Monday, July 9, 2018 (transcription from Audio letter)
Hey everyone, This is week 4 of transfer 16.
It's been a pretty good week. We've been busy. We started off the week with exchanges with the Elders of Hospital where they have, it's a super country like rural sector. Super fun. I was with Elder Kammerman who has my time in the mission but he's been here a month and a half more than me because when he came he already knew Spanish. So the interchange was really good. We mostly just contacted a bunch and then we had a Family Home Evening with some members which a person investigating was supposed to come to but in the end they didn't come.
On Wednesday, we had interviews with President Harris. Which went well. (Hold on, we are just getting to the cyber.) We had to do a training during the interviews. We talked about unity and working with members, which was good. We applied some of the things we taught in our sector these past several weeks and it's been going really well. Mostly about working with the branch council. They finally called us a new branch mission leader this week. They have a habit here of calling less actives to be mission leaders and they've kind of done that in our branch here which is just how it goes. He's a really nice guy. He's from Venezuela. We have a lot of Venezuelans in our Branch which is fun. They are a lot of fun to work with. The interview was pretty normal. I talked a little bit about my mission goals with President some more. (Sorry, I'm looking through my notes right now of what we've done this week.)
On Thursday we did divisions so that one of the District leaders of our district could do an interview for the sisters for an investigator of the sisters who's an 83 year old man. He's kind of a fun little old guy. He's super nice. Very repentant. He's half deaf and half blind and kind of shuffles around but he was very excited to be baptized. He cried at the end of the interview when the Elder told him that he "passed" his interview. It was pretty funny though because he's hard of hearing and the other Elder has about 6 months in the mission so he speaks pretty good Spanish but he's still got a bit of his old accent, but I'm in a public place so I can't tell you EXACTLY what he said. But it was basically like...Imagine an 83 year old Chilean man who's partially blind sitting across from a 19 yr old American who speaks decent spanish but with a pretty thick accent. So at first he couldn't hear him so then he had to speak really loud and it went something like, " SO BROTHER HAVE YOU EVER HAD A HOMOSEXUAL RELATIONSHIP?" (said very loudly)
And the old man kind of looks at him, and was like, "Oh when I worked, I used to have a work companion who was like that, who was homosexual."
And the Elder was like, "Ok....did you ever have a homosexual relationship with him?"
"What?"
(Louder) "DID YOU EVERY HAVE A HOMOSEXUAL RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR WORK COMPANION?"
"Uh, No. NO. No!"
"Okay."
And so for every question it went something like that. I thought it was pretty funny. These two yelling across the table at each other. But anyway, it was pretty good.
So after that, on Saturday, we had the baptism for him. He is the father of a member. They got there about 40 minutes late to their dad's, to his baptism. My companion and I had to go before the actual baptism. So when they got there, they were taking pictures and stuff. And in the beginning, I walked into the chapel, and this is like after I've been there for a half an hour, and the branch president was like, "hey, the person who was supposed to give a talk didn't show up so do you want to give the talk?" And I was like "sure." So I gave a talk at his baptism. It was pretty good. It was fun. And it is just really awesome to see older people get baptized, because at that point in life, there are very few people who are willing to make that big of a change. And he was just so willing to make that change. I was VERY happy to see him do that. I think that's about it for Saturday.
On Sunday, we had church like normal. We worked a bunch. We contacted a ton. We have a person that is interested named Veronica and she is awesome. I don't want to jinx it, knock on wood, but I feel like she's going to get baptized in this change. Hopefully, I'll be able to see that. And she came to church for the second time this week and she's excited for her baptism. We still need to teach her the word of wisdom but she doesn't seem to have any problems. And that's about it, but she's great. Be praying for her. And be praying for us to be able to find some more people. We have a goal of 4 baptisms this change, which is pretty high. But it looks like we are probably going to achieve our zone goal, which when we put it, it was also pretty high, so I'm pretty happy with how we're doing as a zone.
But this transfer our focus has been on obedience and I've been memorizing scriptures that have to do with obedience. My goal is to memorize at least 10 this change. I mean I probably could do more, but I want to be able to remember them. So far I have 4 and so far I remember all 4. And those are Alma 57:21, John 14:15,21, Matthew 7:21, and D&C 93:1. All really good scriptures about obedience. One of my personal favorite scriptures about obedience comes from Leviticus 26 but that one is kind of long to memorize, but the whole chapter talks about the blessings and consequences of obedience and I think it's really interesting.
Also, this week in my personal study I was reading the "war chapters" (in the Book of Mormon) and reading a little bit of the story of Amalickiah and the Lamanites. And Amalickiah basically takes command of the armies of the Lamanites and then there's a rebellion and a lot of the Lamanites don't want to go fight against the Nephites. And so they go up and they come high up on top of a mountain and the king gives Amalickiah control of all the armies that ARE willing to fight and tells him to go obligate the people who are up on the mountain who are led by a man named Lehonti to force them to join the army and go fight the Nephites. So Amalickiah goes, but he's got kind of a different idea and he sends a message asking for Lehonti to come down from the mountain. And Lehonti won't come down. So he sends another one and then another one and Lehonti won't come down from the mountain. And Amalickiah finally goes up closer to the camp, sends another message saying, come down from the mountain and bring your guards. So this time Lehonti listens to him and comes down and brings his guards and him and Amalickiah form a plan to have Lehonti's army come down and capture Amalickiah s army and Amalekiah would be put as second in command to Lehonti. So that's what they do. But Amalekiah has one of his servants slowly poison Lehoni until he dies leaving Amalickiah in charge of both armies. The thing about this is I think there's a little bit of symbolism in the fact that Lehonti was up on top of the mountain. Mountains normally represent temples in scriptures or a holy place. So we can learn a little bit from that about standing in holy places and not being moved. Satan's gonna come and tempt us to come down out of those holy places, but no matter how many times he comes and he tries to get us to come out, we've gotta stay where we know we ought to be.
So yeah, it's been a good week. Doing well. Working hard. Hope you guys are all having a good time at home. I didn't mention that today we had a little P-day activity playing soccer and eating pizza. I've been taking advantage of having some pizza places here and have been eating a ton of pizza. Haha!
But I love you guys. Have a good week. Take Care. Bye!
Elder Olson
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| Jaime, the mission "dad" of the Buin zone took us to lunch (last week's letter mentions this) |
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| Jaime is great |
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| post soccer P-day pizza |
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