WRITTEN 11/7/16
"Wherefore, men are free according to the flesh; and all things are given them which are expedient unto man. And they are free to choose liberty and eternal life, through the great Mediator of all men, or to choose captivity and death, according to the captivity and power of the devil; for he seeketh that all men might be miserable like unto himself."
2 Nephi 2:27
Hey erbody!
Things up here in NJ are going great!
Monday was Halloween and our pday! We had some fun activities. We all met together as a zone at menchies (frozen yogurt place) and our senior couple and we all got frozen goodness to start the day off! After that we were packed with sugar and ready to have fun. We all bought pumpkins to carve and we did that while doing our emails at the chapel. Our senior couple made chili for all of us to eat so it was a pretty fun filled day. And then we went back to the apartment for the night and ate a bunch of pizza and played some uno, made plans for the rest of the week, confirmed meal appointments for the week and went to bed early. It was a fun Monday.
Tuesday we had district meeting and fundamentals training at the chapel and had a bunch of appointments lined up for the rest of the night. Nothing too big.
Wednesday we had coordination with our ward mission leader Cesar at this Colombian restaurant called Noches. It was way good. We got like an appetizer plate with a combination of different types of meat and other stuff, and I like meat so yeah it was worth it. We also taught Ana on Wednesday.
Thursday we had service and met with one of our less active/recent covert kid. His name is William and he has a hard time getting to church because of the family situation. He's the only member in his family and his dad doesn't really like him going to church so it's a work in progress.
Friday we helped with the community garden and did some weeding, some cleaning and some organizing. And then after we went back home and did weekly planing for this next week.
Saturday we helped a member move. Moving here is a real struggle. Apartment hallways and staircases aren't moving friendly. Big bulky tvs (the old kind), shelves, mattresses, fridges, pianos are the things that make moving around really difficult. We had to put a box spring through a 2 floor window because it wouldn't go up the stairs so that was interesting.
Sunday it was fast Sunday and we had ward council after church. I've come to learn that if all the ward leaders aren't on the same page and aren't one in purpose then the ward will not function. Ever since we got here we've been trying to implement different things to help the ward be more unified and so far what we've been doing is helping we think. Later on Sunday we had to go help another member move. They fed us tacos, lots of tacos! Lots of service this week.
Well one week is over and now on to another week. We got lots of people to talk to this next week and ready to put some more on date.
Thanks for all your thoughts and prayers!
Love,
Elder Marz
* BONUS EMAIL * :)
Hey, MAMA
I'm doing great. It's been getting a little chilly but I've been staying warm. You can send stuff to my apartment and I'll get it. I don't really know what I want for Christmas:/ remember the magic bullet? It's like a little blender, I was thinking maybe one of those but anything works:)
Transfers are every six weeks. So the next one will happen the Monday right after thanksgiving and it will go into the beginning of January. It's crazy how fast time flies, it's scary to think how 2 years is going to fly by. The days feel like weeks but the weeks feel like days. On Wednesday I hit my 100th day away from home, that's crazy!
Teaching has been good. I've been doing a lot of the leading in lessons lately just so I can get better and better.
Well this week something pretty awesome happened. We've been teaching this recent convert family (Ana- mom, Ralph 19, and Paolo 12 or 13) ever since I got here in September. They were all baptized in may or April so relatively new. We've been trying and trying to get all of them to the temple to do baptisms for the dead and especially bringing your own family names but every time we bring up the temple Ana gets super defensive about the temple. We had now idea why, but she had lots of doubts. One of her doubts was that she doesn't want to ask her full-catholic extended family for permission to do baptisms because she's afraid that she'll offend her family. She's already offended her family by becoming a Mormon so it's a difficult situation. And another thing holding her up is that she wants to go in a year when she can go through the front doors and do her endowment but that's a whole other thing, she needs to experience doing baptisms for the dead. But anyways we were teaching her this week and we were talking about proxy work, and how you can go to the temple and help other family's with their work. And I gave an example that lets say perhaps that I didn't have time or the resources to do family history to bring one of my own family names to the temple to do baptisms, I can still go to the temple and do baptisms for names of other families. Once she heard that she got all these chills and she felt the truthfulness of our message through the spirit and she said she wants to go soon. So we think she understands it now. My mission Pres talks about a pretty important aspect of teaching and it's called 7 times 7 ways. It sometimes takes people 7 different times or 7 different ways to learns something before they understand it and that's what we experienced this week. So awesome!
One of the hardest things this week has been probably been trying to handoff the active members that we see to the home teachers and visiting teachers. We find ourselves teaching in a lot at active member homes and with Hispanics here especially, if you come over once they expect you to come over once, twice, three times a week and if you don't come then they get offended. And we can't be using precious time like that and not have any new investigators from it. So we've been tying to get the priesthood involved a little bit more and making sure that they do their visits every month so the missionaries don't have to as much. Going back to elder Hollands talk! But other than that nothing else this week has been to hard. Learning and using more Spanish.
My trainer elder Jordan has been really good to me. I feel like we've really had a good time together. We both get along really well and he's always pushing me to do better wether that's with my Spanish, teaching, or anything else. We've had some really good laughs! A+
We all know that laughter heals the soul! (Side affects of laughter can include: crying, a six-pack, abdominal pain, can't breathe, sweating, and many more haha). Elder Jordan and I have experienced this!
Well we're trying to find more people. We were able to meet a whole bunch people last week and now we have some more investigators to teach this week so that's pretty exciting.
Other than all that I'm doing great. Just having fun teachin, preachin, and talking to lots of people.
Love,
Elder Marz
