Growth

Thanks for the pics and the BYU news! that is so awesome, im so psyched!

Anyways wow crazy stuff this week. Sorry the gringos are distracting me with NBA news and BYU news and what not. So sorry lol.

But yeah, we were trying so dang hard this week to help a 20 year old girl to get baptized, she has family that are members and she likes church and everything but she just doesnt wanna get baptized it was so frustrating. argh! On Friday we decided to give her one last chance. So we were there with her cousin and aunt who are members the spirit was strong and everything. She hadnt been reading the BOM which is absolutely essential for conversion and so we just had her open it up randomly and read from it. all 3 passages talked about repentence and not hardening your heart when the spirit speaks to you then we asked her, So what is the Spirit telling you to do?

Follow Christs example

So will you follow the example of Jesus Christ and be baptized as he was by someone who holds the authority of God?

She took a huge pause and said very bluntly...No

Wow talk about spirit killer.

But its all good everyone has agency and thats basically what I learned. It sucked but sunday we had a bunch of people come to church, 2 of which members brought and another 2 came all by themselves, and we got good news that a couple we have been teaching wants to be married so we will have a ceremony on the 25th. So tight.

This zone is starting to explode, the whole stake is getting involved and we talked to the stake president on tuesday and he said that they are talking with the general authorities to divide the stake. That is a huge ginormous step towards a temple here in Arequipa. That is our goal as a mission that this year there will be an announcement and plans made for a temple here in Arequipa. Oh and if the stake divides that generally means an apostle will come so we might have the opportunity to listen to another apostle which would be awesome!

Keep up the good work as member missionaries and I know that the Lord will bless us even more abundantely

Love

Elder Patrik Connole

Pictures & Baptisms

So I´m sending you pictures of the 2 baptisms we had this week, its kinda nice to get to a new area and have baptisms right off the bat. I even got to baptize one haha, it was really cool at the baptisms and the confirmations because the families were all there and they could see how it all goes. The first baptism was of Fernanda who was going to another ward, we taught her for the first time on monday and commited her to baptism for that same saturday, she was so excited for everything, and her mom now wants to baptized as well, unfortuntately she isn´t married to her husband! grr.

And the other young girl, her name is Maybé (my-BAY) haha, she should have been baptized last week but her house flooded becuase there has been SO MUCH RAIN!!!! so we got her dunked this week lol, we almost didn´t get it done because like we did it on sunday before sacrament but there is another ward that meets before us, so we asked the other elders to fill the font. So we went down to double check and they hadn´t done it. So we started it and just prayed that it would fill up enough by the time we got back with Maybé, fortunately by the time we got back it was full enough to baptize her and everything.

The ward has been helping us out a lot so we are very grateful because we have to a lot of things as Zone Leaders to do so yeah, but its going good and now I gotta go because we gotta hit up the office to drop off the baptismal records and what not.

TTYL,

Elder Patrik Connole

Rainy Days & Miracles

I always share my pics because everyone loves seeing such a huge family.

So I got transferred...which is why im writing so late. and because I just got calledas a zone leader! WHA? yeah it was a total surprise because just last week the was zone leader conference in which all soon to be called as zone leaders went to, but I didnt go. But at 1 am this morning guess what I get a call and the zone leaders tell me that im heading to manual prado, (which is in arequipa and is the zone with the most missionaries in the mission) to be a zone leader. Another funny thing is that my comp is E. Frias who was in the CCM with me. He is awesome and I cant wait to get to work with him.

Anways this last week I think for E. Muñoz and I our hard diligence despite the contstant rain finally started paying dividends as we found 6 new families to teach. Seriously a miracle because I dont think Ive found 6 families in a whole transfer up until yesterday. 4 of these families are really quite amazing and i believe they have some good potential to get baptized.

One family in particular came to church all by themselves and we had never even talked to them. turns out that they have been having a lot of struggles lately and they decided to come to church in search of blessings from God and just try to get closer to Him. They used to just live together in the house of the wife{s mom but the mom kicked the husband out because of some bad habits and idk what else. (that mom is lds) anyways they felt the need to come to church and so they did with their 2 little kids. E. Muñoz and I just figured that they were less actives but the bishop thankfully told us that they aren{t members and that we should teach them.

We had an extremely spirtual expierence therein the class room as we explained to them the blessings of living the restored gospel and the blessings of making the baptismal covenant with our HF. just such an intense expirience as the spirit testified to this struggling couple that God loves them and that this is the right path for them. They accepted a baptismal date right away and the dad got extremely emotional during the closing prayer that he gave. very heartfelt.

love ya

Elder Patrik Connole

No Ugly Missionaries...

Alma 5:14 or Alma 48:17 or 1 Nephi 3:7...I have a lot of favorite scriptures so yeah.

Lol i guess other families don´t wrestle, haha but even the fact that the family is so big and that we all look alike just kinda makes all the latinos laugh.

Yes thank you I got hte family pics. S looks like he has gotten stretched out haha. I showed them to my pensionist and she loved them and says that the family is muy linda, I think the translation would be very cute.

thanks for the pics. the ireland map that D made was quite impressive.

Lets see, this week was pretty crazy, of course it rained all week but i guess thats normal here. I don´t like it one bit.

We changed rooms this week so now we are no longer in the house with all nonmembers, except the guy we baptized last month. We moved into our pensionist´s house and it is so much better. because the room is on the first floor and its a bit bigger and the people who live there understand our sacred calling as missionaries. Plus having pension and room in the same place is so much better. The only downside is that the shower is small enough that we have to kinda hunch over so we don´t electrocute ourselves. And the water isn´t really hot either, luke warm. but I guess I´ll just deal with it.

We were kinda disappointed this week because we only had 2 investigators in sacrament meeting. ugh. one of which was edwin who is our baptism for this week. the other we were just walking in the street and we ran into a crazy old guy we talked to a week ago and were just like hey you wanna go to church with us. He was like alright lets go. so we went lol. It was quite funny because he had a pack of marlboros in his front pocket but he was there at least haha.

We were talking with a brand new investigator this week and one of the things that was bothering him was that he had never seen an ugly missionary....Wha??? afterwards E. Muñoz and I just laughed about it.

Transfers are next week, time is just flying by way too fast.

Anyways love you all and I´ll talk to you next week.

Elder Patrik Connole