Stepping Things Up a Notch!

Im not surprised that not having tv is not a big deal because really we never watch tv. we are much more creative than that lol. My only thing (and I´m sure for Dad too) would be the sports. Other than that there are a bajillion other things that we can do.

The table is awesome!

Yesterday was pretty amazing because we went to our pension and did absolutely nothing other than watch conference on a 56 inch screen, eat food and play card games. Way nice to get a break and get energized so that we are ready to go get a working in the Lord´s vineyard once again.

On friday we had an emergency zone conference to teach us how to have baptisms every week and to put us on a 3 week teaching schedule for our investigators so that they get baptized but the key to the whole thing is the Spirit which only comes by prayer, obedience and having a missionary mindset all the time. My comp and I are pretty excited for everything thats is coming at us and we are trying to hit it all with as much young missionary energy as possible to get baptisms every week. That is definitely something you can include in your prayers.

Our mission president when he served has as many as 40 people going to church every week and up to 20 baptisms a week! We know its possible but the problem is that we have never seen it done so we don´t know how to do it. So basically we are walking entirely by faith because honestly I don´t know how I´m gonna be able to have that kind of success but I know its possible.

Lets see what else happened this week...oh yeah we planned a specific day and hour that Karen would be baptized, which will be this Friday, but the next day we had an appointment with her and she was just like "I still don´t feel very sure about it. I believe in the BOM and in Joseph Smith and the Church but I want the type of surity and conviction that I see in you" So I taught her (we were on spilts) about the need she has to really just pray, like really pray, and tomorrow we are going to talk about confidince in her decisions. She´s been kinda stressed out for her finals so I can understand that. But she still went the YSA activity and really enjoyed herself so hopefully everything will go good. At the YSA activity they are practicing a dance and we went to see how Karen was doing and we found her mom there, who always goes to church with her and always is present for the lessons but never reads the BOM so we read it with her right then and there and she committed to reading 3 Nephi 11. It was kinda funny because they brought us a huge thing of fries and hotdogs that we were eating while reading the BOM. ( well me and my comp anyways haha)

So thats all for this week,

Love you all and Im praying for all of you constantly!

Elder Patrik Connole

Baptism Pictures

Maria hugging Dad after baptism.
The whole family.

My comp and my ward mission leader.

So whats up with not having tv? wow. thats lame. But we will be able to watch the conference on sunday only, saturday is just another normal day for us. but still, a day off is a day off.

So we had change of plans and we went through with the baptism on thursday and she got confirmed on sunday! way cool! It was a very cool baptism because she got baptized by her brother and the spirit was very strong she bore her testimony in sacrament meeting and wow it was great. We had a couple other investigators at sacrament meeting one of whom is about ready to get baptized (Karen) and her mom was there and when we asked them how they felt during the confirmation they said that the felt it was true and they felt something special! YES! Progress!

Yesterday it was kinda funny because we were doing our missionary coordination meeting and we told him we put a baptismal date on this one lady that has been listening to the missionaries off and on for like 7 years, we told him that it was easy to get people to commit and he didn´t believe us so he was like, well put one on my mother in law. and after 15 minutes we did so! Haha he was quite amazed.

My new comp, Elder Lowe is from New Mexico, he´s great! really well prepared to teach and everything and he is really excited to be on the mission. He played football in highschool as a running back. And he is the very first missionary in his family so pretty cool.

Training is way different from what i was expecting. When I was getting trained we always did practices and I never understood why, but now I do. They really help. More than anything I have to set the example and show him how to be a good missionary rather than just telling him. I also have to teach him how to teach and contact and work with the members and everything! its a lot of work but its also a lot of fun I really enjoy it. and we are working hard ot get the area back into shape after it kind of fell apart with me not really having a companion or anything.

Anyways I´m doing awesome, learning how to teach by the spirit and lead by example, I´m gonna send some pics of the baptism.

Love ya,

Elder Patrik Connole

Making Things Work

Got both your emails and one from Dad the sisters both said, "aww how cute." lol, of course they did.

This week was pretty crazy trying to do everything myself. cooridinate with the members and with Elder Seminario, ugh I just about died. I was so tired sunday night, and I really have had time to write any letters, so I´m sorry but they will be a week later than I wanted to.

But really all and all I had a fairly good week. I got to almost all of my appointments and thanks to the members we had 6 people at church! 2 families and a young girl that we´ve been teaching her parents. Her parents...ugh I´mnot sure why they didn´t come But i´m gonna pass by tomorrow and see what happened.

I had one girl, Karen go through with her baptismal interview but apparently she still has some doubts about the BOM and Joseph Smith, she told me that she felt good about them both, but then she told Elder Seminario that really she hadn´t read it nor prayed very much. But its alright she still wants to learn and still has a ton of questions so we´ll get to go through with the baptism next month.

Maria (Franco´s sister) is good to go with her baptism, I´m gonna try to get her to change her baptismal date to the 9th of Oct. because if she gets baptized on the 27th of September she is gonna have to wait until the 17th of Oct. to recieve the Holy Ghost.

Oh yeah something interesting here in Peru is taht the elections are the 3rd and 4th, the same time as General Conference but the problem is that the have a law here that you can´t have any type of reunions during elections so we have to wait until the 10th to view GC and we don´t have anything on the 3rd and 4th like at all. So thats why Maria would have to wait until the 17th to get the gift of the Holy Ghost. As missionaries we aren´t gonna do anythingthe 3rd and 4th because the law won´t let us because of the elections. Woot! Free days! haha jk IDK what we are going to do. My pension has the BYU channel so I´m gonna go to their house to watch GC live so that will definitely be nice, and then the next week watch it again, maybe in English but I´m not sure.

Today we are going to go the Mission House and eat lunch with the President (the whole zone) and then from there go play soccer against another zone, except for Seminario and I because we are going to get training...blech. I wanna play soccer haha. But it´ll be good because I have no idea how i´m gonna work with the greenie without somebodfy giving me some ideas of what I should do.

Thanks for the pictures and the prayers. I miss you all and love you all. Keep working at getting the scripture study in because I know its super important to keep the family united.

Love,

Elder Patrik Connole

Companionless

So everybody liked the pics, thanks, they are pretty awesome!

So I am companionless until next wednesday, So I´ve been working with the members and with my DL who is also companionless until then,. But the new companion i´m going to get is gonna be a greenie so I will be training him, ah!!! We´ll see how it goes. It will also be a North American so we´ll see how good his spanish is.

I actually have eaten spaghetti here, they call it tallarín but the sauce they use is way different, its like orangish, but it still tastes good.

I have a ward and a branch, the branch has about 25 or so people that go every sunday, we actually just lost a 19 year old kid afte he comited suicide out of nowhere. Apparently his GF left him, lost his job and was having troubles with non member buddies and parents. So it really hurt a lot because he was friend of mine too.

In the ward there are about 40 or 50 people who go reguarly but they have 600 people on the the roster, so like 550 people are inactive which is really sad, but ufortunately thats the way it works a lot around here.

The weather here is a lot like az and it doesn´t change much. It has gotten a little hotter, but the nights are still chilly and it actually snowed on the mountain tops the other day.

There are actually quite a few sisters in the mission something like 30 of them and about 120 elders,

I´ve gained 4 kilos so like 8 pounds or so but really I don´t feel any difference, te biggest thing I´ve noticed is that everyone thinks I look older, like 23 or so. crap..

We haven´t really gone anywhere else super cool, but in the next couple weeks we are gonna go to a couple turist sights, one place is call the hand of God, which is a tree that has 5 trunks that looks like a hand, my ward mission leader when he served his mission here has pictures of it and it looks pretty cool

I have to see I certainly enjoy the city more, more things to do, And the people here are actually home a lot more because they ae working in the fields all day long. So more people to teach and baptize lol.

I feel fine, this last week was a little bit of a trunkie week because my comp had his bags all packed up and didn´t want to do anything.

On saturday we had a really fun activity where each organization brought a different dessert and the bishopric judged the desserts. The young women won, followed by the young men and then the relief society but it was nice to see the ward repond and bring some references, we got About 5 out of it and about 35 or 40 people showed up.

I almost forgot! We had Elder Christofferson come out and speak to us on tuesday. Wow what an amazing experience! we got to go shake his hand and he reallly helped us get energized and know how to work with our investigators better, with more love and with the spirit.

Love ya, and I wish I had more time to write, but I don´t blech

Elder Patrik Connole

PS I read a Liahona article the other day that said that families should start reading the preach my gospel manual daily with their scripture reading...just a thought

BYU Fan

Here is Elder Connole doing a service project on the day of BYU's first football game of the season. This was his idea of being a true blue fan. lol

Today I had all natural apple pie for breakfast hehe

Thanks to Dad for the amazing sports updates! I´m excited for BYU and the Cards and the Dbacks that everything is getting better! My comp was pretty pumped too, being from AZ and all. Max Hall went to his highschool but he never met him, too young lol.

So Elder Grow and I have been trying really hard to apply what they have been teaching us lately, which is basically find more people and put more baptismal dates. This week we found 25 new people and we put 17 baptismal dates! So in total we have 22 people preparing to be baptized, some are a lot closer than others, ie some need to get married , others go to church, others just need to pray about it, but we are pretty excited about all of it.

We´ve been working with Yason a lot to try to get his grades up and to be more obedient with his parents, but he didn´t come to church on sunday because he just didn´t get ready on time to go so that was kind of a bummer. But we are still going to work with him a lot to get him ready to go.

We have another teenaged girl, I don´t know if Í´ve told you about her. She was Catholic but never really felt like God was there and she has been asking why God just left humanity alone. She also has a bajillion questions some of them weird, some of them good. but basically she loves the Church because God does talk to us, and we have answeres to her questions. She told us that she feels like the Church is true but still has some questions. Her baptismal date is for the 20th, which is a sacred day for missionaries (AKA P-day) but I´d much rather have a baptism than a full p-day.

My companion has told me that he is going home next week. Basically because he just doesn´t want to be here. and he´s really frustated that he already isn´t home. So i´ve been trying to do everything to get him excited about being a missionary but his mind is set and he´s going home. So basically I´m gonna be by myself for 4 weeks without a comp.

Love you all and I´ll send off letters to you next week

Elder Patrik Connole

Catching Up!

I got a little behind with the posting since baby arrived, so here are some updates!

In this picture the elders are doing a service project. In the first

These two pictures are of a Catholic Church.

These two show the soccer injury!

So we ended up not speaking at the high school because we werent the bishop lol. and I´m pretty sure that people make the cat calls because they really don´t see too many gringos dressed up like me haha. Thanks for all the pictures,

So today we did get to play soccer with a lot of missionaries from that are in arequipa and the president played with us. I played goalie, I did a pretty good job on everyone except for one guy who scored 5 goals on me...oh well he was really good. I also got out in the field for a bit and some how scored a goal haha. I was just running up and Elder Rendon tried to kick a goal but it ended up short so hit it in with my shoulder because it was bouncing like crazy. I also managed to get a black eye because my mad goalie skills. The elder who kicked it was like 3 feet away and he kicked it as hard as he could. obvioiusly he didn´t intend to hit me in the head but stuff happens in sports. Somehow my disc got lost too. ;( So if you could send me one that would be great!

I did get a package from mormor, so thanks to her. And I really enjoyed the pretzals.

This week we´ve been tryting to apply what the president has asked to do and `put a baptismal date on everyone that we teach. if they don´t accept we just leave them..Its been kinda tough to leave a few of them but tthats what the president has asked us to do and he is the one that represents the Lord for us. But we did find a lot of new investigators that were very willing to do it.

Love ya

Elder Patrik Connole

Hey

Glad to hear that all is good with the fam. Why on earth is all this college sports craziness happening while I´m gone?? Agh! I´m going nuts! Its going to be so weird when I get home and everything has all been changed!

So basically these week we were supposed to have a baptism of Santiago, but basically we went to go find him for his baptismal interview and he was drunk, yelled us and told us not to bother him anymore. Apparently he is mourning the loss of the mother of his daughter because she basically just dumped him for another guy, and he is kinda blaming the church for it. So Elder Aguilar and I were quite devastated for him. It was pretty tough.

We´ve been having to work with another elder a lot this week becuase his companion went home for a bit to fix some things at home. So he has been solo and since my comp and I are the only other elders we´ve had to go pick him up bring him to our area, try to work in his area and make sure that he has a companion at all times. Its been tough to get much work done in this manner.

But we were knocking doors the other day and this guy came up to us and was like ¨I wanna change my life and I know you can help me¨ We were just like uhhhh ok! lets do it! His name is Huber and he has a drinking problem. He will drink for like 3 or 4 days straight get hospitalized and then not drink for like a few months but then fall into the same hole again. He wasn´t able to go to church sunday because work called him in but he has some really sincere desires to change his life. He has a brother-in-law who is an active member that lives near by and so he wants to change his life and be like him.

Yesterday we did have 6 investigators at church! Yay! 4 in the ward and 2 in the branch. One of them was a girl¨(Karen) who is 18 and has a tooooonnnnnn of questions. especially about the afterlife so we are gonna go teach her the plan of salvation on sunday night. While we were talking with her she was like ¨I might be a missionary, what are the requirements?¨ Haha. And this is her 2nd time at church so we should be able to baptize her in the next couple weeks. The problem is finding her because she studies so she isn´t home a ton, and the other problem is that because she is a girl we can´t go into her house unless there is a another guy with us. So yeah.

Another one was the younger brother of Marco Antonio, (the guy I baptized 2 months ago) Jason, so it was kinda fun that he brought him

Anyways I think thats it, but I love you all

Love,

Elder Patrik Connole

Hi!

Anyways today was transfers and I´m staying here in the same area. But my companion Elder Aguilar left to Tacna and re-open an area there. He will also be the DL there. My new companion is Elder Grow from Mesa, AZ. I´m the senior companion because this is only his third transfer. So yeah. The new district leader is an Elder from my group who is really cool. Elder Seminario.

Yesterday E. Aguilar and I went on splits, he went with a kid who is going to argentina on a mish in a couple months, and I went with Marco Antonio, (the guy I baptized). Anways, you don´t even know how amazing it feels when he was bearing his testimony to a couple of people we were teaching. He said that when when he got baptized it changed his whole life. He had always believed in God but never really followed the commandments, but after we taught him and baptized him he siad he feels like he is walking in a new life, happier and with way more peace in his life. It still gives me chills because the Spirit was so strong as he was bearing his testimony. We were teaching a young single mom about baptism and he basically told her ¨look, I got an answer from God and I followed through with it, Elder Connole baptized me so why don´t you let him baptize you as well?¨ Lol

Marco also said that his new goal is to have an eternal family, and so he has started bringing his 15 year old brother to church! His parents are a little...odd, but now that they have their son´s example in their life they are opening up a lot more.

I´ve been trying really hard to try and invite almost everybody to be baptized because really thats why I´m here, to give people the chance to recieve the saving ordinances of the Gospel in their life. It´s gotten a lot easier and I feel a lot better as I do it more often. Before it was kinda scary to invite someone to be baptized but now I can do it in the street if I wanted to. The other day we invited a family to get baptized if God answered their prayers, and we invited them for them 25th of Sept. They accepted and the Dad said, I´m pretty sure God want´s us to get baptized as soon as possible.¨ We were just like um yeah!!!

We also invited an 18 year old girl, Karen, to be baptized I honestly wasn´t sure if she would accept it or not. She has a ton of questions, some of them a little weird but some really good ones too. She´s been to church twice and has liked it, she feels like in the Catholic church she hasn´t been able to find the answers to her questions but here she does. She also said that whenever she talks with us she can tell there is something different about us. We have an assurity (sp?) when we talk and there is just something the shines in our faces. And she really likes that. Anways we invited her to be baptized and at first she didn´t want to accept a specific date, but after we showed her how goals are necessary in life and that she could be baptized on whichever day she picked a date for the 20th of sept. the only problem is that thats a monday, p-day but its a baptism so we´ll do it that day

Anyways thats all for now

I love you all and I miss you a bunch!

Elder Patrik Connole

Challenge of the Week? Thinking in English!

The first paragraph will probably not make any sense to most people, so an explanation is in order. We are getting ready to send E. Connole's younger brother off to college and are trying to find all the stuff that should have been left over to send with him. Unfortunately we aren't having much luck! I was very pleased to find that the one box we did manage to uncover had the Swedish cheese cutter in it. Swedish cheese cutters, you must understand, are not easy to come by (unless you are in Sweden) and thus highly coveted. He understands he would have been in deep water had he lost that one! LOL

Um...think I left another box in Kris´s room´s closet. Man I can´t think in english any more. Of course I kept the cheese cutter, thats a vital life line, that really everyone should have. My pension I´m sure would love to get one.

We lost like 44 missionaries or so to the Cuzco mission. This week we are getting 24 and losing 12. We´ll keep increasing until we have a 150 or so missionaries in the mish once again.

Yes I did get pictures :). This last week I´ve been eating 2 lunches because our district leader was getting training so we had his comp, Elder Sanchez with us. So we ate at our pension then his. It was pretty cool.

I didn´t resell some of the texts because, A) some of them it was their last year of use and the classes got new texts, B) some they only took back a certain amount and I arrived too late. So yeah.

So my zone leader has been pretty crappy about getting us letters, and they are same for this new transfer. but we have a new district leader who is my new comp. so it should be better, Elder Aguilar. His parents are mexican but he was born in Cali. So he speaks both languages fluently. So far he seems pretty cool.

I´m sad to hear Kunz and Rogers are having a tough time. Puno and Juliaca have always been tough areas, they are a lot colder and there aren´t too many members.

We should be having a couple baptisms here pretty quick. We have a part member family that is more asctive than half the members. but they have been wanting to wait until their son comes back from his mission (and has yet to recieve his call) I´ll keep you updated obviously.

Saturday was the baptism, E. Chaca and I went on splits so that he could talk we the investigator a little more about the baptism and i went to fill the font and get everything ready. When I got back they told me that she doesn´t want to be baptized yet. She wants to wait until her boyfriend gets baptized too. They both have dates for the 14th of next month so we´ll see.

Santiago another possiblity has yet to be able to change his work or schedule to get sundays off. so until he can fix that he will be stuck in limbo.

The new president is pretty crazy. He has some really big plans for the future, starting now, like 10 baptisms minimum every month, 90 contacts a day, stuff like that. Right now we are doing 1 or 2 baptisms, and about 20 contactacts a day. So if we can get to this goal it´d be awesome.

Love ya!

Elder Patrik Connole

p.s. Keep me updated on Jessica & Andre if you can.

For some reason, I can't get the picture he sent to upload today. I will try it again next week!