Feliz Navidad!

¡Feliz Navidad!

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¡Feliz Navidad!

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¡Feliz Navidad!  Prósperos años y felicidad

I WANNA WISH YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS

Okay that's enough.

Hi all!  We had another great week here!  I made a recording but I don't know if it'll work so I'll pass real quick through the things I talked about in the recording.

This Wednesday we had our special Christmas zone conference, so the mission sent a bus to Talca and took us all to the mission home in Rancagua (about 2 and a half hours away) to have the conference together and celebrate Christmas!  The plan was to sing a special Christmas program for people in need so we needed to prepare that well in advance.  Last Saturday we got together in the morning as a zone to practice the songs and then we did the same thing Tuesday morning.  Then we went to the conference Wednesday and practiced the songs and had a special Christmas dinner with turkey and potatoes and other deliciousness.  Sadly, as a result, half the zone got sick bedridden for the next 3 days but it was still tasty!  After the dinner lunch thing we went to do the program at a drug rehabilitation.  It was an awesome experience, and we were all very grateful to be able to brighten up their Christmas and give them hope in their tough situation.  Definitely the highlight of Christmas this year :)

The next day we had district class and then on Saturday we had the open chapel in San Clemente, so in total we got together as a zone 5 days out of seven this week!  Good thing we love each other a lot.  Actually, this zone has probably been the most united I've ever been in.  I love them all so much!  They're such great missionaries and we're so proud of them!  We're all really good friends, it's going to be hard when the change ends.

So the open chapel was also awesome.  Like I said in the recording, Alejandro came and he was a huge help.  He was never a missionary and that's probably his biggest regret in life.  He's a machine though, it would have been very different if he weren't there.  Funny story from that though!  While the open chapel was approaching the end and we were on the last run through of the chapel, we were all outside waiting for people to pass by to invite them into the chapel and trap them with our friendliness!  Sadly, the only people who were passing by were on bikes, so I started running along side the bikes and inviting them to come see the chapel for 5 minutes and promising them that the tour would be super cool.  It was definitely a first in the mission!  Even though it didn't work too great it was a lot of fun, and we all got a pretty good kick out of it.  When we walked back in the chapel one of the Elders in the zone told me that I had just become Elder Calhoon from the Best Two Years.  I then realized the reality that I had just been chasing bikes begging people to come to church.  Good times though.

So the zone took a pretty hard hit this week because a lot of them got sick for a long time, but we hope that we can get them excited about working well for the last week of this change.  The sector is also not doing great, we've been extremely busy.  We've been trying to help Emelina and the ward a lot this week, we want to motivate people to go to the sign language classes because nobody's going and Emelina is a little discouraged that nobody can communicate with her in church, obviously.  So we made a power point for the ward to use in a training on Saturday that included parts of a talk from President Hinckley about convert retention and gently slapped the members on the face with it a bit.  From what we hear, it inspired a lot of change.  So that's good! 

 8 For though I made you sorry with a [powerpoint], I do not repent, though I did repent: 

for I perceive that the same [powerpoint] hath made you sorry, though it were but for a season.

 9 Now I rejoice, not that ye were made sorry, but that ye sorrowed to repentance: for ye were made sorry after a godly manner, that ye might receive damage by us in nothing.

 10 For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death.

Anyway, that was that.  We also taught our English class again on Thursday which was fun.  I don't know if you guys remember me talking about Elder Young, because it was a year ago, but Elder Young had about 9 months in the mission when I had 6 and he was a new zone leader living with us in our house in Santa Cruz.  That was the change that I was with Elder Barbosa and his companion was Elder Crane.  Anyway, Elder Young (yes, he is a literal descent of Brigham Young) is definitely one of my best friends in the mission, the missionary I most respect out of just about anyone, and now he's an assistant.  And he came to chill with us Thursday!  He came in the bus with Talca II from their zone conference and did divs with us that night and it was a great time.  He helped with our english class then we talked a long time during our planning about our sector and about the zone and everything.  I got to talk one on one with him for a while too and I forgot how much I missed him!  He's a great guy.

So that was my week!  And this week I finally have some time to actually share my spiritual thoughts!  Yuusss.  For one, I actually really like the scripture above that I edited to fit the situation.  Obviously, the scripture that is most important out of the three is the last one, and it's one of the lessons that I've learned this change!  When we're motivated to progress in the gospel and to change, we have to very careful about what kind of sorrow we're feeling.  We have to watch what's motivating the change.  I've always thought of wordly sorrow as just ordinary shame to confess and correct, which completely impedes repentance.  But what I've learned is that in many cases wordly sorrow actually can and does inspire change in behavior, but not true repentance.  Whatever change occurs, it's certainly not permanent.  This change can be based on any wordly desire:  to look better, to have more, to feel like a good person, or any number of things.  But Godly sorrow is different, and when we can really feel this Godly sorrow, the changes are always permanent, because suddenly there's nothing selfish about our repentance, and in the act of changing we are really just turning ourselves and our souls outward, towards Christ.  And that is how He heals.

So let's remember that!  In the Christmas season it's good to remember His birth, but it's even better to remember His life, and His atonement, and the unimaginable gift that He gave to us.  Let's turn our hearts to the Savior, and let Him change and heal us, and we will never be the same again.  He will make us into His, and we will become like Him, and we will get to know Him as He knows us.  I know, and I promise, that this is true.  If we do this we can look back and happily recognize that we are unrecognizable compared to what we were.

I love you all so much! :)  Merry Christmas!!

Love

Elder Fox

Hola

Hey all!  It was another incredibly busy week but luckily I told you all about it completely in the recording I made you!  So it's gonna be another quick letter but there's a lot of information in the recording so that'll make up for it!  But I still have some stories!

So the sign language is progressing pretty rapidly, we went the other week and were able to converse for a while and teach a lesson without the help of her hearing daughter, so that ain't too bad!  I've definitely been feeling the divine help as well as when I learned Spanish, at first I struggled to retain a new word when Emelina taught the sign language classes in the church but now I learn every new work effortlessly.  The gift of signs!  It's been a lot of fun learning it, the only sad thing is that it's not even close to american sign language so if I want to learn ASL when I get back I'll have to start from scratch.

Another story!  This is an amazing one, and it happened last week but I forgot to write about it!  But as you all know, I'm with Elder Mendez, who was my first comp in Hospital.  Up until last week, I've kind of looked at my time in Hospital as the low point of my mission.  I made a plethora of mistakes and I had a lot of things I needed to change in myself as a missionary, also as soon as I left all the people we were teaching went down the drain.  I think it was necessary for me to feel that a little, because it caused me to reflect a lot and inspired sincere change and repentance in how I worked as a missionary and how I was as a person, and as a result I was able to help touch many more lives in Pichidegua and hopefully here.  BUT something happened that made me super happy.

So last week we were in our leadership meeting in Rancagua, like I talked about last week in the video.  After the meeting, one of the matrimony elders asked me a question about a baptismal record that was in our zone.  He had a few other records there, and after looking at the one from our zone, I glanced at the other registros and saw the word ''Hosptial'' jump up at me.  I picked two up and looked at them both and they both said ''Hospital'' I quickly read the names and it took me way longer than it should have to process the names:  Claudio Sanchez and Gonzalo Aspe.  I kind of lost my dignity and yelled across the room at Elder Mendez telling him to come see and we gave each other a chilean hug and rejoiced not too quietly.  The matrimony was really confused at what was going on seeing as I hadn't answered his question yet.  I took the time later to explain to him that Elder Mendez and I had already been in HoHospitalogether and taught both of those people.    

So that definitely made my week :)  I wanted to take the time to share a quick spiritual thought from the week.  But I don't have time haha sorry I'm really bad at this.  Remind me to share it next week!  I was going to share it two weeks ago but I keep struggling at having time to write.  Have a great week though!  See you in a few weeks!

Love

Elder Fox

More Stories!

Hey all!  So I talked about most everything in the video but there are a few details I forgot and other stories to share!  So this letter will be a bit quick.

So first thing, I realized after passing dats this morning after making the video that the zone has made a huge leap of progress.  They doubled the number of lessons and new investigators from this last week to this week which is what the zone was doing a little bad in and President told us we needed to improve.  So I'm super proud of them all!  The zone did super great this week and worked super hard.  We combined the two zones today to do a zone activity where we played games and bought 14 pizzas from Papa Johns for the whole zone.  It was a great activity!  We left pretty tired because we spent the whole time coordinating everything but it's all good.

So for the first time in my mission, the majority of our teaching pool is children, so it's definitely been different!  It's been awesome though, and I've really fallen in love with these kids.  Lorena has 3 kids, the oldest being Jesus who we're working with, the next being Yoan (pronounced like Johanne but it's a boy) who's 6 and then Sofia who's probably about four.  Sofia is adorable though, she started out super shy and she didn't say anything but I think she got used to me and now she never stops talking.  I sat with the kids during sacrament meeting while Lorena sat on another bench so I kept Sofia entertained the whole time.  It was a good time.  Yoan is a big ball of energy.  The last time we were there we sat outside and talked and he and his friend put on our helmets and our missionary nametags and we gave them some ''ilumina el mundo'' (light the world) pass along cards just to see what would happen and they went running from house to house saying that they were the elders.  When people answered they held out the cards and asked if they wanted to hear the word of God.  It was probably one of the funniest things I've seen.  Funny enough, people were still saying that they were busy... to 6 year old children.  The funniest though was when they actually got in a house.  Elder Mendez turned to me and told me that they do our job better than we do.  They came out a few minutes later saying ''how lame, they didn't give us anything!!'' because Lorena always gives us food when we go over.  We laughed a good deal at that one.

Hey that was a really quick email but I've been a little slower this week.  More details in the email to come!  I love you all!  I hope you have a great week!

Love

Elder Fox