Busy, Busy, Busy

Wow so what a crazy week. But first of all thanks for the updates.

I have been getting the newsletter but it comes infrequently sometimes I get 2 or 3 at the same time but she has been really good about getting it to all us missionaries.

I did my fast for my investigators and zone and for the family in general. I had been thinking about Grandma more than anything.

Anyways so today we are getting all the missionaries together to play soccer. Like all of Arequipa so like a ton of missionaries. We pretty stoked to just get out and have some fun.

Last week was a blur absolutely nuts. I cant even write all the details but Ill give what I can. Tuesday was Zone Leader Council all day. from 8 am to 8 pm. Basically we had to give a report of what all went on in the zone last month and what were our plans to get better. The mission baptized a record amount last month and we are hungry for more. So Pte. Fernandez was very content but he openend our eyes a little more to what we were really doing. Basically in a nutshell we as missionaries are looking for the people that the Lord needs and wants in his church. We are preparing the future leaders of the church and the future kings and queens in the Celestial Kingdom...woah...never thought about it like that before!

Wednesday we went on splits to a smaller outlying town where the missionaries just started working there since January. Its called Characato and is very pretty. Lots of fields and what not. It actually kinda reminded me of Heber but a lot poorer. Anyways they are doing much better and are working hard to get the church established there. Its way cool because the have whats called a Casa-Capilla. Which means basicaly that the meeting house is where the missionaries live. Way cool.

Thursday went pretty well we got permission to baptize M Canazas, who is 12. The Dad works far away and is gone for long periods of time so we were grateful that God sent us in just the right time to be able to get the permission and the Dad also came to both the baptism and the confirmation. He felt the spirit too. It was crazy how quickly he accepted it because he is super catholic (or at least so he says lol). And so yeah it was a really awesome weekend. The first 3 pics are of this baptism.

On Friday there was a HUGE convetion of YSA, like 17 stakes huge. 600 YSA. Wow. Anyways President Fernandez arranged that we could take them all out and contact for a couple hours. So we as ZL went and explained to them what was gonna happen and brought them to the stake center, paired them up and sent them off. In that 2 hours 46 YSA plus 24 missionaries did over 500 contacts and found about 50 references for the missionaries in that area. Wow.

Saturday we had 2 baptisms because the Elders in Characato still dont have a font and so we did it together. Normally they just do it in the stake center but this time they did it with us because the girl who got baptized I actually contacted and started teaching her when I was in Puerta Verde with E. Muñoz. So yeah I was very excited for her and she was very grateful to us for finding her and helping her out.

So in the end despite not working a whole ton in our own area we did a lot and we are very
pumped for this upcoming week because yesterday a 10 year old kid came to church and wants to be baptized on saturday. Sweet! God does reward us when we are doing all that we can!

Love you all

Elder Patrik Connole

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

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