"I Will Be"

Family and friends and such!!  Hi

The weeks are gradually getting awesomer and also more stressful, but I think those are both good things!  For one part the weeks are awesome and for the other part I get to learn to better manage my stress!

We did have an awesome week though, so awesome I don't even remember all the cool things that happened!  Which is a good sign.  The highlight has been Felipe, he's easily the most prepared investigator I've ever had.  In that temple activity that we had the other week, they gave Felipe a 'My Family' booklet which is basically a bunch of family tree stuff that someone can fill out to prepare to put the data in familysearch.  We came back for the next lesson and he had filled it out!  All of it!  I can't tell you how many of those I've given to investigators, less actives, and the like but nobody has ever done it!  He's the first, so I tip my hat to him.  He's been extremely receptive to everything we teach, he has a smoking habit and he didn't understand why we could never drink tea, but when we taught the word of wisdom he accepted it right away and he's quitting smoking.  Also, he came to church again this week and his friend called him between second and third block asking where he was.  Felipe replied, ''I'm in the Mormon Church.''  His friend responded, ''What are you doing there?'' to which he replied ''I'm learning and having a good time.''  Then his friend asked ''... are you mormon?''  and Felipe responded ''I will be.''

YEAH that's what I'm talking about!!

Ahem.  Yeah I was pretty excited.  So he's doing great!  Then we also had an awesome lesson with Denel and his friend that doesn't speak a lick of Spanish:  Crono.  When we came Denel was teaching Crono the restoration in Creol using the pamphlet in Creol that we have him.  I was so proud.  Then we taught a little more about prayer and invited them both to be baptized on the 30th of July and they both accepted!  Then they both came to church on Sunday, even though Crono doesn't understand anything!  Crono's my favorite though, even though he's clueless about what's going on he smiles and laughs and just loves life always.

Eugenio also came to church this week!  We were super excited about that, and today for our P-day our district and we had a barbeque with Eugenio and María José and played futbol with them and their family!  They are seriously the best.  It was also the best meat I've had in Chile, hands down.

The copa america finals were Sunday!  It's about time, because for every game we've had to go home early and it's getting old hahaha and also Sunday we had to go home at 8:00 instead of 9:30.  But Chile won!  WOOOOOT!  I'm not saying that I have magic powers or anything, but the only two times that Chile has won the copa america in the last 100 years were the two times that I was here.  Just saying.  People went crazy like always, and my Argentian comp took it pretty hard.  He didn't even wake up this morning until 10:00 poor guy.  Don't worry I promise that doesn't happen a lot.

So that was basically my week!  More stuff happened but I don't remember much.  So I put the subject of this email for two reasons, one is because of what Felipe said, and another is something that I've been thinking about a lot this week.  I'm no stranger to feelings of inadequacy and insufficiency, and I'm also no stranger to having my pride make a mess of things.  I thought a lot about how that's possible, and I came to the conclusion that neither of these things is what humility really is, and that my disposition to feel incompetent isn't anywhere near a strength, it's actually a very damaging weakness.  I also realized how basically human the sin of pride is, and that even though I should be always trying to overcome it, I can't let my constant failure get to my head and end up just making things worse.  It goes along with what I learned last week about patience, but that I need to have patience with myself, in absolutely everything.  True humility is thinking less about yourself and more about others, in the end, and I may not be anywhere near sufficient now, indeed ''to my own strength I am nothing,'' but I will be.  And that's the hope that Jesus Christ brings us.

I love you all!  I hope you all have a great week!

Love

Elder Fox

The Fastest Year to Ever Year

6-21-16

Hola!  This week was fantastic!  We started the week with only 1 functional bike between 4 missionaries but by Thursday we finally got everything fixed!  So we finished off the week strong, even though we started it off real slow.

So the subject line!  I know it's a little early, but I realized last week after writing that it was the 13th of June, which will be my return date next year.  And that really shocked me, a lot.  For some reason my mind has still been in february and I didn't realize that half the year has already gone by.  Also, I realized that tomorrow will be my exact half-way mark, and that made me feel even weirder!  So I decided to stop thinking about it.  One thinks that his mission will last forever, until he starts it, and then it flies like nobody's business.  It's hard to believe that I've already been here a year, and have been speaking Spanish more than English for a year!  It's crazy to think about how accostumbed(?) I've become to living here in Chile, and I already know that it'll be a huge adjustment when I have to go back.  So I'm going to take the ''glass half full'' approach and look forward to whole other year of being a missionary!  I've made a lot of progress in this first half, and I hope to make even more in the second and become the best missionary I can be!

With that said, this week was stressful but good!  Yeah, still good.  Felipe is progressing super quickly!  He accepted a baptismal date this week, came with us to a district temple activity, came with us to a baptism, and came to church with us.  He's also been reading a lot, but I don't think he's used to praying for his atheistic background.  He reminds me of Kind Lamoni however in just that he believes everything we tell him!  Yet he understands the importance of investigating for himself, and he's not going to get baptized until he comes to his own conclusion through the answers God gives him.  So he's doing great!

Claudio also came to church again this week, and Denel came again this week.  So they're doing great too!  We weren't able to teach Denel again but at least we saw him at church, if Claudio passes his interview with President he'll be on track to get baptized the second of July!  Pretty exciting.  We still don't know much about Claudio #1, he came to church too but we weren't able to talk to him much.  We'll see how he's feeling about getting baptized on the second of July as well this week.  I hope that the scriptures and testimony that I gave helped him.

I did divisions with Elder Bento this week, a new Brazilian that just got to the missino three weeks ago.  It was a good division, I enjoyed getting to know him even though his Spanish is 80% Portogeuse and I don't understand everything.  That night we went to Euguenio and María and had a barbeque with them and Marìa's family.  Definitely one of the best barbeques I've had in Chile, so it was a good score.  Eugenio said that he read the intro to the Book of Mormon and has been praying about it and feeling peaceful while praying, so that's a good sign!  He also said that he'd be coming to church for sure this week because they've been wanting to go, but sadly they didn't come.  I tried calling him the morning of but he didn't answer, so we're not sure what happened.

The district is also doing great!  This week all the companionships in the district have an investigator with a baptismal date, so that made me super excited.  A few of their investigators also came to the district activity and the baptism afterwards, which also made me really excited.  A lot of the people who attend baptisms get baptized, it's funny how that works.  I felt a lot more confident in the district class this week, I felt inspired to abandon what I had prepared and just go for a completely different topic and it worked out great!  The miracle of trusting in the Spirit is that it'll never lead you astray!  Even when you're new at giving district classes and you're scared to death hahaha.

Fun story!  So Wednesday after the district class we are about to call a colectivo to go home when we saw Jaime, a recent convert of the zone leaders who is extremely friendly with the missionaries and always gives us stuff.  We got our attention and told us that if we waited a bit he would take us home.  So we waited and got in his car.  However, instead of taking us home he took us straight to one of the nicest restaurants in the mission (and generally recognized in Chile for having the best meat) that's called ''Los Buenos Aires de Paine.''  And he baught us all lunch there!  It was the best, I was so happy I could've cried hahaha it was the best meat I've had since I've been in the states.  So we ate and talked to him for a good while, luckily we didn't have lunch with a member that day so it was perfect!  So Jaime just became my new best Chilean friend!

So that was my week!  It was a great week, and it's awesome to finally see a good group of prorgressing investigators after a lot of patience and perserverance.  It's not likely that I'll be here to see their baptisms, but what's important is that they get baptized, and I'm super grateful to have been part of that process.  This week I studied a lot about patience, and came to a conclusion that I liked:

Patience = Faith + Time

Then Elder Christensen told me that once an apostle said that patience is obedience prolonged so I decided to change it to:

Patience = Faith + Hope + Obedience + Time

A little more complicated, but I decided that I liked that!  The difference between patience and the other attributes is that it involves time, obstacles, and trials.  It's the ability to maintain all the other Christlike attributes for an extended period of time regardless of the obstacles in the way, and accept the timing of the Lord in all things.  So that's my spiritual thought!

I love you all!  Have a fanastic week!  Know that I pray for you!

Love

Elder Fox

Vamos Ganando

Hello all!  I tried to free more time this week to write the group email because it's been a while that I've been able to write a group email with a lot of detail like I used to, so here you go! :)  This week was awesome, but with many complications.  3 of the 4 bikes of the house broke this week (mine is the one that stayed alive... HA) and without bikes here it's impossible to keep people progressing.  But nothing is impossible with God!  So we had an awesome week anyway!  AND we got more investigators in church and new investigators than ever before!  So we're excited.

Funny stories!  So I tried to invent a verb this week and it didn't work out so well.  We all drink mate just about every night, and I wanted to invent a verb to say ''let's mate ourselves''  (makes more sense in Spanish.)  In order to make 'mate' a verb in spanish I thought of 'matear', and to conjugate it to be a first person plural command I said 'Mateemosnos', which happens to sound exactly like 'Matemosnos', which means 'let's kill ourselves.'  So my comp was pretty disturbed when I said 'let's kill ourselves' right after the closing prayer to our planning.  Yeup.  Didn't think that one through.

So I fell in a hole this week.  For some reason on a bike trail there is a large sewer thing without a grate, and for weeks I've been passing it and thinking 'that would be really terrible to fall into.'  Well one night we were on the bikes (before they broke) and it was super dark and I fell in the hole.  And discovered just how terrible it was to fall into.  It was hilarious, but a little painful.

Alrighty investigator time!  I completely forgot to tell you about Eugenio and Maria last week because I thought that that happened the week before and I already mentioned it.  But I didn't!  We met them in 'El Gringuito' a few weeks ago and we talked about the restoration with the shop owner and it caught their interest.  While I kept talking to the shop owner, my comp turned to them and got their address and asked if we could pass by.  We went by, and they're probably the most friendly people I've ever met.  They want to do a barbeque for the whole zone next p-day for free!  Reeeeeeaally friendly.  Even more shocking was their lifestyle, they live the commandments perfectly and only believe in God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost even though they're technically catholic.  They have tremendous faith, and were excited when we taught them the restoration and they accepted baptismal dates!  It was a true miracle.  The only difficulty now is getting to church, because as catholics they're not used to that.

Denel!  I might have talked to him, but he's another extremely friendly person from Haiti that we met a few months ago.  We just started teaching recently however, and he loves to have us over and listen to us, even though his Spanish isn't perfect.  He's a little iffy on the Joseph Smith asunto because he loves the bible, but he understands the importance of the Book of Mormon in proof that he was a prophet and is willing to read it.  We got him the Book of Mormon and the pamphlets for the lessons in Creol so he can understand better.  He didn't want to accept baptism because of his doubts of Joseph Smith, but he'll get there.  The best news is that he came to church this week!  And he loved it!  We went to pick him beforehand and he told us that he had already been waiting for us for an hour.  To every member that he met, he point to me and Elder Espíndola and said, ''These ones are my brothers, they come to my house and teach me the word of God and it's the best.''  He's great.

Claudio #2 made a huge step this week in finally coming to church!!  Victory!!!!  We're still not sure about him getting baptized because it's hard to tell how much of what he tells us is true, but if he comes to church two more times we'll have to set up a baptismal interview with President Warne anyway, so he can decide if he's truly repented or not.  We'll see how it goes!

Claudio #1 is still waiting for an answer, I wrote him a letter this week with a lot of scriptures about how we get answers and I wrote about my own conversion experience and shared a lot of my thoughts on the subject.  I hope it helps him.

We found three new investigators this week!  I don't have time to go through them all, but the one that called the most attention is a new investigator we have named Felipe.  We were walking towards the fma. Menares last week and I noticed a dirt road off to the side that I'd never noticed before, and I thought it led to a few houses or another neighborhood, so we took the road and there was a young adult already outside walking out to meet us.  We discovered that it wasn't a neighborhood, it was just a house with a really long driveway.  We talked to him and he said that he was atheist but that we should come by another day.  We set an appointment and this Tuesday we went by and he was already waiting for us, he said he was anxious all day to see us which was a good sign to me.  We talked about how God is our Loving Heavenly Father a little, and gave him the commitments of reading Alma 32 and praying to know if God exists.  I asked him why he would pray, to verify his intent, and he replied ''because I want to change.''  That shocked me a bit!  The second time we went, he had read the chapter and wrote 10 questions about it, and already had a table outside and lamp ready for our arrival to talk about it.  It was awesome!  His questions were really profound, great questions.  He accepted everything we said without hesitation.  He also told us that he wanted to quit smoking and he wanted our help.  A little later, we asked why he let us in, why he wanted to talk with us, and he explained that he didn't like the direction that his life was headed in, and made the decision to change his life 10 minutes before we showed up right at his door.  He took it as a sign.  Cool right?!?!?!  That night we talked about the book of mormon and how it's the key to know that God really exists.

So I did divisions with one of the Elders in my district, Elder Santini this change.  He's fantastic, and I always learn a lot from him.  We were able to put a baptismal date with a new investigator that night, which I was really grateful for because I was praying for days that we'd be able to put a date because they didn't have any investigators with baptismal dates.  And the guy's awesome!  His name is Alex, and his girlfriend is LDS and his uncle and aunt are converts of the zone leaders, and he's already been to church twice!  SO I'm way excited.

SO that's my week!  The other companionships in my district also did amazingly this week, so I'm super proud of them all.  Thanks for all of the advice about leadership and feeling peace.  I learned a lot about that this week, and came to the conclusion that everything is in the heart.  I've had leaders that didn't have confidence in me, and it was the worst.  Luckily I learned from their mistaes, and I've been constantly expressing my confidence in the missionaries in my district.  Another thing that's been amazing is praying for them all, by name, every night.  I might not be a great leader, but when we have faith, hope, and charity, amazing things can happen.

So I've just had an amazing week this week in general, minus the stress caused by the bikes and other small things, I've been extremely happy with everything.  There have been many things that have contributed to that happiness, but one of the biggest spiritual experiences I had this week was when I read Luke 5: 10-11 in Jesus the Christ:

''Fear not, from henceforth thou shalt catch men... they forsook all, and followed him.''

Usually we read the other working ''For I will make you fishers of men'', but the different working of Luke really got to me very suddenly, and I wasn't entirely sure why.  I remembered how my mission wasn't the beginning nor will it be the end of my missionary service, but that ever since that summer of 2014 I dedicated to my life to Christ, and ''henceforth [I] will catch men, and forsake all, and follow Him'' And, truly, we will all henceforth catch men, and forsake all, and follow Him, because that is our calling.  

I love you all!  Have a great week!

Love

Elder Fox

Entering the world of liderazgo

Hey all!  This week was altogether great, except for a real rough point that I hit mid-week, which I'll talk about!  Right now I'm doing great though, and I'm super excited for the weeks and months ahead.

Entering the world of leadership!  It's a weird world, full of meetings where we sit in a circle say that we have problems and we're not really sure what to do about it.  Welcome to the world of adults!  It actually has been fun though, I like being able to think very personally about a group of missionaries and be able to receive revelation in order to help them in any way I can.  I appreciate how small the districts are, it really helps me focus in.  I also enjoyed coming up with goals for the whole district and teaching the class Wednesday.  It forces me to study better!  Though it is difficult.  The missionaries in the district are spectacular, and all great friends of mine, so I'm pretty dang excited.  The only negative thing is the added pressure, which comes with just about every responsibility, especially in the mission.  A leader obviously has to be the example, and that pressure is usually good for me, but the way I am sometimes I plunge into feelings of incapability and then get real stressed out because people's success rides on my performance...  But I get better!

So Friday Elder Heap (he replaced Elder Cook in the house this change) and I went to Rancagua to go to a training for new leaders in the mission house.  It was a fantastic meeting, and I learned a ton.  It's also always fun to see my old friend from Santa Cruz, Elder Crane, who's now an assistant.  We passed through the hardest transfer of our missions together, and we bonded a ton through it all.  So it's always nice to get to talk to him!  We got talking about the mission however, and that was the start of the stress.  We talked about how nearly half the missionaries are leaving in the next three changes and how the mission is losing it's backbone.  Almost all the leaders in the mission are from these groups, and suddenly when they leave the mission is going to be ridiculously young.  Since I came here the success of the mission has essentially been on these missionaries shoulders, and I realized that the missionaries my age are reeeeeally going to have to step it up.  And for whatever reason, that started getting me stressed.  I already felt a lot of pressure to step it up in the week, and it put even more pressure to do so.  On top of that, all of our appointments with our investigators fell through, aaaaaaaall of them, including Eugenio and María José, the new awesome ones.  As a result, none of our investigators were at church this Sunday, and the baptismal dates of three investigators fell because they weren't at church.  And there were a few other things too that I can't go too into because they have to do with the house and the district and the branch and other things.  But there were a lot of things!  And I got extreeeemely stressed out.  Probably more stressed than I've ever been.

But then I remembered something!  When we're true disciples of Christ, and we have the assurance that we're trying, it just doesn't matter.  I told my comp about how I felt too and he said something super wise ''When we spend our missions trying to acquire the attributes of Christ, we'll find that little else really matters.  Ever other statistic falls into unimportance.''  And I loved that!  Faith, virtue, knowledge, obedience, diligence, charity and love, and patience basically consist of everything that we're trying to become in this world, and on our missions, and if we're trying to develop those things, everything just naturally falls into place.  The visible fruits of our efforts fall into unimportance when compared with the effects we don't see when we try to follow Jesus Christ.  And that's the important thing!  And I bore my testimony of that very principle that day in Sacrament meeting.

I love you all!  Have a great week!

Love

Elder Fox