Loving Arecibo

Hey Everyone,


Sounds like everything is going well at home. I'm glad school is going well good luck with midterms and all your classes. Law club? Wow, Rachel the lawyer. Haha. I think that is really cool. You'll have to let me know how you like that. Erin, I hope you start feeling better soon. I'm so sorry you've been so sick. Good luck with getting Spring City ready that's really amazing that they are going to put it in a book. Hey Dad, I have seen the Arecibo Observatory it's not too far away from where we live. I didn't know it was so famous. That's cool. Oh and that's cool what you sent me about BYU.

Arecibo is really great. It's pretty cool being so close the ocean. We were knocking doors on this urb that's right on the edge of the water. It's so beautiful here. I am constantly surprised at the excitement of the members to work in the mission work. Wow, all of the leaders are focusing so much on bringing back the less active members and they are so excited to go out and work. We are just working really hard right now to be able to find more people. Nicole is amazing she is so excited for her baptism. If it weren't for General Conference this weekend she would be getting baptized this weekend. Her mom is having a pretty hard time and has a ton of questions about things like thinking that once Nicole gets baptized she'll be shipped off to who knows where to serve a two year mission and also she has doubts like she heard somewhere that Joseph Smith was a delinquent. It's been really hard for Nicole and seeing as her mom doesn't want to listen to the missionaries in Toa Baja and know we are here but we are trying to help her stay positive and help her mom understand.

We had the most amazing two day conference. It was a special conference that president does for just the leaders in the mission but this time he invited all of the sisters. These conferences that he has are always amazing supposedly and we were excited to get invited. But we had to meet our goals of having 140 contacts and 20 lessons for the week. Well that was a little bit crazy becuase with white washing and all we haven't had that many investigators yet. But we were so determined that we needed to be at that conference. So we worked ridiculously hard. After a lot of prayer we were able to make our goal and we found 11 new investigators this week. The conference was amazing! Wow, words can't describe the spirit that was there. President and his wife are amazing! We focused on teaching people and not lessons and specifically on teaching families. Very rarely are entire families baptized. But that is the goal that we are baptizing families. We have started focusing on the family and practicing teaching families. Often in the morning during our studies or in district meetings when we practice we are teaching our companion but he wants us now to focus on teaching a family. The whole conference we taught groups of 4 or 5 missionaries treating them as though they were a family. It's so true, usually we teach individuals and it is a whole different story teaching a family where you have to teach in a different style to catch the attention of the kids or each person has a different doubt or understands differently. He wants us to draw a picture of a family and put on our wall and practice teaching them instead of our companion. I know that sounds weird but it really changed the way we are teaching. Focusing on teaching families is really going to change the mission work here. It's exactly what Puerto Rico needs, a message about the family. It's what the whole world needs because Satan is attacking the family. Wow, when I think about how the gospel has blessed my family and how amazing it is to know that mom and dad were sealed in the temple. If every person could hear about how much that blesses the family, it would be amazing. Puerto Rico needs to hear about families and we need to bring back those families that have been lost so that we can build the church here and one day have a temple.

I can't believe I have almost been out a year. This time of year last year I was getting ready to go finish my job at ancestry and getting ready to go into the MTC. It is going by way too fast and I still feel like I just got here. There is so much to learn and time is going by way too fast. It's almost General Conference time. Crazy huh? We will be watching it in the stake center in Toa Baja. I'm super excited and it will be fun to see people because I wasn't able to say goodbye to people before we came to Arecibo. That's the good thing about still being in the same stake the whole time, even though we are over an a hour away and it doesn't feel like we are in the same stake. Well anyway, wish I had some more exciting things to write about. I'll try and send you some more pictures when I have a chance.

 Love you all a ton!
Say hi to everyone for me!