February 27, 2012

(sorry a little late--just got new pictures!)

Hola Familia!
Well I have really got to admit that this week has been a little bit of a hard one. We have still found success but I think it could easily be named the trial of our faith. hahaha Well transfers came and went and we are staying the same! Pretty cool and we are both excited to continue forward. However Elder Spendlove is now leaving and a new elder is coming in. Kinda sad but it’s also good because I think he was reaching the wire with his companion Elder Sookhan (from Trinidad). Just culture differences and what not. haha Also Elder Berry just got made the district leader so now we will have to do tons of splits. I actually like splits most of the time so I am pretty excited for that. Well for you guys it sounds like things are going great! It’s awesome to hear about all the adventures and what you guys did and are doing. I love to know and it makes me feel a lot better and closer to home. I also wanted to say that I am so grateful to have a family like you guys.

Dad thank you for always writing me such great letters you inspire me and make me feel like a success. I love how interested you always are in the things that I am always interested in. It means so much. Also I was thinking about how you were feeling and I have come to think about the movie Hook a lot. I feel like that’s kinda our movie and It always reminds me that I want to be just like you when I grow up. However there is something that I was thinking about this last week and it was the line from the movie that says, "Death would be the ultimate adventure." How deeply inspired that line is. I was thinking of how no matter how old I get I always want to live for the adventure but then I realized what adventure am I talking about? The more I thought the more I realized that the gospel is my adventure! Every day we get to live should somehow be spent in the service of our God. And then the line about death as we realize it really would be the greatest adventure as we embark on the final voyage to everlasting life and eternal exaltation having given our all while here on this earth. There would be chills running around in our bodies as we smoothly sail into the resurrection and the judgment knowing that this is not the end but rather the beginning of an INFINITE and ETERNAL progression. I love thinking about that and it drives my heart and desires to serve the very best I can. Mom I also have been thinking about you this week. I think back on things that happened and how they happened and how I acted and how everyone else acted and how you always had SO much to do yet you ALWAYS got it done.
Now for this week, well we went from 6 baptisms to 1. I have never seen so much adversity and I am not gonna lie I just don’t think we were ready for it. We had Monica and her divorce problems, the two kids Bladamir and Jennifer with their lack of permission from their parents, Mitch kuck with his legal issues, and then the day we go to give Elena a baptismal interview she ends up telling us she is leaving to Michigan to live with her boyfriend in a week! In other words I can’t be baptized. It was so bizarre and so fast that it just blew up in our faces. We have just been trying very hard to recuperate, to get back up and to keep going. The only baptism that is going to go through hopefully is Jose Deleon's and the cool part is that he is getting baptized with his son Oscar who is 8 and his wife just had a baby who is going to be blessed on the same day. So that’s pretty cool and exciting. Also we did have a lot of the Juarez family show up on Sunday. A couple of them were not there but quite a good amount were. The hard part to that is that Weo who we had talked to about repentance and had talked to president got freaked out and flew out of the building after sacrament meeting. I guess we will just have to get him some other time. haha Then this week I also got to go on splits with Pres Martinez who is an awesome scholar of the doctrine to go and talk to Victor Juarez who is probably the most likely to never change. Let’s just say we left and Victor was almost like wiggin out trying to keep the conversation going so that we wouldn’t leave. It was pretty comical haha not gonna lie. Then I also had the opportunity to show some of my real colors. We had picked up Chewy (Jesus is his real name) because he had wanted to talk to us about making a phone call to pres and he needed our help. Anyways we go to KFC to pick up some food for his family because their electricity went off. Well we get there and he orders like twenty dollars worth of food. Then of course his wallet is empty and he has no money. (yea the old wallet trick) haha well that’s what I am thinking. But I realized even IF he is pulling this on me why can’t I pay it? They feed us all the time as missionaries and for this ONE time I can’t pay for some chicken? WOW I had a serious growing moment in like 20 seconds worth of time. haha I paid for the chicken and refused to take the money they offered to pay me back with. I felt soo good and tingly inside. The Lord had once again given me an opportunity to show some love. haha Now here is the miracle. MUAHAHAHA!!! Well we had some free time on Saturday because frisbee got over early and Elder Berry and I both are blowing out of our suits. haha So We head out to some little thrift stores that are close to our house. Well let me tell ya WE WERE BLESSED! We didn’t have much success at the first store but at the second store Elder Berry found a beautiful suit (with my drycleaner eye I put it at about a 1500 dollar suit) it’s from London and is made sooo well. We got it for 2 dollars. It even fits Elder Berry perfectly! It is brown with pinstripes and really can’t explain more than it is perfect for him. Well how is this my blessing? Right next to the suits is this sign that says ties 5 for a dollar. OH BABY. The only bad part is that there is like a billion ties but in this rusty ol box. Well I start into the box and to my amazement every tie in the box is from Italy and is super nice and they are all skinny ties! I have never seen such a great find! I walked out with 22 new ties for 4 dollars and 50 cents. And trust me these ties are worth a lot. The only bad part is that now I need to press them out. haha Oh man it feels soo good to be blessed. To finish it all off I want to share something that I learned this week. I was reading in D and C in a section around 76 the scripture is on the right side of the page in the right column but I can’t remember the number haha. Anyways it says gird up your loins and be faithful and ye shall overcome all things. Now for me I kinda put it into normal day words and I got the following. Put your pants on, be a man and be faithful and I will be able to do all things. I love this scripture now. I have just decided this week that no matter what happens I will always be a man and I will make sure my pants are always on and that I am the one in control under the direction of Heavenly Father that is. I just think sometimes it really is just simple. BE A MAN. Make your own decision, just be faithful and we will come off conqueror.
I love you guys and miss you soo much! I hope you have an awesome inspiring week fill with many adventures!
LOVE, ELDER OLIVER

February 20, 2012

Well my wonderful awesome loving magnificent familia that I love so very much I am pleased to say that this week is what one might call Pure AWESOME. hahahaa First though I must thank you for all the wonderful letters and for telling me what is going on in your lives and how everything is going. I love hearing about it and I really miss you guys dearly. ! I am so happy to hear that all of you are doing things and staying very busy. The lord has always warned us to not be idlers but to be anxiously engaged in a good cause. I find that that still applies even out here in the mission. We always have to be moving, doing, changing, growing or we will have wasted our precious time here in this life and especially on the mission. I love growing and I love to change and learn. It is my passion right now. I try to think of how much can I change or be changed by the end of my mission and then I set out to accomplish the dreams. It is awesome to see how much you get blessed when your heart is sincere and you aim for something higher than you thought you could attain. I love this gospel soo much and I love my heavenly father and his son Jesus Christ. The reason I feel so strongly about this is because of the things that happened this week.

Now as for my week. Like I said before it was straight up and down awesome. We even had a couple of very hard things happen but they just cant keep a guy down when the blessings keep pulling a guy up. SO to start. MONDAY... We had an awesome pday and middle of pday I realized what we were going to do for family night with the Juarez family, less active side. We have been doing something known as scripture of the night for a while now with investigators and I cant believe how well it works! EVERYONE is reading their scriptures and they are just loving them and asking for more! It is a miracle and it touches me every time someone says "I feel like they are talking to me!" We are asking everyone to join and they all do and because we only send out like a verse or two its not a hard read or anything. 30 seconds later people are loving the scriptures. So we decided to get the Juarez family to do it, but remember these people are still pretty hard hearted. So we make it a competition and now everyone is in. I can not tell you how much it has changed them in only one week! they are sooooo competitive that now they all carry around their Book of Mormons and they have told us they consider leaving other things behind to bring it. hahaha not to mention half the people that participate are not even members who are now reading it. Oh yea not to mention sometimes when they accidentally leave the book in their room and they are on the computer they go to our website and read from there. It has just been awesome and inspiring. haha Then on top of that Monday night we receive a miracle phone call. A guy by the name of Mitch Kuck calls us and says he wants to be baptized and will do anything he has to to do it as soon as possible! Miracle I think so. So now we are at 6 baptismal dates set! Well of course because we are doing so good things kinda have to fall apart a little. Well 4 dates got pushed back this week. One because a divorcement didn’t go through, the other 2 because the kids hadn’t told their dad that they were going to be baptized, and the last because Jose Deleons wife is having her kid TODAY. haha c section... and the baptism will be too pressured if we do it this coming week. By the way we didn’t have 3 baptisms yesterday I had meant the end of THIS week. but anyways. So kinda a little sad but not to bad just push backs. They all still keep saying "yea this is something I am just ready for and really want to do." so we are still pretty pumped for them. But back to the miracle on the 32nd street entourage. Then I don’t know if I told you all this but I got chosen from the about 200 missionaries in this mission to sing in a special choir. I get to sing tenor and Guess what? the song we are singing is 68 pages long. yea 68. It goes from Christ’s baptism to his Resurrection in about an hour worth of time. So Wednesday at zone conference we got to stay there until about 6 at night practicing, in the which I was the only tenor present and I really have no musical background when it comes to reading notes, only to have to drive an hour and a half back home. So the whole day was gone. Yet here is the miracle... We still got twenty lessons this week. Oh wait here’s the best part. We got 8 member present lessons which is the most we have ever had, 8 less active, and 4 others followed by 6 dates set, 4 investigators in sacrament meeting, and three new investigators. Oh yea and we had 100 people in sacrament meeting because guess who all came? YEP ALMOST THE WHOLE JUAREZ INNACTIVE FAMILY. The only people that were not there were Amanda and Weo because they came to our church last week and because Amanda is not a member they go to her church every other week because Weo is a good guy who supports his wife and is showing her he cares. Oh and Oneida (one) ((oh-nay)) but here kids came. Oh and Victor. he is a whole other story. We actually went to pick him up and he wouldn’t even come out of his room to talk to us. Yet he almost won the scripture competition. sooo We are still working on him. WOO Sorry I got carried away but its just so awesome!!! Then we got to meet with Weo and Amanda this week and we had an awesome lesson and then afterwards when we were walking out to go Weo followed us and spilled some serious beans. Lets just say we left with him saying I can do this and I am gonna do this and you guys are right Thanks. All I can really say is the Lord super inspired us to ask just the right questions. It is so hard to see all this success and remember that it is by the Lords hand alone and that we are just the tools because really we get soooo excited and it just feels soo good! I want to think some of it was me But trust me when I say none of it was. The Lord has seen fit to pour out quite a few blessings upon us and I am forever in His debt to have even seen such blessings. OH not to mention one night this week we were stressing because we thought all our baptisms were this coming week and we needed to prepare quite a bit, but then all of a sudden no joke about 4 lessons cancel on us this one night I think it was Friday. Not like 4 hours worth of time but like our plan our back up plan and the two other plans in case everything fell through. Well we decide to pray and ask for the inspiration to know what to do. Well we both feel prompted to go to bowling green. at that moment we were in Zolfo which is the complete other side of our area, but we have been pretty good with our miles so we head out and we decide to visit Mindy Juarez. Well we pull up and her nonmember husband is outside. He runs in and tells her to come out but he comes out with her. By the way that has never ever happened before. So we just start talking and laughing and stuff and then all of a sudden out of no where her husband asks us why do we serve missions. OH BOY what a question. hahaha I love that one. So we both tell him why and bear testimony. Needless to say he kinda shrugged it off and asked a couple more questions and then goes inside. Well the miracle is that he came to church on Sunday... I love this mission.... He has never come to church ever. Yet there he was and he was all happy and smiling and it was great because the rest of the Juarez family was there to be like a support to each other. I just really cant even describe how happy I am and how grateful I am to be in this very blessed area. I also was just asked to be the one who baptizes Elena this next week which really makes you feel good. All I know is that my Heavenly Father loves me and that He cares so much for me. Sometimes I don’t know why but he does and I get to see it almost everyday. I love you guys and I miss you a lot. I cant wait to see you all again someday soon enough. You guys mean everything to me.
LOVE ELDER OLIVER