Prepare to Laugh

thanks for the pics, the other missionaries now think i have one of the craziest families ever hahaha

this keyboardiscrappy andthe space bardoesntwork sosorry.

this week we baptized a 10 year old girl, lucero flores, sheisthedaughter ofthe lady we had actived after she had been inactive for over 15 years. so it was a really neat experience for both of them and for the ward to see that we are really starting to work hard. oh yeah it was kinda funny because we needed to bring a bunch of juice to the baptism, like 6 liters and somehow i got roped into bringing all 6 liters in my backpak. holy cow that was heavy and not an experience that i would like to repeat. hahaha

this week i also learned how to use an umbrella. i had a lot to learn lol. i learned by straight up trial and error haha. like how to block water from cars that splash in the puddles, or what to do when you go by a tree or another person or someother object. when to open it and when to not open it. man it was tough.

but we still got a lot of work done. we were walking down a streetandwe had an impressiontoknockona members doorl,so we knocked and knocked but nothing. so we were just kinda like ok whatever. and thena man walked aroundthe corner and we contacted him, turns out he knows our pensionist´s son that has now moved to the states. anyways we visited him the next day and commited him to being baptized on the 12th which he accepted and then we invited him to the baptism whichwasinlikean hour. and he showed up! and he liked it too. anyways he also came to church all by himself and sunday and stayed for all 3 hours. we are so excited for him. his name is edwin romaní and if you could pray for him that he´ll be able to get baptized on the 12th.

since we´ve started working a lot harder we have noticed a huge difference in the amount of spiritual promptings we get and the expierences that we have after we follow them are amazing

love

elder connole

Maximizing Time!

Hola querida mamita

Crazy that bub can get his papers so soon. It´ll be another crazy waiting period until he gets his calling. I´m sending a bunch of pictures this go around, like 5.

so this week Elder Muñoz and I went crazy and we did over 330 contacts. usually we had been averaging around a 120. But we really took to heart what our president has been telling us the last 6 months and and we managed to do 3x the amount of contacts while maintaining and actually even increasing the amount of lessons that we normally have in the week. what happened? Honestly we just needed to actually go out and do what the Lord through the president has been telling us to do. And we have been blessed for it. We found quite a few new people that seem very interested we had a ton of rejections. and when I say a ton I mean aa ton. But it didn´t even matter, we just shrugged it off and kept on looking.

President Fernandez had us do an exersize where it showed us that we were really wasting a lot of our time and so we took the principles that he told us and applied them and they worked. This week we are gonna do even more and it will be awesome.

We´ve started teaching a young couple, the girlfriend lives in another area where the church has never been until just recently this year, but she has obviously had a ton of contact with the church through her bf and she actually knows a few RMs, anyways she really really wants to get baptized and we have permission to teach her but we have to figure out what we are gonna do with the baptism and transferring her over to the brand new branch that is being opened. Her boyfriend has been pretty much inactive ever since he got baptized 2 years ago but now wants to serve a mission and so does she. hahaha so we´ll have to work with the bishop a lot to keep them on track.

One of the pictures I sen is of my pensionist. She is awesome one of the first members to get baptized her in Arequipa and she lived in Salt lake for a couple years, but that doesn´t mean she speaks english haha. The whole family is awesome and she cooks really good food that hasn´t upset my stomach very much. The only complaint I have is that we eat a toooooonnnnnn of beets. Im not sure why, i guess they must be in season or something lol.

We had a funny experiecnce a couple days ago while contacting. We contacted a lady and so we presented ourselves and that we wanted to share a message about Christ with her. so she asked us if we believed in the same Christ that she did, obviously yes. And then we told her that we wanted to help her to follow Christ´s example more fully and come closer to him. So she responded that the only way she could get closer to Christ is by reading his word...so we pulled out the Book of Mormon and said that here we have more of Christ´s word for us. She took one look at it and just said "No", put her head down and walked away briskly. E. Muñoz and I were kinda startled and after she had walked a little bit away we just started laughing.

Anways I love you all, GO COUGARS and I´ll talk to you next week!

Elder Patrik Connole

Commitment & Agency

Why not buy Brazil jerseys? haha they were cheaper, sometimes on P-day we go to a huge out door market and just look for cheap soccer jerseys and so yeah. We´ve actually found some pretty sweet ones.

So we had a baptism this week. Jann Carlo. We had it with the zone leaders who baptized the two primary age girls that I interviewed. Jann Carlo is the son of our landlords and he is awesome! Like every night he would be reading his Gospel Principles book or the Book of Mormon or sometimes both! Anyways next week he should get the aaronic priesthood and then we´ll take him out to go to appointments and strengthen his testimony. We are working with his parents but man they are a lot tougher. Basically its because they aren´t willing to put in an effort to actually read the Book of Mormon nor will they pray. They keep telling us that they want to know which church is true because there are so many congregations but they aren´t willing to do their part!!

Y´know thats really toughest part of being a missionary is that you are completely depending on other people to exercise their agency and go through with the commitments that we give them. If they do it they get baptized. If they don´t they don´t. Seriously we would baptize 95% of the people we talk to if they would just follow through with what they say they are gonna do. So as missionaries really our major responsibility is to help people to actually make and keep commitments. because if they do that they prepare themselves to get baptized.

2 weeks ago when we put a baptismal date on Jann Carlo he wasn´t sure if he could prepare himself so quickly but we promised him if he would do his part, God would prepare him and he would be ready. And that we would be with him through every step. And guess what, he quit smoking, got an answer and was baptized on the day that we committed him too. We were actually a little worried that he wouldn´t pass the baptismal interview because he had the smoking problem. But God works miracles in the people that really put in their effort.

And now these same principles apply in my life as a missionary and the lives of every person. If you really commit to do something and then do your full 100% effort you will succeed. God will provide the rest. Its the same with salvation, if we live the gospel 100% then God´s grace is sufficient to apply mercy and forgive our sins so that we can enter into His kingdom. Just like Nephi teaches right? it is by grace that we are saved after all we can do. I know that if you have a righteous goal and you really put in your effort then you will be able to fulfill it and fill the satisfaction of doing so. Goals are so important in our lives and now that I´ve been out for over a year I need to make some goals for how i´m gonna finish.

We also got into a discussion this week with some crazy old guy who knew the bible inside and out, like really understood it well. But really who took us more as a couple young bucks that he could try to force his religious belief based entirely on biblical substance. Thank goodness we have more than just the Bible. We have the BOM, D&C, POGP and the words of living prophets. If we didn´t have those I would have left that conversation very confused.

Anyways thats what I learned this week and we were excited about the baptism, we should have a few more coming up where we will be making incomplete families completed with goals to get sealed in the temple

Love you and thanks for everything that you do for me!

Elder Patrik Connole

A Week of Miracles

I´ll be waiting on the pics. I can´t wait to see them. A few missionaries here also got word that Skype was ok to use but I didn´t hear about it until afterwards...drat. Mother´s day we will have to do it. ;)

Anyways wow what a powerful week. We just expierenced miracles. The most amazing one was that this week we contacted a woman who has been inactive for 15 years or so and was going to another church. But we gained her confidence and we were able to set up an apt. with her family for the next day, tuesday.

So we got to the apt, not really knowing who was gonna be there nor what we were gonna say. Her husband and 10 year old daughter were there. Anyways so we just introduced ourselves and had them do the same. Wow they just started telling us all the difficulties that they are going through with their older daughters who got married and had kids young. they just feel awful. So we explained the importance of family prayer and reading the scriptures together. and they commited to do so.

The next apt we passed by and the dad wasn´t there so we just talked with Dominga, the mom, and she said she was now very confused as to which church she should go to. We told her that the spirit was trying to touch her heart and if she prayed and asked God he would tell her where to go.

Came back on Saturday and she hadn´t prayed. So we explained to her 1 Nephi 19:36 which explains about the importance of applying the scriptures to ourselves. and then we asked her and her husband if we could kneel in prayer and if she would ask God where to go. So we did. After she ended her prayer we just kneeled there in silence feeling the spirit. It was soooooo strong. wow. After what seemed an eternity but was probably less than 2 minutes, the spirit prompted me to ask her which church she felt like she should go to. She said "I think I should go to the Church of Jesus Christ"....WOAH!!! thank you Heavenly Father!!!

And guess what, Sunday morning, a little late, but in time for sacrament, the whole Flores family shows up in their sunday best and absolutely loved the whole thing!!!

We also should have a baptism this week. Remember how we are living in an investigators house? well one of them wants to get baptized, Yean Carlos. He has had a smaking problem but like we comitted him to quit in a very spiritual lesson about the word of wisdom. He hasn´t smoked since but relapse is always a possibility. He came to church by himself as well.

So as a DL I am in charge of calling the missionaries in my district every night and making sure that they are alright and that their investigators are progressing. And I am in charge of doing all the baptismal interviews for those in my district...yikes!!! Thursday I have my first one!!!!

So the pic is the volcano misti with SNOW

And the other are the brazil jersies that we bought

Elder Connole

15 Minute Blessing!

Thanks for all the pics. I can hardly keep up with everyone! They are all changing so fast! Especially the youngest ones. I also can´t believe that I´ve been out for almost a year!

Anyways all this week once again I went to training meetings for 3 days at 8 hours each day. But this time it was because I´m gonna be a new District Leader...which is a kinda scary thought but I know it will be good for me because whenver I´m put in more leadership type situations I usually do better. Presidente Fernandez talked a lot about how we as leaders need to be the examples. Its gonna be hard because like literally every single on of our investigators except for 1 went on vacation...actually wait one family came back today so I guess we´ll see. We´ve started contacting like crazy though and we´ve found quite a few people that have some potential

The 9 year old that we baptized last week got confirmed yesterday and the mom was sooooooo emotional. Hahaha I don´t blame her too much though because she has been waiting a long time so that her son could go through with this step that is so important in his life.

I´m staying here in my area with E. Muñoz which means that if we make it all the way through this transfer together it would be the first time in all my mission that I´ve had the same companion for more than one transfer.

Oh that reminds me, the other elder that I trained, (Elder Lowe) yeah he was there at the training meeting too because he is now training and he also is a DL! What a power house!

We had an intersesting expierence the other day we were contacting and we knocked on a door and out came an older gentleman. Really nice but agnostic and he said that he didn´t want to talk to us because he thought he would make us agnostic too which he didn´t want to do lol. Poor guy he was miserable. But anyways we talked to him for a little bit and as we were talking the guy´s younger brother showed up with all his family on a visit. The brother invited us in and we taught them the first lesson and challenged that whole family to be baptized which they accepted! Only problem...they live in another area...whole different stake...but we are gonna send the missionaries over as fast as possible! (the agnostic guy still didn´t wanna listen but it was a very interesting way for the Lord to present us a family who was ready to listen to the gospel)

You may notice that this letter is a bit longer than normal and its because...we now have 45 min of computer time!!!! YAY!!! So really 15 min makes a HUGE difference. I´ll try to be even more detailed in the future with some more stories and more pics and what not. Oh and if we behave ourselves next month he might extend it to an hour! That´d be so awesome.

So thats all for this week, remember that prayer is powerful and that if you ask you shall recieve, so ask for the good righteous things that you really need. The Book of Mormon is amazing and should be read daily and even more important you need to apply what is written there because it was written for our time and for us. Heaven Father loves us and he wants for all his children to return to his presence and only throught the restored gospel is that possible

Love,

Elder Patrik Connole