Week 91 - I love the Temple!

Helloooo!!

I have actually been thinking about B's mission call all week! That is super upsetting that she is going to get it today and I won't find out where she is going for a week! Maybe I can ask President for permission to just jump on one day and see! I can't wait to see where she goes! I am rooting for the DR :-).

This week was AWESOME!!! This week basically just shows how important members are in missionary work. So Yudelis rescheduled her baptismal date for Wednesday for family reasons. She was supposed to take a note with her on Monday to her school to give her a permission to leave early, she normally gets out of school at 7pm. (They kind of do school weird here in like two blocks where you either study in the morning, like from 7 to 1 or in the aftnernoon from like 1 to 7.) So we weren't able to pass by on Tuesday to make sure that she sent in the note, then Wednesday we went to the temple so we didn't get back until like 5-ish to the area. The baptism was scheduled for 7. We basically ran to her house once we got back to make sure that she was there and ready. When we got there we found a closed empty house. And nobody knew where they were. We ended up finding her dad and he told us that she was still in school. We didn't really know what to do because if she would have gotten back at 7 there probably wouldn't have been time to have the baptism because she lives pretty far away. But the dad was leaving and we didn't really know what to do.

Elder Arnold and I stopped and talked about what we should do. We ended up saying a prayer and we both got the feeling to call this one member whose name is Annie, she is a friend of Yudelis' mom. We called her and asked if she had heard from Yudelis or her mom and she said no. She then told us to give her a few minutes. About 10 minutes later she called us back and told us that we needed to go find them at a different house. It is a crazy long story of what happened but basically Yudelis had gotten out of school a little later than planned and her mom got back from her job late and they weren't near their house. And to make matters worse, no one remembered that there was a baptism even though we had announced it multiple times and reminded people. With a little more help from some members and their cars, Yudelis got home to change (all schools here have uniforms). During this time, two members with cars started running around and basically dragging people out of their houses (not really but they went looking for members) and loaded them up in their cars and by about 7:45 we were starting the baptism. Her mom showed up a little late but it was so awesome! We could feel the spirit there so strongly! Her mom isn't a member but we think that because of the example of Yudelis, we are going to be able to start working with her mom! It was kind of a crazy night but it was awesome! God is good!!

Like I said we went to the temple!! I love the temple a ton! One of the missionaries in my zone pointed out to me that it is the last time I will go with the mission. That was weird to me. I will have one more temple trip with president the weekend before I leave but that will be with like 6 people. But the temple here is so beautiful! The revelation that you can receive inside is insane. It truly is the house of the Lord.

I got the package!! Like any good missionary I did not wait until my birthday to open it :-). It is PERFECT! As always! Elder Arnold and I have already eaten most of it. I am saving the mac and cheese and the cake for my birthday, although I have eaten a little bit of the frosting already. You guys are the best!!!

There is so much work still left to do here! The branch is so close to becoming a ward!!! I am looking forward to working here for the next few weeks! The Lord is preparing a ton of awesome people! We just have to find them!!!!!

I love y'all a ton!! That Salt Lick looks so good! That will probably be the first place I want to eat when I get back.. RIGHT BEHIND TORCHYS OF COURSE!!! I miss BBQ so much. (whoever guessed that was right).

MAKE THIS WEEK AMAZING!!! (The best birthday present yall could give me is if each one of you invite a friend to church or share the gospel with them!)

ENJOY CONFERENCE!!!!!!!!

LOVE,

Elder Robertson

My last trip to the Temple until I go home

Yudelis' baptism

Week 90 - Basketball and Baptisms

Helloooo!!

I am on a little early today because it is a short p-day because we are going to the temple this week! BUT this week was AWESOMEEEE!!

First and most important thing is that Ysmael got BAPTIZZEEDDD!! He was so excited about it! He wanted to know everything. Like exactly how it was going to be and everything. When he finally got changed in the bathroom he said that there was no need to wait or do anything special or have a service and he wanted to just jump in right then and there. We convinced him to wait and while Elder Arnold was changing Ysmael was dancing in the mirror and it was super funny. Like I said last week, he had been to church a lot throughout his life. When he was younger he visited a church by himself but a couple of his friends would tell him "hey come with us to the true church." From a young age he like the church but then moved and lost connection with the church. Here through a friend (who we are also working with to get baptized but that is a whole different story) he found the church again and started visiting but never understood why everyone said it was the true church. We taught him a little bit and after we taught about Joseph Smith we could feel the Spirit really strongly. He just sat there for a bit and thought and then looked up and asked, "so when can I do this whole baptism thing?" He has been so much fun to work with and he is helping us with one of his friends. Ysmael is one of the kids that we play basketball with on P-days. He is a super good kid. He has a pretty strong testimony of the church and wants to serve a mission!

For family reasons Yudeli's baptism fell and we rescheduled it for this week! Prayers! She is super nervous but super prepared!

Elder Arnold bought a basketball and we have been waking up a little early to go play a little bit and it has been super nice. We played today and we did a lot better. We beat them 5 games to 1. I love basketball. Do the guys in the ward still get together on Wednesday nights and play?

GENERAL CONFERENCE IS IN TWO WEEKS!!!! IT FALLS ON EASTER SUNDAY SO GET READY BECAUSE THE TALKS ARE GOING TO BE AWESOMMMMEEEE!!

There isn't a ton more that happened this week that I can think of. I might keep this one a little short due to some complaining by some unnamed Elder whose name is Elder Lynn. But still love that kid.

Just some fun little pictures that I can send because I know only send this to the family, all my missionary friends have gone home (We all can agree that Christian and Zach are part of our family.)

Really the only picture that is awesome is what we found in our neighbors house. Right now we are just a normal companionship so I don't really have many responsibilities which has been a weird change because if we get home at 9, I have no idea what to do with all the time. I have to call our district leader but then I have time to make dinner or do a lot of stuff. We have to be in bed by 10:30 so we have an hour and a half. A lot of time we will just climb onto our roof and talk (hence the picture of me laying down, my back was hurting.) Well we were just kind of looking around and there was this big ole gaping hole in our neighbors wall and as you peek, we found something kind of interesting. I will let yall guess what it is.

This week is going to have a lot more awesome stories I think! I also think my suits might be done this week and I might try and pick them up when we go to the temple on Wednesday. IM PUMPED!!!

It sounds like life back there is pretty full of adventures! That is awesome that the cousins got to go on trek with yall! That must have been a blast! I remember when we went on trek and I kind of cheated the system because I had a qualifying meet one of the days so Dad came and picked me up and I slept in my own bed. jeje. Spring break here is always the week before Easter and they call it the "Holy Week" and that week gets crazy! But we still got a week before that!

That is super crazy and a little scary about the bombings in Austin. Be careful! Just don't order any packages until they catch that crazy guy!

I love y'all a ton! I hope everyone has an amazing week!!!

Love,

Elder Robertson

Ysmael's baptism

Ysmael's baptism

Week 89 - Happy Anniversary to my Parents

Happy Anniversary to the greatest parents in the world!! I love it when these days fall on a Monday because I can actually get on and wish well on the actual day! 24! That is a tooon! It is kind of crazy to think about that when yall got married yall were our age! Like I am almost exactly the same age mom was when she got married, actually I think even a little older! And y'all look almost the exact same as that picture! That is crazy to think that it was 24 years ago! I am so thankful for y'alls decision to get married in the temple. My life has been blessed by it from even before I was born and I never even knew it. In such a crazy world with so few moral boundaries I am so glad to be able to say that I was given the chance to grow up in such a stable home with loving parents. That is such a hard thing here. Every where you turn you see single parents. And if there are two parents (and both of them are the parents of all the kids) they aren't married. Most people here believe that they will see their loved ones again but most of them don't understand the importance of being sealed by someone who has the proper authority, the same authority that the Savior gave to Pedro, which was later lost, and then restored to the Prophet Joseph Smith. It is so important to share this message with everyone so everyone can have the same blessings that we have! Thank you parents for being so awesome! I love y'all!!

The week was a pretty average one! A lot of basic missionary work. We have a few investigators who are really promising. The first being Ysmael. He is a young single adult who has visited the church various times in his life and goes a lot with his friends. I originally thought he was a member but as it turns out he just had a few doubts. We are working with him and he will probably get baptized within the next couple weeks! We have a goal with him for next Sunday!!

The next one is Maribel (funny thing about this country, everyone has their given name but at some point they kind of just pick out their own nickname and then go by that, so we call her Yudelis.) She is 12 and the smartest little 12 year old I have ever met! Her mom works a lot so she basically takes care of her little brother and does everything in the house, cooking, cleaning, laundry, like everything. And then goes to school. She was baptized in the Catholic Church about a year ago and was confused why she would have to be baptized again. She loved the Restoration and prayed about it and the next time we saw her she just asked "So when are you going to come by to do the thing?" Us, "What thing?" her, "that interview thing that you need to do before you get baptized." She is super awesome and depending on her mom, we also have a goal with her for next Sunday!

The last ones are Ronny and Randy as always. They live so far away from the church and are so poor so it is so hard for them to get to church. We have an FHE with them tonight so we are going to try and make a plan so that they can get there, their dad can get reactivated, and he can baptize them.

Needless to say there is much work to be done! There is an awesome primary hymn that I actually don't know in English but we kind of have turned it into our mission theme song, in Spanish it is called "Voy a ser valiente." The letters are

"Valiente siervos busca,
para su obra nuestro Señor,
por sus preceptos los guía
y sierven a su pueblo con amor,
voy a ser su siervo
y mis convenios observar
defenderé la rectitud,
y en mi Él podrá confiar."

Yall can translate it or just look it up in English, it is basically all the Lord needs in these last days.

I don't have any huge awesome stories this week. Just two little things.

The first is Satan works in mysterious ways. We were with 4 other Elders and one of them asked us if we wanted to order pizza from this hole in the wall, none of us having eaten pizza in some time thought it was a great idea. It wasn't...we all got super bad food poisoning. My zone leader and I got it the worst but luckily it only lasted a little bit and now we are back to 100.

Second thing, I decided today that when I get home I will want to go to the basketball gym a lot. We played today and well...the lyrics to one of my favorite country artists came to mind. I'm not as good as I once was, but I'm as good once as I ever was. Basically I did really well the first game and then fell apart, so I got to pick up on that if I am going to walk away with an intramural championship.

Oh yeah and we are having transfers, Elder Arnold and I are staying together to ball up for another 6 weeks here in The Cristal!

But yeah that is about it for this week! I love yall a ton and am so happy that I am part of your eternal family! Have an awesome week!!

Love,

Elder Robertson

Week 88 - It all Starts with our Desires

\Wow what an amazing week! I don't really even know where to begin! Okay I will begin with the most important...

RAFAEL!!

Okay so something we do in the mission here is we seek revelation from the Lord at the start of every month to see how many people he is preparing and if we work diligently, how many baptisms we will have in that month. We get them as both zones and a mission as a whole. Well in our zone this past month of February we had the promise of 21. That was kind of a high number considering the most this zone (which is also a stake) has baptized in one month is 19, (which actually happened when I was in Lotes y Servicios at the beginning of my mission.) The problem is this past Sunday we had only found 18 of the people that the Lord was preparing in the month. All 18 of them had been baptized but we knew that the Lord keeps his promises and we knew that there were three more people and we had three days left. So we went crazy working with the people we had. Long story short we had a HUGE miracle happen. His name is Rafael.

Here is a little back story on Rafael, he lost his parents when he was young and when he turned 10, he basically lived on the streets. When that happens you usually get caught up with the not so friendly people and he hasn't lived the most Christ-like life. He had never done anything horrible and has never gone to jail but he definitely didn't have the best friends. We have been working with him all of this transfer and he has grown so much. A few years back he wanted to change his life so he bought a little tin shack that is like 10 feet by 10 feet and he started selling bread in the morning to earn a little bit of money for him and a little kid who he started taking care of (kind of a long story, it's basically the kid of the kid of an old friend but doesn't have a dad so Rafael took him in.) Well as fate would have it he got wound up in a sticky situation and got attacked and with a little accident with a machette and a really bad infection he got his leg cut off. (this happened a few months ago.) He didn't know what to do because he couldn't go around on his little motorcycle and sell bread anymore but he needed to earn money.

There was a big tempation to start getting in touch with some old contacts and maybe getting into some stuff like selling drugs and what-not but he decided that he never wanted to go back. So every morning he started to wake up at 5 in the morning and go sell water bottles down in a really busy intersection to make just barely enough each day to feed himself and his "son." His leg was healing so he couldn't get wet but he wanted to get baptized. The water here isn't the cleanest and if he had an open wound it could get infected pretty easily by whatever is in the water. We went to go visit him on Wednesday (the last day of February) and shared some scriptures out of the Book of Mormon and he sat there thinking for a long time, he then told us that he knew he needed to get baptized and he knew that God would protect him and his leg and he wouldn't let his leg get infected by the water. He asked us when the soonest baptismal service would be, we let him know that the ward that meets in our same building was having a service in an hour and he immediately got up, when we asked what he was doing he said "well one hour isn't a lot of time, I have to get ready!" We got him down there and we got everything ready and he got baptized. He was so happy and so in peace. And with some other miracles in some other areas in the zone he ended up being the 21 baptism in our zone in the month of February.

The Lord is preparing so many people and we can't wait to go find them and help them. He went to the doctor a couple days later and the doctor said that the wound had miraculously healed was faster than they were expecting and looked completely healthy. God. Is. Good.

We aslo had interviews with President this past week and I always love those! My interview was pretty simple and basic this time but President really is a man inspired of God. We talked a lot about desire. Both our desire to help people and the desire that our investigators need to have to follow Christ. What is our desires to one day return and live with God? What would we be willing to do to get there? We talked about an example about what would happen if you lived in a house by a lake and looked out the window and saw that your mother was drowning. What would you be willing to do? Would you be willing the say a prayer? Or would you be willing to do more? Would you be willing to call someone on the phone for help? Or would you be willing to do more? Would you be willing to go yell out your door to someone? Or would you do more? Would you be willing to throw a life preserver to her? Or more? Would you be willing to jump in and save her even if it meant risking your own life? Most people would, I know I would.

It is this same desire we need to have to be saved. It is this same desire we need to keep the commandments of God. If we don't have it yet, work on it, ask the Lord to give you that desire. I was studying in 2 Nephi 28 this week and there is so much truth about our day. I have heard so many times here "I know that I am a sinner but I believe in God and I know that he will save me someday." Of course he will! If we do our part. No unclean thing can live with God. I have stopped to check myself many times on my mission to really see where my desires are. Everything starts with our desires. It is something I have studied a lot on my mission.

After a lot of challenges The family of Randy and Ronny and Ruben (the super less active guy) got everything arranged to go to church for the first time in a rreaaaalllllyy long time! Like 20 years! It just so happened to be stake conference where they basically only talked about family history work jaja. It was still awesome and they loved it! We went back to their house afterwards to eat and he told us that he isn't sure why he ever left. While he was there a ton of hymns started flooding back into his head and he started singing them all! Randy and Ronny have baptismal dates for the 17th of this month! We just have to work a little with the wife who is super hard to find! God. Is. Good!

There are so many people here in this country who are so awesome! We have been working with the Branch President who says that the branch doesn't need a whole ton to become a ward! We worked it out and made some plans but if all goes well and we keep working hard then we should be seeing some awesome miracles VERY soon!!! GOD. IS. GOOD!

Guys, the gospel is true. This church is true and this work is the work of the Lord, BUT HE NEEDS ALL OF US! I don't have a ton of time left but I know that I've got to work my tail off in the time I have left!

I LOVE YALL A MONTÓN!!!

Love,

Elder Robertson

An awesome pig we ran into and contacted

This is a pic from zone conference

An orange chicken attempt (turned out alright)

some comp bonding on our patio last night

some comp bonding on our patio last night

Our Zone

Rafael Baptism