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