April 20, 2015

Phew... I feel really sleepy right now. We´ve been getting up earlier some days to go running and I´ve gotten to bed late a few times due to district leader duties (lots and lots of time calling the district and the zone leaders).

I have lots of photos to share, and I´m actually in the good cyber today, but I forgot my camera in the house :p I´d normally go back, but when your with a companion, every little trip like that takes time from your companion as well and I don´t want to do that.

I bought a new watch today. This is my third watch. I got a nice one for my 19th birthday, and that broke (I gave it to a guy who repairs watches, but he said there´s a piece that snapped and it´s not fixable without a replacement for that exact part). Then I bought one a few months ago. That broke too. This one´s a lot lighter, so I think it wouldn´t take lots of damage in a fall.

There´s an old evangelico guy (like, evangelical) in a wheelchair, named Carlos, that wanted me to say "hi" to you from him.

A nice family we teach about once a week gave us cestañas, which I think in English are "chestnuts." They grow on trees in big spikey pods that have 2-5 chestnuts in each pod. They take the nuts out of the pod, boil them, and then you cut them with a knife to eat the part inside. It´s really yummy and it´s the type of food that´d be nice to eat while watching a movie, but they´re also very tedious to prepare and eat.

Juan Carlos didn´t really understand the plan we gave him, so we retaught it and now he gets it and is more committed. He stayed true to the plan for two and a half days, but then he fell again.

This morning I got really frustrated, because I feel like I´m recieving very high expectations from all sides, and I sometimes feel that it´s impossible to do what I´m asked to do. President Packer once said that something similar happened to him when he was called as an apostle. He learned that he wasn´t just going to be brought to the edge of his abilities, but he would need to step out of the light of his own knowledge and into the unknown. By taking the step of faith, the unknown became illuminated, and he was changed by the experience. The mission has tested me physically, socially, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, and maby a few other -ally words as well.

But God is perfectly loving, and perfectly merciful. He knows what he´s doing when He puts us in trials and He knows what´s going to happen from the beginning. We´re left between trusting Him or trusting nothing. Trusting nothing can´t get anyone anywhere, so I choose to trust Him. Sometimes it´s hard to hear His voice, or we feel like He gives just a little less than what we expect to meet the increasing darkness, but He knows perfectly what we need to make it through. The iron rod is the only solid thing in our sight. The rest is darkness. The iron rod does not fail. The choice is clear, and we can step forward in faith.

I just went overtime, and I didn´t have time tor revise what I wrote, but I love you all :D

-Elder Connor Christopherson


Elder Alder's awesome mom sent fun PJs.

April 13, 2015

Aw. My watch broke last week and I was going to buy one downtown today, but I forgot. I guess I´ll go another week using my phone.

I have lots of photos that I want to send, but I´m once again in the cyber that I think has a lot of viruses in it, so I don´t want to connect my camera.

This week was good. We have a lot of people in our teaching pool, but absolutely none of them came to church last Sunday. We´ve got to get that moving. I want to baptize someone before going back to California.

My district is full of really high quality missionaries. It´s actually kinda intimidating. I get in these mindsets where I try to compare myself and that´s never a good thing to do. That´s one of the challenges of this transfer, learning not to compare myself against very good, high caliber missionaries.

I told President Obeso last week in my letter that I feel like I don´t accomplish all the things I´m supposed to, even though I feel like I´m trying my best. It´s frustrating, because Nephi says we can always do it, but it stresses me out, so what I did was I wrote a list of all the things I could think of that I do that I would consider chueco (it means crooked or skewed, missionaries use it to mean disobedient). It actually helped a lot to see it all listed out. It made me feel more in control. I put stars next to some of them to polish up this week, and I hope to dominate everything in the list before my last week. I´ve only been half successful as I´ve worked on my starred items, but I guess I need better plans. I want to be exactly obedient.

The other missionaries in the house stole my agenda and made it a truncky agenda. They taped lots of pictures of young couples from the Liahona. They filled it with scriptures about marriage and they numbered the days to make a regressive countdown. I´m still debating if I should take the pictures off or not.

I love you all so much. I´m doing all I can to make these last 5.5 weeks count.

-Elder Connor Christopherson