Elder Benjamin Sierra's Missionary Blog

A GREAT GENERAL CONFERENCE AND NOW PAPA JOHNS, VOLLEYBALL AND STAR WARS! CAN IT GET ANY BETTER THAN THIS?

Oct. 5, 2016

Dear Family,

Sorry I'm on so early (for you guys). I get to go to the president's house for Papa John's, volley ball and Star Wars, so I gotta get my emails done early!

 

Wow, it's been officially two months since I left home! That's pretty neat! 

Conference weekend was such a flippin' blast!!! We had to go to our stake center to listen to it but they had a classroom playing it in English so that was bomb! Also, we brought our investigator Coni (Constanza) to conference. She's basically a member, but hasnt 'realized it yet. We've had her for two weeks and she went to ALL FOUR SESSIONS!!! Half the members in our ward didn't go to all four sessions! Heck, I'm not sure if the Bishop went to all four sessions! She was so flippin' chill and said she liked it and she felt good about it! She even grabbed my comp's notepad during Elder Robert D. Hales´ talk and copied down a scripture he mentioned, ¨"We love Him, because he first loved us." (Which is also my mission scripture so that was SO cool)

Since we were about a 25-30min walk away from the ward and our house, everyone just stayed and ate lunch in the church during the first break. We had rice with chicken both days so nothing out of the ordinary there. Then, after the next session, we did contacts by the metro station. It was a really fun weekend and listening to the words of the Prophet and Apostles was very refreshing!

Yeah, so my comp and I are over all the young men in the ward, but that's only about 5 active members. We're trying to raise that number through getting more kids to mutual, which worked last time; we had about 12. We also have this big teaching pool of recently converted young women that we teach at a member's house about twice a week. It started with one recent convert, Ana, and her other less recent convert friend, Camila. Then they got their other recent convert friends and through them, we got a reference for a single mother and her child that were inactive. Her daughter's 13 so she's about the average age of the 5-6 that we teach and we asked the groups to help in fellowshipping her and taking her to mutual/conference. She went to both and gets along awesome with the other girls. We're doing what we can to reactivate the mom who is a very friendly and happy person, but is working almost 24/7, which includes Sundays. That's actually a big reason there are so many inactives here. 

Anyway, I think the ward will grow quite a bit in a few weeks or so and I'm excited to see what lies ahead. My Spanish is getting better and I'm leading more and more lessons and talking to members a lot more. I've been adjusting quite well to Chile but I still miss certain things about the States, namely Chick-Fil-A. But, I'm having Papa-Johns today at my president's house so I'm happy!

Love you all

-Elder Sierra

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