Branching Out

(Okay, sorry about the really dumb pun in the title.  lol The following two paragraphs, he is commenting on his brother's dislocated shoulder and on his other brother playing flag football.  Little does he know that his little brother isn't so little anymore, although he is still as skinny as a toothpick.)

That was pretty gnarly from B there. How in the world do you do that pulling yourself out of the pool? LAME!

 

Yes I do laugh at the image of skinny little Derek running around with all those big guys hahaha but thats totally awesome! Hopefully he can be a difference-maker on the team.

 

I love miracles. Like so much. This week we went to pick people up for church and we came up blank. But then a few minutes before sacrament meeting ended a former investigator showed up to church. We had left him because he, well, just started to avoid us haha. We had talked to him about baptism and what not but he never would accept it. This week when we taught him the same day he told us "I went to church because I felt like God was calling me. I tried to resist because it was late already but I couldn´t deny what I felt. I really want to learn now and I want to get baptized soon." WOOT WOOT! Awesome! Turns out that his aunt who is a member had been praying and fasting that he would go to church this week and thus we see that God answers prayers. So yeah he could be baptized this week if he really gets hit hard with the spirit but more likely it will be for the 8th.

 

This week a member family from Quillabamba (its by Cuzco) came to church and after the meetings they asked us to give the mom a blessing which we gladly obliged and afterwards we asked them if we could go visit their friends that they were staying with. After a quick phone call they invited us to pass by. We headed over there and they presented us to this guy Willy. He was really cool. We had already contacted his house like 3 times but never found anyone. Anyways we taught him a little bit about the church and what not but more than anything we had the spirit with us and he committed to baptism as well. We had been asking and asking and asking everyone for references and finally the Lord blessed us for beign persistent.

 

We started working this week in a new part of our area. Well kinda, about 3 months ago Presidente Fernandez decided to take the 2 missionaries out of the branch and we were the closest once to the area. But it is far away and so we hadnt been going over there much but this week we just felt like we needed to do so. And so we called the branch president and (who is a BYU grad) he took us all around visiting the part member families and what not. We found a lady who is the sister of a couple that baptized in April. She has a lot of doubts but we were able to help her feel the spirit and she commited to baptism for the 8th. We couldnt go to the are to pick her up for church because its is just way far away and it starts an hour early in a different chapel but the branch went and picked her up and told us that she really loved it. So she is progressing very well.

We are excited that the branch has responded well to our offer of 2 days a week heading over there. It means a lot more walking for us and less time to eat dinner but right now it looks like very quickly we could be seeing some results. AKA BAPTISMS!!! haha. This week for general conference we are going to have a multi-baptism stakewide. We have at least 5 people that will get baptized at it and we could have upt to 12. We´ll see but E. Sulcaray and I are trying very hard to get the missionaries pumped about this activity

 

Love you all!

 

Elder Patrik Connole

Unconventional

Did I read that D is playing Flag football? wha?  Hahaha jk thats awesome

 

Ok so we had a fun week this week we had 2 baptisms but I only have pictures of 1 of them. We baptized the 10 year old niece of our RS president. She was way cool and really understood everything extremely well for her age. Her parents were really cool too and even went to the baptism. They would like to get baptized too but they are living together and are not married and the Dad just went on a verrrry long business trip so they arent gonna get dunked anytime soon.

 

The one with pictures is Carlos. He is that kid that I was telling you about and like really it was just awesome to get to know him and be able to baptize him, he was so excited about his baptism that he invited his younger brother to come all the way from cuzco to go to the baptism. So it was fun to have his family there for him suporting (idk how to spell that). The most interesting part was definitely the confirmation. All of Peru had like a regional conference I guess where Pres. Monson, Elder Christensen, Julie Beck and Walter Gonzalez all spoke to the 94 stakes of Peru. So like before the satelite transmission we asked the Stake Pres. if we could confirm the 2 of them, and he was totally fine with it. So like right before the transmission we confirmed both of them in front of the entire stake. It wasnt nerve wracking for us, but for the 2 of them it was a little bit scary haha. But it was interesting to do it like that and the spirit was a little bit different just because of the atmosphere. But definitely a highlight experience.

 

Other than that we keep working as hard as we can trying to bring more people to the church and help them enter into God´s kingdom through the baptismal covenant.

 

Thanks for the pics and the stories!

 

Elder Patrik Connole

PS. Pretty much the whole zone (well gringos) was so mad about the byu game except for one stinkin UofU fan...grrr...

In a second email...

So idk what happened to my other email but Im not sure if it got sent and now I dont have any time!!!! Let it be known that we had 2 baptisms and we confirmed them during stake conference!

 

Elder Patrik COnnole

It's a Crazy Life

Well, changes came and went and E. Sulcaray and I still together. 3 transfers with the same comp! But its all good because we work good together and we are good friends. We are getting a lot of greenies in the zone this transfer, (they come in on wed) so yeah it´ll be fun with a bunch of newbies. And all the elders who are training it will be their first time training so as ZL we have a lot of work to do to make sure that they are all do the job well. But I think it is good for the zone because we just had 2 missionaries that ended the mission (aka trunky haha) so we got some new blood in the zone now.

 

This week was kinda weird. I was sick for some of it and felt great for another part of it so idk. We got to work some and found some cool people that have some potential. We started contacted a lady in the street on Saturday morning but like 15 seconds after we contacted her, her bus came so she took off in that. Later on in the day we ran into her again and she gave us her direction and asked us to pass by the next day. So obviously the next day we showed up at her door (she lives at the very tippity top of the biggest hill that we have...but of course) and she recieved us very well and she told us "I know you kids have been sent from God to help me...why else would he have had you find me once again?" Sweet! She is a single mom who has a 19 year old girl and a 3 year old boy that live with her and a son who is married already. So hopefully we will get some results of that.

 

This Sunday was absolutely crazy at church. Like wow. We got there 5 minutes early and come to find out that the Bishop is at the hospital with his wife who had an emergency surgery, and that the 1st and 2nd counselor couldnt come. So we arrive and there are 2 Melchizedek priesthood holders running around trying to get the sacrament set up and the microphone in place and everything. But there wasnt anybody there to preside! Agh! Finally about 15 min late the EQP shows up and we could finally start the meeting. Whew.. Disaster (mostly) avoided. haha

 

Lets see what else happened this week. Oh yeah so another fun story. Our pensionist forgot to pay the phone bill this week so we were without a line. Well kinda, we couldnt make calls but we could receive them. Anyways that presented a problem because yesterday the asistents called us to inform us about the transfers and then we have to call everybody up to make sure that they know. So yeah, we came up with a brilliant plan that the pensionists son could just let us use his cell phone, and it would have been such a great idea except that he didnt have any more minutes left! argh! so we ran out at like 9:30 at night trying to see if there was some place to recharge his phone with minutes. Nobody has credit to do the recharge! So we went the RS president because she always has minutes, and thankfully she was able to let us use her phone, so we go hauling back to the room to pass indicators (I have know idea how you spell indicadores in english haha) and our 2 DL are calling to get the numbers passed and it was a total mess but we got the numbers passed and then we had to wait for transfers. They actually called us earlier than normal (aka 11:30 pm and not 1:30 am) so that was good and then we just had the normal craziness of all the transfers.

 

Anyways so craziness as usual for us but hey thats ZL life. NUTS!!!! haha

 

Love ya

 

Elder Patrik Connole

Another Good Week in the Field

Good to hear that Amanda is back, how´s she doing?

 

Lol I guess we will have to see about my accent. I hope that it isnt horrible, but I am sure that I will throw in a lot of spanish words as I speak, or at least as I think I will have to translate as I go, because thats what I do as I write you guys.

So this week we didnt get to work very much because we had zone leader conference and I just haven´t been feeling very good. But even with that God blesses us, we found a 22 year old kid named Carlos Quispe Yauri and he is da bomb. Like so cool. E. Stoddard and I contacted him while we were on splits and the next day right before ending the splits we went over to "teach" him. He had read the entire pamphlet that we had left him and marked everything that he didnt understand, he expressed to us that he hasnt been baptized yet and that after reading our pamphlet he gained a desire to do so...THAT JUST HAPPENED! What? Talk about people that the Lord prepares for us! Anyways we taught him about the covenant of baptism which only made him even more excited to get baptized and he commited to read the Book of Mormon and read the pamphlet (folleto sounds soooooo much better, pamphlet is just idk...blech). The next day (Sat) we showed up and he had read all of 2 Nephi 31 and the pamphlet and loved it. So we made sure he understood everything and since he hadnt prayed about it we commited him to doing it and he said he would come to church the next day. So we got to church a little late trying to bring another kid to church (also named Carlos Quispe haha) but without success. But we walk into sacrament meeting and who do we see? Oh yes...CARLOS! Woot! He was sitting with Emmanuel, who just got off his mission in April and they were already best buds.

 

Later that day we were on splits with the members and E. Sulcaray went to visit him and according to him, Carlos is awesome and had prayed and recieved an answer that the BoM is true, Joseph Smith is a prophet and that he needs to get baptized. Sweet! Bad news is that he might be going on a trip for a couple days. Good news is he might bring his whole family back with him so that they can see his baptism. So I guess we´ll have to see.

 

This week in Zone Leaders Conference we talked a lot about faith and how faith is both action and power. Normally we just think about faith being action and usually thats how it works for us but faith is also power and in order for it to be converted to power we must exercise enough faith as action on a belief until we accomplish something, then it is no longer faith, but knowledge and as Alma explains, when somebody knows something believing is no longer necessary. In Ether we always think about how the brother of Jared had so much faith that he could see Jesus Christ in his premortal state, but afterwards, in Ether 3:19 Moroni explains that it is "because of the knowledge of this man that he could not be kept from beholding" So yeah kind of a cool insight from Pte Fernandez, and he learned that from E. Christofferson.

 

Love you all!

 

Elder Patrik Connole

Moving the Work Along

Wahoo! I like to hear that the work is progressing in CA! Good stuff with the baptism (So I totally spelled that baptismo and didnt realize it until much afterwards) and the endowment session. Way cool.

I´m feeling a lot better healthwise, I think the mission nurse finally found some pill that is helping out a lot. Idk if that means that Im healing up or if its just not hurting anymore or what but for now I´m good to go.


So this week we were able to play a 7 on 7 gringos vs latinos and total win for the gringos! haha the latinos were not not so happy that we beat them lol. The main reason that we scored on them so much is becuase they didnt have anybody that played goalie so we´d just fire at will and I´m sure if they woulda had a better goalie they woulda beaten us.

This week we were climbing our wonderful (not) hills and we passed by a guy who was chipping away at the hill side to expand his house. So we offered to help him, which he accepted and we helped him and his brother chip away at stone for an hour and got a lot done. Afterwards we presented ourselves and left them with a Book of Mormon to read. They gave us lunch too! Here in Arequipa that means a for sure baptism lol. So we were pretty excited. The next day we came back and committed the guy (Victor),his wife (Yeny) and his younger brother (Miguel) to baptism for the 10th of Sept. Unfortunately Victor and Yeny are not married and have a 2 year old child, so we will talking to them about that soon. (like todayish) But anyways we came back on saturday and Victor was being all like tough-guy-not-wanting-to-recognize-the-spirit type, but Miguel and Yeny both comitted to come to church and so he changed his tune. We got them to church the next day and they loved it so much that they didnt want to leave after it was all done and they wanted us to come back asap to visit them. So we got another apt. today and we will teach them about the importance of marriage in God´s plan.

So remember how we have been working with all these kids that belong to this "gang" haha, we are now working not only with these kids but with their parents as well. Actually most of them are single mothers so that explains in part why they dont have so much control over their kids. But they have been able to recognize the difference in their kids lives so they are really taking what we teach pretty seriously.

Lets see other big news, as a mission we baptized 155 people this month which is awesome especially since it was a 4 week month and not a 5 weeker.

We had a FHE with a lady who almos got baptized 8 years ago in Chile with the RS president, and it was a very powerful lesson. We have been trying to get this lady to understand that God is calling her and she needs to do her part in the calling. We watched the movie "Only a Stonecutter" and we think that she is finally understanding that God doesnt expect us to just passively accept what happens to us, rather we should be actively trying to do evrything possible to fulfill with what God wants us to do.

Other than that this week was kind of a blur, but we did work hard and we have been having a lot more success finding people to teach this week.

Anyways I´m outta time again but I love you all and I love all the letters :)

Elder Patrik Connole