Merry Christmas!

Hey!

Merry Christmas! It was awesome getting to skype you all at home! And thanks for the birthday wishes! Haha...you know how much I love celebrating my birthday...

This week was way good. Elder Olsen and I received a ton of blessings! He says that we were blessed with more new investigators and more lessons than he's had in this area in months, and we're excited to try to keep it going. Hopefully its the beginning to a long period of growth here.

Since all of our new investigators are so new, we don't have anyone that has progressed too much yet, and none of them were able to come to church this week. But since school here is out for summer vacation, people tend to have a little more time to talk to us, and it seems like its going well. Dad asked for a list of investigators. Right now, we're working mostly with Yamila, Rocio, Juana, Rosemari, and Aida. We also are just barely beginning to start teaching a kid whose nickname is Willy (not sure what his real name is), and another kid named Augustin. Haha you might say we have "nothing but potential". No one has come along to much yet in these 2 weeks or so, but we have high hopes for them. Its a way exciting time to be here in Dorrego.

The verse I was thinking of this week was in Luke 15:1-7, specifically verse 7. It talks about repentance, and how there is greater joy in heaven for one sinner that repents, than for 99 people that don't need repentance. A lot of times, when people think of repentance, they think of something hard, sad,or maybe even depressing. In reality, its a process thats meant to lead to joy. Yes, it can be hard, but life would be a lot harder without it. In the manual that missionaries use to help them learn more about what to do as missionaries (Preach My Gospel), it says the the central objective of this life is to put our life in harmony with Heavenly Father's will through repentance. We all came here to progress and eventually receive a fulness of joy. Since we all have sin, repentance becomes the necessary step that helps us fulfill the purpose of our life and the very creation of the world. And every part of it is possible because of Jesus Christ. I love Him so much.

I hope you all have a very HAPPY NEW YEAR! And that you guys at home keep enjoying your breaks from school/work! Keep being great!

Love you so much!

Out Of The Office!

Hey!!!

Merry Christmas!!! Haha sounds like everyone is definitely busy with the christmas activities! It'll be fun getting to skype home soon!

This week was awesome. OUT OF THE OFFICE! Haha its true that being in the office was a huge blessing and I learned a ton. I'll miss it in someways...but I don't miss it enough to go back. My new companion, Elder Olsen, is pretty fun. Haha I called him 3 times before we actually had transfers just to tell him how excited I was to be there with him and to work hard (and to arrange how we'd meet, since I had to help with the new missionaries on transfer day). Haha luckily he's way excited also (or else those calls would have been kind of awkward...). We've got a ton of work to do in this area though, it kind of looks like we're starting from almost nothing.  And really our whole district is way fun and excited. I get the feeling that last transfer was kind of hard for the district because it seems like everyone's areas are a little bit...dead, and because everyone is way excited about the changes that happened and are way ready to work hard. Our ward seems cool and quite a few people came to church yesterday (about 100).

Saturday we had a district activity that the zone leaders had assigned us. It was an "open chapel" activity where the district got together to invite everyone near the church to come and learn more. Well, as a district we probably knocked on around 200-250 doors during the activity, and talked to quite a few people...and not a single one came. (wow that story would be way lame if it ended right there...luckily it doesn't). We were all in front of the chapel as we finished up, when a woman walked up to us and told us that she was looking for a church-that she was new to the neighborhood and that she had distanced herself from God, but that she thought she needed to come back to Him-and wanted to know if she could see our church sometime. Well, it was already set up for a tour, so the sister missionaries went inside with her and had an amazing discussion with her! Totally made the activity worth all the effort. And it showed us how even though Heavenly Father expects us to do all we can, when it comes down to it, this is His work and He knows what He's doing. We're just helping it along.

Scripture of the week would have to be...1 Nephi 11:8-23. Nephi's father had seen a vision, part of which included a tree whose fruit would make people happy. Nephi wanted to see the vision and learn more about what it meant. In the first few verses here, Nephi has the blessing of seeing the tree, and then asks what it means. Instead of being told what the tree meant, he was shown a vision of Mary and of the baby Jesus, and then an angel asked Nephi what he thought the tree meant. After seeing Mary and Jesus, Nephi knew that the tree represented the love of God, the most desireable thing for the soul, and which could make man happy. It caught my attention that Nephi wasn't simply told that the tree represented love. Instead, it appears that as he learned about Jesus, he learned about the love of God for mankind. Jesus Christ and His sacrifice is the perfect example of the perfect love that our Heavenly Father has for us. Hopefully as we think about Christ and His birth this Christmas we, like Nephi, can learn more about the love that Christ and Heavenly Father have for each one of us, and that we can begin to love others in that same way.

Merry Christmas everyone!! And Happy New Year (next week)! Love you all, and can't wait to talk to the family later this week. Keep being awesome.

Elder Webster

Daily Disciples

Hey!

Haha literally like half the emails in my inbox mentioned something about me leaving the offices soon. Exciting. Haha I should be finding out the transfer stuff today, it kind of just depends on when President submits them online. Haha it seems like all week the office has been talking about where Elder Barton and I are going to go (he's leaving the office also).

This week was pretty good. Lots of preparation for transfers next week, the new people coming in, and the year-end mission christmas party that we have every year. Haha I feel a little bad for leaving the office right in the middle of what will probably be in the top 5 busiest weeks we've had since I got here, but...I don't feel bad enough to stay here... so...oh well.

We've had appointments set up with Jhony (the recent convert) and Mario (the cool new investigator from a few weeks ago), but both of those fell through. We actually have appointments with both of them today though, so hopefully that works. We also had a cool experience early this week when we went out trying to street contact people. We had knocked on various doors without anyone answering, but twice while waiting for someone to answer a door, I stopped someone that was walking by on the sidewalk and they were both pretty interested in the website we told them about (the church has a cool christmas video on mormon.org that we've been telling people about...which is a little hard here sometimes since it seems like so few people actually have internet but...whatever). The coolest part that day though was a little later on. We were walking down the street when we passed a young man sitting on the side of the acequia. I felt like we should talk to him but didn't. As we passed him, the feeling didn't go away, in fact it got stronger..so 4 or 5 seconds after passing him, I turned to Elder Trelease and told him we had to go back and talk to that guy, and Elder Trelease just looked at me and said, "I know". So we went back and talked to him, and he was way cool and way accepting. He actually lives in a neighborhood a little ways out of our area, called Campo Papa...which is basically the most dangerous neighborhood in our mission...but we passed the reference to the elders there and hopefully it works out...and they don't get killed... haha...but seriously...

So yeah. The verse I was thinking of this week is from the New Testament, Luke 9:23. Here, the Savior tells the people that if they want to come unto Him, they would have to take up their cross "daily" and follow Him. The word "daily" caught my attention.  Well, actually, the words "cada día" caught my attention..but I guess it says "daily" in english. Anyway, I liked it because it shows that discipleship is an active decision that we can make daily. Every day we can (and should) do something to take up our cross and follow Him. Not just on Sundays. Not just at Christmas or Easter time. But daily.

Well, as always, thanks for all the support and emails! I hope you all have a great week! And a great last week of school to Hailey and Jaxon!

Elder Webster

Todo Bien?

Todo bien?

Haha well I'm glad everyone is slowly starting to recover from all of the Thanksgiving parties. Haha everyone told me that this week was pretty "boring" except for Hailey, who said her week was pretty great, and then all she told me was that her math teacher went missing...haha I just hope you guys aren't having TOO much fun over there.

This week was fairly busy. Its the beginning of the month, which is generally our busiest time of the month, making sure everyone has their money and paying rent and all that good stuff. Plus we had 4 conferences this week that we had to get everything ready for, each with around 50-70 missionaries, and then 2 more next week, so thats kept us pretty busy. We only managed to go out to our area a few times and all of our appointments fell through but...hey, thats the mission I guess.

Haha not gonna lie, I struggle a little every week trying to figure out what to say in these emails, because I feel like every week in the office is so incredibly similar. But the good news is that I'm expecting to leave here on the 17th, so that'll be cool. Don't get me wrong, I feel like I have learned a ton here in the office, and probably 95% of the things I've learned in the office apply more directly to life after the mission than the things I learned in the field... but at the same time... the field is the field...it'll be fun to go back.

Anyway, verse of the week. This was another week where it was hard to decide. There were a few I found from personal study that I liked, and a couple that President shared during the conferences that were really interesting. But, I'm going to have to go with Jeremiah 16:16. Its one of the ones the President shared. It has to do with missionary work, and says that at first the Lord would send fisherman to go to His work, but then later He would send hunters (haha I thought Dad would like this one). Remember when Jesus called His apostles, and told them to follow Him, and He would make them fishers of men? We then talked about the difference between fishing and hunting, and how we are now expected to become "hunters of men" (hahah...you know what I mean...don't go killing people..). Just kind of an interesting way to look at missionary work.

Anyway, hope you guys have a slightly more than average week this week, keep being cool!

Elder Webster

Lots of Study Time

Hey!

Wow sounds like everyone had a fun Thanksgiving! I'm glad everything went well! And thanks Elder Webster 2 for all the pictures! San Francisco looks way fun!

We had another typical week in the office. Nothing too out of the ordinary. The next two weeks are full of conferences that we have to prepare for and then right after that we have to have the christmas party ready, so thats keeping us busy enough. Haha and yes, my piano playing is coming along pretty well-ish. I found a book of like 50 "simplified hymns" and I can pretty much play all of those now, so thats pretty cool. I've only really been practicing with my right hand though because, well, I wouldn't want to be too good at piano or else that would take all the fun out of it haha or something like that. I helped Elder Trelease pay rent for his first time so that was...about how you might imagine. We haven't quite finished, but we've gotten most of it ready for the beginning of the month. Plus, we talked with President and got the amount raised that all the missionaries receive every month for food and stuff, so that was different. More than anything I think I've just been helping Elder Trelease with things and daydreaming a little bit about when I'm going to get out of the office...

We got to go out to work a few times this week. All of our appointments with Mario keep falling through. When we call him he's always way happy to talk to us, but he works pretty much all-day, every-day, so he's been really hard to get a hold of. He agreed to come meet us on sunday at the church though, so hopefully that works out. Elder Trelease and I have also taken up a new game while we're out. We work in one of the richest parts of the mission, so we've kind of set the goal of finding the nicest houses we can and then knocking on their door. Haha it didn't really start out that way, we would just go, and anytime one of us said something about the way a house looked, we'd go over to knock on the door. We're also thinking about trying to bring a giant whiteboard or something over to this walking path near the office, and then writing a question on it or something to start conversations with the people at the park/walking path, because there are always a ton of people there. We'll see.

As far as verse of the week, it was a hard choice this week. Training in the office means I have lots of study time, and this week I've been having some of the best personal studies I've had in a long time. This isn't necessarily my favorite thing I learned this week, but I decided it would probably be the easiest to put into words, so here it is: 1 Nephi 17:12. Pretty simple. Nephi was explaining that they hadn't really made very many fires on their journey because the Lord had promised that he would take care of their food. But that made me wonder.....why? Would it really have been that hard for Lehi's family to make a fire that they were in need of that type of miracle? Surely living in the desert didn't involve so many time consuming tasks that they didn't even have time to make fire..? So then I started imagining what that would have been like. Every meal would have been a trial of faith...looking at the meat they were going to eat, knowing it hadn't been cooked...and then eating it, trusting that the Lord had taken care of it. It kind of gave meaning to verse 13 where it says that they would know who it was that was leading them on their journey. It would have been hard to deny the Lord's hand when literally every meal was a obvious reminder of the miracles He was doing to help them. Not to mention it would have been pretty humbling knowing that the Lord cared enough to basically cook your food for you. Kind of interesting how, in a way, the blessing wasn't so much a physical thing, but a spiritual thing that helped their faith and humility.

Well, I hope you all have a great week this week! And I'm glad you all had a great Thanksgiving!!

Elder Webster

Training and Door Knocking

Hey everyone!

Sounds like everyone is keeping busy and is excited for Thanksgiving!! You'll have to tell hi to everyone for me! And I hope mom's jewelry thing goes great!

This week was pretty good. Its way weird training the new financiero. He's been here long enough now that he can do most things without my help...which means I'm starting to honestly not have a lot of work to do...which feels weird. Its not really a job that requires two people...or that can even really be done by two people, and I'm trying to get him to do as much of it as possible so that he's used to it when I leave. But unfortunately, that means I kind of just sit in the back of the office and study and every once and a while I'll help him if he gets stuck. Haha but on the bright side...I hooked up a keyboard that we have here in the office and started learning piano! So thats kind of fun.

 

On the other bright side, having two financieros means that its a little easier for us to go out to our area and work more often. Mario was out of town all week, and we don't really have any other progressing investigators, so Elder Trelease and I got to spend a lot of quality door-knocking time! I can't say we actually ended up finding very many investigators that way....in fact I can't say that we actually found any investigators that way...but I can say that I feel like I've probably been rejected in almost every way that I can imagine. Haha the weird thing about missionary work is that no matter how many (or few) physical results your efforts bring, you always feel good for doing it. I can't think of very many other things that are like that. And then last night we got our ward mission leader to come with us to an appointment...which fell through, so then he came with us to basically every person that we knew that lived by there...and not a single one opened their door. But hey, A+ for effort I guess.

So the verse of the week is actually something that I was thinking about this morning. I was reading in the New Testament when Hebrews10:14 caught my attention. "For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified." One thing that helps me think about what a verse is saying, is thinking about what the verse is not saying. Of all the words that could have come at the end of the sentence, he intentionally put "sanctified"...which means there are a lot of words that he intentionally didn't put. He didn't put "sinners", even though everyone that would receive help from His sacrifice is a sinner...He didn't put "humble", or "faithful", or "forgiving", even though those are all things that Christ asked us to be in order to be saved...But he did say "sanctified". And then that led to a  search for a bunch of scriptures about exactly what it means to be sanctified and how to become sanctified. Interesting stuff.

Anyway, I hope you all had a great week and that you have a great Thanksgiving!!! Hopefully all the stuff you have planned for this weekend goes well! Say hi to everyone!

Elder Webster

The Wise Man Built His Family On A Rock

Hey,

Sounds like its been yet another crazy week over there! I'm glad that everyone is doing so well! Shoutout to Elder Funckes for being a stud!!

This week has been pretty good, not too crazy. I'm still training Elder Trelease as the new financial secretary, so thats going well. Haha I like him a lot...which makes me feel a little bad, knowing that he'll have to be here in the office for like 6 months. But I really am glad for the things that I've gotten to learn while I've been here. At the same time, I'm way excited to leave here next transfer. So...yeah.

Honestly, this week has been pretty calm. The president was in Buenos Aires all week, and the banks were all closed/on strike or something for 2 days, so that was sort of lame. That appointment we had last week with Mario fell through, but we got to meet him this week on thursday! He was supposed to meet us at the church, but he didn't show up, and we had his address, so we went to see if he was home. He lives in a small group of houses, so we touched the doorbell that had his name on it...and nothing happened. So my comp said we might as well try another one since we were already there, so he touched another doorbell...and guess who answered? Mario! He's way awesome and super prepared! It was sort of a joint lesson with the sisters from our ward, because they wanted to be there to introduce us to him and explain to him why we were going to be teaching him instead of them. He told us all about how he had grown up planning to become a catholic priest or something, but eventually came to the decision that he didn't like the things he was learning/seeing there. Then he had spent a long time looking for the truth, and said that nothing had ever touched him the way he had been touched when he met Hermana Russell on that bus 11 months ago. He lives sort of a lonely and busy life, and admits that he wants religion to play a bigger part of it, he's just always been skeptical about which religion. He has a strong testimony of the apostasy and is really just looking for something that will help him feel more happiness and love in his life, and he's eager for the rest of his family to find it too. We only had a very short meeting with him, so there's still a lot to do for him. We have another meeting with him tonight, so hopefully it works out.

As the verse of the week, I chose 3 Nephi 14:24-27. I was reading in Preach My Gospel (the missionary handbook) in the section about how the Book of Mormon answers questions from our lives. One of the questions had a reference to this chapter and I was curious about how that chapter answered that question. I found these verses and I started thinking of them differently. They talk of how those who build their house upon the rock will remain after the storms come, but that those who build their house upon the sand will be washed away by the storms. For some reason, changing the word "house" with the word "family" made a huge difference in how I read the scripture. Pretty cool.

Anyway, I hope you are all doing well! Hopefully next week is even better!

Elder Webster

hey sorry, we left early to go to centro, so I didn't finish my email time...plus, unlike every other missionary in the mission, I don't have to pay to use a computer..so I figured I'd take my last couple minutes to send some pics.

Eating some alfajors with my new comp

Elder Arndt contemplating transfers after we helped him update the transfer board at President's house

Preparing the sack lunches for the missionaries that had to travel a long way after hearing Elder Christofferson

The view from President's house... I guess we've been there kind of a lot lately to make all those lunches and update his boards...which was weird since no one was there either time