The Best Week Ever

Hey all!  This week was awesome!  And super hard!  But mostly awesome!

My new comp!  Is super awesome.  He is the most stellar missionary I think I've ever met.  His name is Elder Barbosa and he was born in Peru but moved to Barcelona, Spain when he was 7.  He lived there ever since.  He's a convert and was baptized 5 years ago, which I think is awesome.  It's been awesome getting to know him!  This is my first time leading a sector and I've been making plenty of errors but he's been helping a ton and I feel like I've already learned and progressed a ton in this week.  The only reason the week was hard was the stress of leading a sector that I've never before experienced.  But it was the kind of hard that made me feel great at the end of the week so that's good!  I'll start with the fun stories and move on to the cool things that happened.

I found rootbeer!  In Chile!  I was so happy I could've cried.  That day I bought four cans of rootbeer and vanilla ice cream for everybody in the house to have rootbeer floats that night.  It was a ton of fun.  Then a few nights later my comp bought rootbeer and vanilla ice cream for everybody for Elder Crane's birthday, so I had rootbeer floats two nights this week!  After 7 months of no rootbeer at all, and I was starting to really miss it.

That's the only fun story!  Now things that happened!  Just so you know, we haven't been able to find Karla (the dyslexic girl who could read the Book of Mormon perfectly and started believing in God when we talked to her) since we talked to her last, which is kind of sad, but we know she's still there!  We hope to be able to pass by her this week.  Also, Felipe (the investigator that the other elders found and put a baptismal date for us) has passed his date and we still haven't been able to find him in his house or get a hold of him on his phone, so we're starting to think he was a dud.  Which is disappointing, but it's okay!  We can move on!  

BUT!  We found other people and some of our investigators experienced huge breakthroughs this week.  And thus it was the best week ever.

Isabel y Blas!  I'm not sure how much I've been talking about them, but they're an older couple who we've been passing by since I got here.  They both already know that the church is true.  Their only difficulty is that they've never been able to go to church because they work in the city market which is only open on Sunday and Wednesday mornings.  Also, this week we found out that they aren't married so their baptismal date also fell.  But that's okay!  Because this week we promised Isabel and Blas that if they took an hour out of their store to go to sacrament meeting this Sunday, that the Lord would bless them for their sacrifice and that they would end up recieving more money by the end of the day than is usual.  We also mentioned again all of the blessings that come from church attendence and this week they came!  I was so surprised!  And I don't know why!  But I was!  I was so happy I could've cried.  My companion noticed that Isable was crying during the sacrement and during the hymns, which I think is awesome.  I think they both felt something different, and I'm sure that they're going to get baptized.  I think it touched Isabel especially because she's told us recently that she doesn't feel like God is with her, that God has abandoned her and she only feels that God is near when we are there in their house.  We've been talking about that lately, and how going to church would be something that could help with that, and that the goal of recieving the gift of the holy ghost would help her feel Him always.  So it was a great week with them!  It's awesome to be able to see their lives change and be able to feel the Spirit more.

Pamela!  This is the awesome story of the week.  My first day with Elder Barbosa we were walking down one of the main streets when we crossed the street at the same time as a young girl.  She said hi to us, which called to my attention because people rarely say hi to us before we say hi to them, and I said hi and asked how she was doing.  We had crossed the street at this point and she told us that she didn't have a religion and that she really had a lot of questions about us and wanted to know more about what we believe, and asked if we could sit on a bench and talk for a bit.  Whoa!  What a response to a 'how are you?'!  I was pretty shocked, but excited at the same time!  So we sat down and talked for a bit.  We answered some questions, and she expressed that her Dad was a evangelical pastor and that both her parents are crazy evangelicals, so she doesn't want them to know that she's currently investigating other churches.  Under those circumstances we wouldn't be able to teach her if she weren't 18, but we're in luck because she's 18!  But as a result she doesn't want us to haver her phone number nor her address to her house to avoid awkward questions.  So it was a little bit of a tricky situation.  I suggested to her that we meet at the church the next day with other missionaries to be able to answer her questions in a better setting and be able to teach her something.  She agreed, and we went on our way.  I was super excited about the lesson because nothing like that has ever happened on my mission before, so we went to church the next day and we waited.  For a long time.  We waited until 30 minutes after the set time of the interview, and I decided to call it quits and head out.  Needless to say I was pretty disappointed.  There was a possibility that we had lost her, as we had no other way to contact her.  I was praying all day that we'd be able to find her and talk to her again, not that day specifically, but that we'd be able to run into her again, because I felt something very powerful in our first conversation together.  That night at 9:30 when we were walking back to our house I saw a pair of girls wakling past us, but one of them was staring at me as she walked by.  Because it was dark I didn't see until she was close that it was her!  It was Pamela!  I love those little moments that let you know that God's there.  I was super happy to have found her again, and we talked a little bit in the street again.  Sadly, after our previous conversation she wanted to investigate more and turned to the internet for her source of information.  Woops.  I blabbed for a solid 15 minutes that night, telling her about my personal conversion story, how we don't worship Joseph Smith, how we're not a cult, and how I know beyond doubt that the Book of Mormon is true and that this is the true church.  And a lot of other myths that she read.  I invited her to come to the English class the next day, and she said that she would come!  But I was still unsure how she felt about the church and about us and everything, and thought that perhaps she wasn't as prepared as I thought she was.  The next day came!  And Pamela came to the English class!  Again, I was super stoked.  At the end of the English class I had the impression to invite anybody who wanted to stay and ask us questions about our religion to stay and ask said questions.  All 12 people in the class stayed, and the first question that was asked was about Joseph Smith.  We taught them all lesson 1.  All of them.  All 12.  Alan's dad and sister were there, attently listening the whole time, as well as 9 new investigators.  It was one of the most incredible experiences of my mission, if not of my life.  The Spirit was very strong, and they all understood the lesson very well, and they all accepted the invitation to pray and read the Book of Mormon.  The things I noticed most in the lesson were the reactions of Pamela.  She was super happy and nodding her head the whole time.  In fact during the lesson, she often answered the questions of other people in the class!  Extremely well!  She's practially mormon already!  After the class she came up to me and I asked if her she was going to read the Book of Mormon, personally.  She said yes.  I asked her if she was going to pray.  She said, ''Yes, I have to do it.''  She was super happy, like incredibly happy, and full with the Spirit.  And I'm super excited to see what happens next!  She may not get baptized while I'm here, but I know she will one day.

So that's my best week ever!  I love you all!  Remember that God is there and that miracles are real!  Have a good week!

Love

Elder Fox

Bautizmo! Por fin!

Hey everybody!  This week was great, but there haven't been very many new developments since we've been busy doing divisions and preparing for the baptism and stuff like that.

SO!  Changes!  Wooooot!  Elder Leguizamón has 2 and a half changes here in Paniahue, which made guessing what could happen difficult because normally with 2 changes you stay and with 3 you leave.  But what happens with 2 and a half?  Hard to say.  I honestly wanted him to stay because he's an awesome example and a great friend, and it would be easier to strengthen our new convert with him here.  But alas!  He's going to Rauquén in Curico, the place where Elder Hadlock started his mission!  He's going to be a district leader again which is awesome, he deserves it.  I'm going to be with Elder Barbosa!  Like the character from Pirates of the Carrabean (is that how you spell it?)!  He was born in Peru but has lived in Spain for a very long time.  I hear that he has a peruvian/spaniard mix in his accent, which will be interesting!  He was a zone leader  for a while (I have a habit of getting put with ex-zone leaders) but he only has 2 changes left in the mission so he was released from his responsablities to be able to die as a normal missionary.  And I hear he's awesome!  I don't know why I keep getting put with these superstar missionaries, either I keep getting lucky or President thinks I'm a problem child.  Either way I won't complain!  Cuz it's great!

So that'll be my next change!  I'll probably be leaving after next change because if I stay two changes to kill him I'd have to stay a fourth change for another missionary to get here and that's longer than normal, but we'll see!

So this week was good!  We still haven't met our investigator with the baptismal date that the other Elders put, but we're hoping to do a family home evening with the other elders and him this week so that'll be good!  We also put a baptismal date with one of our investigators named Blas!  I only met him once because for whatever reason this whole change Elder Leguizamón has only been able to find him while on divisions with another Elder, but I met him recently and he's awesome!  He and his wife are both great, and they both already feel that the church is true, the only difficulty is getting to church because they work in a job that they only do Sunday mornings (selling things in the feria (don't know the translation for feria)).  And they would've put a fecha with his wife Isabel as well but she wasn't there when they were able to teach him.  So that's three baptisms this next month hopefully!

Another cool story!  Elder Leguizamón and I decided this week to go through all of the contacts in our phone labeled as 'investigator' and call them if we don't know them (because contacts build up as people never delete the investigators they stop going by) and we found a great investigator that way!  Sadly I forgot her name because I only met her once and it was a 5 minute conversation, but I have it written down somewhere!  In the call she said we could pass by her house and we did Sunday and had a brief conversation.  She told us that the missionaries were passing by often and she really liked what they were teaching but then Elder Junior left and Elder Bernal (from my group, the missionary that I replaced when I got here) came and they never passed by her again.  Which is odd.  She said that she sees something different in us and is genuinely looking for the truth.  Which is awesome!  We'll see where it goes!

Also we started teaching(ish) some people who have been coming to our English classes.  They're very young, and here I've noticed that the youth are very very similar to the youth in the States (probably due to the unversality of opinions provided by the internet.)  So it's interesting talking to them!  Most young people I've talked to have the same opinion, that God is just an energy through all of us and that there really isn't even a God nor a true church, but that Jesus Christ was still the son of God (I have no idea how that works either.)  But this Saturday they accepted what we've told them pretty well!  We just need to teach official lessons and leave commitments and everything.

Then of course there's the story of Alan and his baptism!  But I'll save that for the end of everything.

Some funny stories!  In divs I went with the zone leader Elder Miller to a house of about 20 Haitian people!  Which in Chile is definitely not something you see every day.  Apparently the zone leaders had taught one lesson, but they weren't sure that they understood everything because the Haitians are still working on their Spanish too, because they speak French!  And I was so sad that I had forgotten absolutely everything I have learned of French!  Cuz it would've been awesome to talk to them in their native language, because it's a little odd that we're speaking a language we're new to and they're speaking a language they're new too but we have to speak that language because it's the only one we have in common!  We invited them to play sports with us that night, and Elder Miller told them that I knew French but I explained that I forgot everything when I learned Spanish.  They told me to try anyway so I just said 'I don't know' in French and left it at that.  They were very entertained at my attempt to French.

More stories of Chilean news!  So early in the week I was in a member's house eating lunch when I saw a story about a bunch of rogue waves that have been going on in Viña del Mar.  There's this platform that's pretty high above the ocean that's a really popular tourist spot, but this week these giant waves have been coming every now and then and soaking everybody there, which they found pretty fun!  The whole news story was about how much of a thrill these tourists are getting out of standing on this platform as giant waves come up and soak them (and the cars driving on the road by the platform and everything in the area.)  Later in the week I was in the same home and saw more videos of giant waves coming and soaking the platform in Viña del Mar, but this time with nobody on it.  The headline was ''They're getting sick of the big waves.''  I thought that was hilarious.  I love how frank these headlines are.

Another headline!  The story was about a mall that got robbed before it opened, and the headline was ''It hasn't opened yet and they already robbed it.''  Yep.  Classic Chilean frank headlines.

So the baptism!  I never really told you much about Alan, but that's because we honestly didn't do very much for him.  That's the amazing thing about this story, is that all we did was invite him to be baptized at the very start of the change, and he took that invitation seriously and did everything he could to arrive at that date.  He is an amazing kid, and really just want to do what's right and what's going to help him.  It was a miracle how it happened, and it really goes to show that it's not the lessons that lead someone to baptism, it's the Spirit and the commitments you leave them.  He prayed and felt his answer on his own and learned to recognize the Spirit, he decided it was important to be baptized, and he was the one who asked us what he needed to do to be baptized, and he did everything necessary.  We hardly did anything!  So it really was a miracle.

Which leads me to completing my thought from last week!  I was talking about how the circumstances leading to the emergency of the font not being full at my last baptism were very unusual, and likely caused by God in order to teach us a lesson.  I think that story is a great example of our limits, and of the Atonement.  I don't have a lot of time to say everything that I was thinking (probably should have skpped the Chilean news story) but I learned through that that the atonement of Christ does more than cleanse us from our sins, it can also perfect our efforts.  What I mean by that is that in this life whatever we do (as long as it's the will of Christ) our efforts can be 'filled' by the atonement, to that the effects of what we do are much much greater than what we actually do.  Because of this, even though as humans we 'awkwardly lump around', we can make a huge difference because the atonement fills the gaps in our imperfections in everything that we do to serve God and to serve others.  The atonement fills the gaps left by our errors and our imperfections, in everything that we do.  Alan was a great example of this, because we didn't do much in his progression, but the atonement made the difference.

I love you all!  Have a great week!

Love

Elder Fox

Señor Fox

Hey everybody!  This week was great!  And the best thing about it is that we're going to have a baptism this Saturday!!  First one in a very long time.  It's been 4 months since my last one at the end of my first change in Conti.  We're super stoked.  And so is President.  We had a special training this week and the first thing that President told me and Elder Leguizamón is that he's happy that Paniahue is finally seeing success.  And we are too!  We visited Alan every day this week and taught him, and conducted the pre-interview on Saturday and he passed really well.  His third church attendance was this Sunday so now he just needs to do the real interview Wednesday and he's ready!

I also gave a talk in church!  But I'll probably talk about that later in the email.  I find it funny though, that a 10 minute talk in English used to intimidate me, and now I'm perfectly comfortable giving a 25 minute talk in Spanish without writing it out first!  My Spanish wasn't perfect but it was good enough!  I feel like my Spanish has improved a ton with having Elder Leguizamón as a companion.  Both my comprehension and speaking ability have improved, but mostly my comprehension.

We also got a killer reference this week!  Apparently he's attended the church in Santa Cruz a few times (more than 3, which is awesome) and he went the other Sunday and the zone leaders talked to him, put a baptismal date with him, and since he lives in our sector they gave us the reference!  So we have an investigator with a baptismal date that we haven't even met!  So that's also super exciting.

I feel like the lessons I've learned about faith have been really paying off.  I learned a lot about not blaming the circumstances for anything.  It's easy to blame the circumstances, but in a work like this, the circumstances really don't matter.  I think I may have been sent to a less-successful mission specifically to learn about faith.  God has the power to prepare people and put them in your path, regardless of where you are, how the members are, or anything.  That was a big lesson I had to learn.  And I'm really glad I learned it.

Also!  The mom of a convert named Yanina came to church Sunday!  Which I was excited about.  We've been trying to get her to go for a while, and this week we were able to teach her a 15 minute version of lesson 1, and she came to church!  She said that she was bored, but that's okay!  We can still work with that!

We spent Wednesday and Thursday in Pichilemu this week, which was fun.  We helped the other elders move houses and I got to enjoy the lovely coastal climate which I miss from Conti.  And I got to see the beach again, nice because it's been a while.  Also in Pichi there's a disco (kind of like a club) called 'Señor Fox.' that's big and super popular there, which I thought was pretty funny.  The logo looks almost exactly like the little fox drawings that Bri does for our birthday cards.

We did a deep clean of the house today!  It was sorely needed.  The past elders were very irresponsible with the place and we've been cleaning it trying to get the weeds and plants out of the small yard out back essentially since we got here.  And now it's finally finished!  Now if it were in the States we probably wouldn't even be kicked out of the house!  Probably.

SO my talk!  I wanted to talk about the atonement and missionary work, so I ended up telling the story of the filling of the font in Conti as an intro for my talk.  I liked reflecting back on that event and thinking of the symbolism behind it.  I realized when I looked back on that story that since that baptism Elder Hadlock and I have filled the font two other times (for the baptisms of the hermanas) and the font filled much more normally, without problems.  The font filled in 2 hours, just like it should've that day of our baptism.  Also, we've used the firehose of the church since then to clean the church (don't ask how) and the water that came out of the hose was perfectly clean.  I realized that both of the things that caused the emergency that day were both very exceptional circumstances, and realized that God had likely caused both in order to teach us a lesson.

Aaaaaaand I have to end the letter there.  Which is really sad because I started that whole thought with the font-filling and the atonement but I can't finish.  Woops.  Sorry!  Remind me to finish next week!  I love you all!  Have a great week!  Be good!  Stay safe!  The church is true!

Love

Elder Fox

Alan! Alan! Alan! Alan! Alan!

If you don't understand the subject, go watch that youtube video that was popular for a while with animals speaking in British accents.

Hello all!  This week was wonderful, but at the same time not much happened.  But there are some awesome stories that I want to share!

First is about a girl that my comp and district leader met last week doing divisions named Karla.  She accepted a Book of Mormon and said that she would read it in a few days (she's really intelligent.)  We went back to visit her this week after we went to Rancagua again to get my carnet, and it was a super interesting conversation.  She was a lot of fun to talk to because of her knowledge of history and of everything, but the part that really made me smile was when she said that right before Elder Leguizamón and Elder Holley came to the door she was just about ready to give up belief that there was a God at all, but that they left and now she was starting to believe in God more and more.  They didn't teach her a lesson, or do anything really, but just the presence and the conversation with the missionaries led this change.  It's awesome how such short contact with people who are willing to share the gospel can change people like that.  She also said that she had a really interesting experience reading the Book of Mormon that made her cry.  Even though she loves reading, she's dyslexic, which surprised me.  She says that she can read really well but when she tries to read out loud she has a really hard time.  But she told us that when she read the Book of Mormon out loud, she could easily without any problem, and this is the first time anything like that has happened in her life, which moved her to tears.  My first reaction was ''Well that's your answer come to church dang it!!!''  But I didn't say that.  A cool miracle of this week.

Second, we did divisions again this week (my current district leader likes to do them every week) and I was with Elder Holley the district leader.  For divisions, both members of the companionship choose a focus that they're going to study and try to put into practice in the division, and the other companion studies it as well and offers advice.  My focus for the division was a pauta (don't know how to say that in English sorry) that lead to an augmentation in baptisms, which was ´pray for miracles and expect them.´ I decided that that was the best focus ever.  That whole day we kept finding amazing people in the street, just being there in the exact right place and the exact right time.  Early on the day Elder Holley had to stop to stretch his leg because his knee was hurting, and a little later on we passed a woman just as she collapsed in an emotional breakdown.  We calmed her down and she told us what had happened, her husband had hit her and she fled the house.  We asked her if she had called the police and she said that she had and they were on their way.  After talking through the story and after she had calmed down, we told her that we couldn't help with anything legal, but that we do have one thing that we think could help her, which is our faith in Jesus Christ and His sacrifice for us.  We asked her if she wanted to hear what we had to say and she said yes, and gave us her address and her phone number.  Had Elder Holley not had to stop and stretch, we wouldn't have been there at the right time to help her.  Just 10 minutes later I started a conversation with a woman standing on the street waiting for a colectivo.  She was super nice, and actually brought up the topic of religion herself, saying ''you know, I've never been baptized.''  We shared a little and gave her a lesson one pamphlet, and she said that she'd be interested in us coming by and teaching her too.  There were more that day, but those were the highlights.

So Alan!  Alan was by far the best part of the week, and the inspiration behind the email subject (everytime we say his name in the house we yell it like in the video, like ''how's ALAN'', ''ALAN is great.'').  He's our 17 year old investigator with the baptismal date, and right now he's showing a lot of promise of reaching his date.  He's attended church twice now, and has liked it both times, and after our English class Saturday he started asking questions about baptism and what's required to be baptized.  Right there we taught him the law of chastity and the work of wisdom and he accepted both on the spot.  Which is awesome!  I haven't seen anyone get as far as him since our convert my first change in the field.  So I'm super excited!  I think that the Spirit has really touched him with the desire to unite with the church, which is a really cool thing to see.  He's become good friends with all the youth in the Santa Cruz branch, and saw one receive his mission call recently.  I think he was pretty inspired by it.  If he gets baptized and ends up going on a mission I think I'd die of happiness.  So that's the hope!

So that was my week!  The other highlights have been our English class Saturday, which more people went too, and the fact that a branch member in Santa Cruz thought that I was Mexican due to my accent, which I thought was awesome because I think the Mexican accent is easily the cleanest and most attractive Spanish there is.  If you don't count Spain, that is.  So that's my week!  My thoughts this week have been on miracles.  I realized how little I expected miracles or believed that they could happen before my mission.  I almost believed that they were things of the past, or things that I would never really be associated with.  In the Book of Mormon it says that if miracles cease among men it is only because faith has ceased also, and I think that's true.  I've gained a very strong testimony through experience on my mission of the availability of miracles, to everybody.  The biggest example was when God filled the font, but there have been miracles every week, and every day.  God really is among us, and miracles really exist.  They can be available to all of us, we just need the faith sufficient to ask for them, and then the gratitude and vision to be able to notice them.  And the amazing thing is that we can pray for both.  With God, we truly will never lack anything, as long as we ask.

I love you all!  Do good!  Make good choices!

Love

Elder Fox

New Years!

Hola everyone!  This letter is going to be short again because not much really happened this week, but there are some stories to share!  Life is just a little slower here in Paniahue, but that's okay!

First good news about Alan!  He's the son of the family of investigators that I talked about in the other letter, named the fma. Yua or something like that.  We've been inviting him to sports and things every week to get to know him and gain confidence, and this week we taught his family for the first time and they weren't extremely receptive, but he was.  We put a baptismal date with him (but none of the rest) in that lesson which was awesome, but he still has to feel like he receives an answer before he'll get baptized, so there's a lot of work to do!  The really exciting thing is that he came to church with us on Sunday, so he's already made it farther than about 90% of the investigators I've had thus far in my mission!  I hope to be able to see him progress and change in my coming months here, the only problem is that there aren't any youth in the branch, so it would be very difficult to keep him active without his family being members or other youth in the church.

BUT we found some youth this week too!  We found this one girl (forgot her name sorry) who's super intelligent.  We gave her a Book of Mormon in our contact and she told us that she'd have it read before Sunday, which would've been incredible, but alas she didn't finish it.  She started it though, and has a lot of questions, which is awesome.  We also have a few other families and people that I think can start progressing here soon, so I'm excited to see that things are picking up!  There's an awesome convert in the branch named Yanina who lives with her mom and cousin, and we've started going by them gaining confidence with their family while giving lessons to our convert.  So good things!

Other stories!  New Years Eve was a blast, it involved a pointless trip to Rancagua and gringo desserts!  I needed to go to Rancagua to get my carnet (Chilean citizenship card thing) which is at a civil register (a building that essentially does everything related to the government) there, so we decided to go on Thursday to get it.  It's about a 3 hour trip in total.  When we got there at 1:00, we walked to the civil register to discover that it had closed.... at 11:00 that morning.  I found out that the civil register normally closes at 2:00 in the afternoon (2:00... on a normal day), but because it was New Years Eve it closed at 11:00 in the morning.

I know you like complaining about the U.S. government... but really... just be grateful for it.  There are more advanced forms of stupidity in this world.

So we took the trip for nothing!  Which was pretty sad because we wasted a lot of time, but also fun because we got to eat at a sandwich place that sells .5 kilogram sandwiches (about a pound) which I enjoyed greatly.  And ate the whole thing.  Easily.  It really is amazing I'm not fat.

We got back to Santa Cruz at about 6:00 and had to enter the house early because of New Years Eve at 7:00... so we didn't really get a lot done that day.  Oh well.  That night I studied the New Testament for a few hours and then us four Elders in the house made oreo shakes and also a delicious brownie\chocolate chip cookie dessert with ice cream that was absolutely delicious.  It was a little too North-American for my Argentine companion, however, and he got so sick that we stayed in the house the whole day the next day.  It was fun studying and watching church movies and mormon messages, but I started getting pretty restless, since our house has the square footage of our family room and I couldn't leave it.  I just felt bad for my comp though, he plans on moving to the states after the mission so I hope he doesn't suffer the same problems with the food when he goes.

We also had our first English class here but we didn't advertise very much at all so only Alan and his family came.  Some of the English that went around the room was pretty hilarious though, since they got some of the practice sentences mixed up.  Here are some examples:

Alan to Elder Leguizamón: ''Where..are... your people?''

(I think he mixed up 'where are you from' with 'how many people are in your family' somehow.)

Elder Leguizamón in response:  ''They are in your house.''

Our people.  They always be in your house.

Also Elder Leguizamón also accidently asked for marijuana in the closing prayer, saying specifically ''we ask thee for... weed.''

I think he was trying to say 'please bless us', but got a little mixed up and wanted to say 'we ask thee for we' but added a 'd' on the end.  I thought it pretty hilarious.

So that was my week!  It was a great week with all said and done, though a slow one since we went two days without doing much.  And we're going to back to Rancagua tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes!

Quick thought on faith: over these three weeks I think this is the biggest lesson I've learned here.  In Conti I kind of gave up faith as a result of our lack of success, which certainly didn't help the fact that we didn't have a lot of success.  We can have faith despite the circumstances, always, and if we create our circumstances (rather than letting our circumstances create us) with faith, we can achieve miracles.  Always.  Our Heavenly Father is a God of miracles, but he works on the principle of faith.  We can have faith that He can do anything, but even better is having faith that he will do it.  But of course, in order to know that He will do it, we also have to know that it's in accordance with His will, which is knowledge that we have to seek through Him in prayer.

Love you guys!  The Church is true!

Love

Christmas!!!

Merry Christmas!!  Again!!

I told most of you Merry Christmas over Skype but for those who weren't there Merry Christmas!

This week was great!  And the obvious highlight was Christmas!  So I'm going to mostly talk about what we did for Christmas Eve and Christmas.

Christmas Eve!  We worked normally that day until about 8:00 when we went to an awesome recent convert )her name is Llanina) to have Christmas dinner.  The only problem was that there were only two grown women in the house so we couldn't enter without another man or another woman, and they were planning on having a friend over but the friend canceled at the last minute.  So we couldn't go inside, but they were awesome and brought the table and chairs outside and we ate Christmas dinner in the street!  It was actually really cool, I thought it was awesome that they cared that much about getting us dinner.  Then we got back the house and celebrated by making oreo shakes!  They were delicious, and the first shakes I've had since I've gotten to the mission since they don't really exist here.  My Argentian comp was a huge fan, and has since told everyone we've met about this weird delicious gringo drink that has ice cream and cookies in it.  We're actually going to make it tonight in a FHE with the Wyco family.  Anyway, I digress.  We made shakes, drank coke, ate potato chips, told stories in Spanish, it was a great night.

Christmas!  Our district meeting was moved from Wednesday to Friday in order to have it on Christmas morning, so our whole zone got together in the chapel in Santa Cruz and made pancakes before the meeting.  That was probably my second favorite part of the whole day, because the zone here is awesome and we had a lot of fun.  After the meeting I got to sing songs from Les Miserables with Elder Anuarve (one of our favorite pass-times while we were in Conti) while we were cleaning dishes, which was also a ton of fun.  The meeting was great too, the zone leaders talked about faith and in our district class we read the christmas story from Luke.  Then Presidente Warne and Hermana Warne came and gave us a little spiritual Christmas thought too, which was great.  After that we went to the house that we skyped at to have lunch and email you guys about the time we would be skyping.  After lunch we ran over to visit Janet real quick before skyping, and I haven't told you her story yet!  So I will now.

So Janet is an investigator of ours who owns a little store in a neighborhood in our sector.  Her son was baptized about a year ago, and recently left on a mission in Bolivia.  She's not married to her husband (husband? partner? not sure what to say in this case) still, and she hasn't ever listened to the missionaries or attended church.  We've been passing by her every now and then to talk and try and start teaching her, and she invited us to come when her son skyped for Christmas (Elder Leguizamón knew him before he left.)  So we went to skype with her son right after lunch, and the son was awesome and frank with his mother and told her that she needed to get married and get baptized, that she needed to listen to the missionaries and do what they say.  Then Elder Leguizamón asked him to bear his testimony of the gospel and baptism, and he bore an incredible testimony of the gospel and again testified of the importance of her getting baptized.  I could tell it made a huge difference in her.  At the end he challenged her to pray about the church and ask God if it's true.  What he said was perfect, and I was really excited that it might have made a change.

After that we skyped!  Easily made my month, or even my year.  It was amazing, thanks for being awesome, family!

After skyping we passed by the Wyco family to say Merry Christmas and then we headed for the house.  So it was a great day!

THEN the next day we passed by Janet again, and she said that she prayed like her son told her to and felt something really strong.  She told us that she wasn't expecting to feel anything, but she did, and that she knows the church is true.  I was blown away!  Best Christmas ever!  I didn't even know what to say because nothing like that has happened in my mission yet, then Elder Leguizamón said ''So what are you willing to do now?''  To which she replied, ''Wait for my son to get home to be baptized.''  Another good example that having a baptism is never easy, you've really gotta fight for it!  We talked to her about the blessings of baptism and also told her that it'd be cooler if she could get sealed to her son when he got home and that her son would be really happy to find out that she was baptized but she still felt like she wanted to wait for him.  She did, however, commit to being taught and to go to church this Sunday.  So that was an amazing miracle of the week!  Even though she's a little stubborn and doesn't want to get baptized now, she will one day, and that's amazing!  I think that when she has the lessons and goes to church she'll start feeling the desire to get baptized as soon as possible, but if not I know she'll get baptized so I'm very greatful I got to witness the first stages of her conversion.

So that was my week!  The rest of the week we spent finding past investigators from the area book trying to find more people to teach and also a lot of contacting.  As well as visiting our recent converts and strengthening them.  So it was a great week!  I love you all!  Sorry this letter was a little shorter, I spent a lot of time reading letters today.  But have a great week!  The Church is True!  And great!

Love

Elder Fox

Paniahue

Hey guys!!  How're you doin?!  That's good.

Anyway, I'm in Paniahue!  It was a little hard leaving Elder Hadlock and all the people that I know and love in Conti, but now I'm feeling great here and it's great!  

First, my comp!  As you know, his name is Elder Leguizamón and he's from Argentina, and he's awesome!  He knows less English than any Latino I've met so far in the mission, especially with his time, but honestly I actually really enjoy the challenge!  I can't express everything I want to in the exact way that I would do it in English but normally I can say anything I want to and tell any story with ease, so it's been great!  We've been getting to know each other pretty well.  He found the motivation to learn English recently though, because he's going to be living in Utah after his mission, so I've been helping him learn which has been a lot of fun.  He's actually learned super quickly, and has taken a lot of initiative.  He has about 18 months in the mission, and was previously a zone leader in Talca.  He was released from being zone leader in an emergency change a little while back (pretty sure I told you about it) when all 4 Talca zone leaders were taken out and made co-comps.  I've always wondered why that happened, since all four of those zone leaders were amazing missionaries and leaders, and Elder Leguizamón told me the story this week and apparently it was a long complicated mess full of a lot of misunderstandings.  From what I've seen of him so far, he's an absoultely amazing missionary who is exactly obedient and I have a ton to learn from him.  He's famous for being an amazing contacter and teacher, so I'm super excited to be with him.  He has a lot of motivation and he works really hard, I love his attitude.  He told me that it was a little disappointing being emergency changed out of being zone leader, but that what's important is that you work as hard as you can wherever you are placed.  He's a great guy.

We live in a house in Santa Cruz with the Santa Cruz zone leaders, so I'm essentially living with 3 zone leaders!  It's the greatest, I love the constant atmosphere of hard work and obedience.  Our sector includes a little bit of Santa Cruz and all of Paniahue, which is a tiny little city with a tiny little branch of about 20 members.  It takes about 30 minutes to walk to Paniahue, so my days of walking ridiculous distances to get to church and our proselyting areas aren't over!  The only downside is the heat, the heat is easily worse than anything I've experienced in Utah, so those weather scientist people who say that Rancagua is cooler than Utah in the summer are definitely smoking something.  But I'm getting used to it!  The only hard thing is that the heat doesn't improve when we get to the house, nor at night when we sleep.  But I'm quickly getting used to things.

So that's Paniahue and my comp!  Like I said last week, we don't have a lot of people, which is pretty characteristic for this zone.  We do have a family of recent converts who are awesome but definitely need a lot of strengthening right now, so we've been working a lot with them helping them rid their doubts.  They're called the fma. Wyco (I think that's how it's spelled...)  The husband was an Adventist preacher when he was converted, and he's very educated in the bible unlike most people down here.  He probably knows the bible better than I do, admittedly.  He has a wife who seems to me to have a really strong testimony of the gospel, and also two daughters, one who's in primary and the other young womens.  They're an awesome family, but the husband has a lot of doubts still that we're helping him to resolve.  Some of his questions are really hard, so it gives me something good to study for.

I've met another family of potential investigators that I think have a lot of promise, they seem to trust a lot in us right now and the Dad is a less active member.  We haven't taught them yet, but we hope to this week.  The two kids have taken a lot of fascination in English and my piano playing ability, and want me two teach them both!  We're actually thinking of starting an English class and a piano class for investigators and just the population in general to find investigators (classes here in Chile work really well for finding people) so we'll probably start that next week!

So story time!!  This story involves a huge thank-you I owe to Sister Gouls and my wonderful mother.

So this branch has a deep distrust of North Americans.  That's a little bit of a problem for me, seeing I'm North American.  The past President used this sector as a ''punishment'' sector for missionaries who were disobedient or didn't do anything, and as a result the branch has an understandable distrust of missionaries, especially gringos.  Ever since I heard this, I've been thinking about ways to fix this problem so I can help strengthen the branch.  The branch definitely needs to be strengthened right now, but there's nothing I can do to help them until they trust me.  God helped me to fix our relationship with the Constitución Ward, so I had no reason to disbelieve that he wouldn't help me with this branch.  Elder Leguizamón and I have been visiting the members and delivering spiritual messages to all of them and asking what we can do to help them out, and every member that I've met so far has been an amazing person so it hasn't been hard at all to love them very genuinely and show that love.  So that was a good start.  But then they figured out that I play piano, and that really made the difference.

When I told Elder Leguizampón that I play piano he got super excited, saying that this sector really needed someone to play the piano in order to teach our investigators who want to learn and also to play for the branch.  As soon as we got to the house he called the Primary President and told her that I could play for the primary program that Sunday, but that she'd have to give us the songs so that I could practice them beforehand.  We had to go to the church a few mornings because there were 7 songs that I had to learn for the meeting Sunday morning, but I eventually got them all down.

Then Sunday came!  Normally branches and wards give time to new missionaries who come in to share their testimonies and present themselves, and I was really counting on this opportunity to start building trust with the branch, because when someone speaks and testifies with the Spirit it's hard to deny that they're a servant of the Lord.  But they didn't give me that time.  Shoot.  I played the opening song though and the branch seemed surprised that there was real piano music (it's probably been a while.)  I played well for all of the songs of the primary program too, and I hoped that that would build my trust with the members.  Then the primary President got up at the end of the meeting to speak.  She hadn't really said much to me in the way of thanks or appreciation, but I didn't really think anything of it.  But what she said in her talk really surprised me.  She got up and at the end of the talk she said  ''I know that the Mission President is a very inspired man and receives revelation, and I know that it's hard losing Elder Bernard (He's a Mexican from my group that they really loved) right before Christmas, but before we were practicing these primary songs with just the CD's.  Then President sent us this angel right before the program to play the piano for us, and I am so incredibly greatful that God sent us Elder Fox to help us out.''

Wow.  I was stunned.  President, funny enough, was actually there at the sacrament meeting and shortly after her talk he got up and said.  ''I actually forgot that Elder Fox played the piano, to be honest, and I had no idea about your situation.  So that's evidence for you all, that God really does direct this work and that Elder Fox is supposed to be here with you.''

That was better than just about anything I could've hoped to happen ever.  The members warmed up to me immediately.  Every single one of them came up to me after and told me that I play the piano very beautifully and that it's such a different spirit having real piano music in the meeting.

So here's a thanks to my mother!  She understood much better than I how vitally important my piano playing abilities would become in my mission.  It turned out to be my entrance into the hearts of everybody in this little branch.

So skype!  Count on 6:00 Chilean time, not sure what that is over there with daylight savings and all that.  If anything is amiss email me, I´'ll check my email before.

I love you all!  Have a great week!

Love,

Elder Fox