Romney, Pres Jesperson, and I think the last one was named Pres Cole? One of them was a relative of Mitt Romney too. They all shared with us different advice and experiences about what they had learned in their own service as missionaries and mission presidents. Sister Romney talked about how there isn't much difference between us and Helaman's army of stripling warriors in the Book of Mormon. I liked the questions she had that made me reflect. "How would I treat my companion if he were one of the stripling warriors?" Would it be different than how I treat him now? How would I feel working with them? etc.. It made me realize that God really does expect a lot out of us and that we too can see just as many miracles. We should take after there example and be exactly obedient. Being obedient to Heavenly father brings blessings, but being exactly obedient brings miracles.. Another thing we learned a lot about is how when we give God everything we can we really come to know him and can see all the miracles that he has prepared for us in our lives. There´s an example about how water boils and 100 degrees celcius but at 99 it still doesn´t. The difference in us giving the Lord 99 percent of our effort and 100 is just 1 percent, but it´s that last percent that´s sometimes the hardest. After giving that last percent though we recieve the power of God in our lives. There was a lot of other good stories I heard from them and advice that I was able to take note of too, so I'm hoping to apply it all the best I can.

Later on we had to go fly back to culiacán for the concilio with Presidente Cantú on Friday. We got to work a little bit with the guys in the offices because we got their a half day early and didn´t get back to our area until late saturday night.. The concilio was good and we talked a lot about leadership roles this time. We need to always be trying to be more christlike and our purpose here is to serve others. We also talked more about how the importance of recieving personal revelation through our studies. There´s a quote I like that about how the salvation cannot be recieved through ignorance. We need to be seeking direction from our Heavenly Father through the spirit to be able to do exactly what he wants us to do. We have the opportunity as missionaries to recieve direction from God for the people we teach too if we are doing what we should be, like studying efficiently in the mornings.

The only hard thing about the week is we didn´t have much time to work in our area! We had just a couple lessons but yesterday we had a cool experience. We were looking for a reference named Fabriseo in this housing complex. Their neighbours told us they´d never heard of him and that the people in that house weren´t there. We started talking to the neighbour, Maria, and we asked her if their were other people that would be interested in learning more about God. She pointed us to some other neighbours and we started teaching this lady named Irma. She seemed pretty enthusiastic while we started teaching her and her kids. Her husband didn´t want to come and listen though. A couple minutes later a truck arrived of family members and they got out. We greeted them and one of them was Fabriseo. He was really happy to see us and told us about how he had meet some other missionaries recently. The dad ended up coming out and listening to us too, and we taught several of the family members right there.. We taught part of the restoration but didn´t finish the message. They all said their going to pray and we have an appointment with them on tuesday. It was cool to see how the Lord guided us to find Fabriseo though, even though it looked like nobody knew him when we arrived there.

Sounds like everyone is doing well at home and it´s definitely feeling like spring time here already. It´s cool at night but hot in the day. Have a great week and thanks for all the prayers, love, and support as always.

 

Love,

Elder Carlson

11 Marzo 2013, La Paz Mexico

Mi Querido Familia,

Well it's been a great week! Sounds like things are going pretty well at home too, and that's very good to hear. This week we were able to actually work in our area and it went pretty well! It was still very busy though, as usual haha.

In the beginning of the week we had our zone meeting and it turned out pretty well. Everybody left feeling excited about working harder and looking for miracles in our areas. I got to go on divisions with Elder Cruz we met a cool young man. He's 18 and his grandma is a recient convert of the church. We started talking a lot about what he hopes his life is like 10 years from now, and what he hopes for things to be like. We were able to apply his desires to the gospel. He realized that he wants his future family to be a God loving family, and to achieve that he'll need to put the example. His grandmother's testimony and just support in general helped throughout the lesson too.. In our area we got to teach a young man named Isaac. He's been going to church the last couple sundays and he's preparing to be baptized this month. He didn't seem like the church going type at first, from his appearance, but it looks like he is his changing little by little and we're happy to see the progress he has made.. The family we brought to church the first week was moving this weekend and couldn't come with us to church. Unfortunately we weren't able to get to teach them that much but we're planning on visiting them a few times this week.

Besides that there was an activity an Elder in our zone was planning that we helped out with. It was an activity about Lehi's Dream and the whole stake participated. Members and non-members came and it turned out really good. There was a rope that the followed that was the iron rod. Some other missionaries and I were helping people that were blind-folded to go around obstacles and other ones were telling them to go down wrong paths sometimes.. Everything has a symbolism and I really liked hearing peoples testimonies at the end and we got to compart our own about the activity and what we learned. We could see that Heavenly Father has one path to follow but a lot of people were getting lost or detained when they heard voices of the world telling them to do the wrong thing. At the end everybody ended up in the chapel with the Tree of Life, which represents God's love or eternal life. It seemed like everyone had a good time and left having learned something gospel related so I think it was a success :). Definitely was a good idea of Elder Mejia.

I'm feeling a little bit more familiar with the area now. There's still things I don't know too well but I've really enjoyed getting to know all the members. There really are a lot of people that are willing to support us here and we've been seeing more and more progress the more we try to work with them. I know that Heavenly Father loves each and everyone of His children no matter how old they are, where there from, what color they are, or even how obedient they are! I know that He really wants to bless us and I have seen many of his blessings. He'll never force us to do something though and every challenge we face here in life is for a reason and can be used for our personal progress or downfall. We ultimately make the choice, and the sooner we learn to trust in him, the sooner we'll know what true happiness is.

P.S. Photos: My Companion and I, Fancy views of my Area, The Zone: La Paz