Monday, November 13, 2023 10:25am
Hello my friends, how's it going? Happy Pday! I hope you all are doing well.
Soooo this week was pretty interesting. I'll start off with the good stuff before getting to the big sad of the week.
First, Zone Conference! It was the first one I had in person, which meant they brought us food. Exciting, I know, they had these American style fried chicken sandwiches, and dang, did it make me miss American cuisine. I also had the opportunity to give a small discourse on a conference talk, Eternal Truth by Elder Pingree, or should I say VERDAD ETERNA POR EL ÉLDER PINGREE. That's right, gave it in Español. With only 2 hours of preparation on a bus. Yuhhhh. Anyways, I learned a ton during the conference, mostly about how we should be having member lessons and thinking about our amigos in a more eternal perspective. Powerful stuff. It was also fun to finally meet all the Elders in my zone, they're all super cool and a lot of them only have a few more transfers than me, so we'll be hanging out quite a bit. Probably.
After the conference, we're supposed to have interviews with President, but any busses back to Pico would have left before we got our interviews, so President and Hermana Marsden drove us four Pico elders back home in their car and had pur interviews in our pension. It was actually so wild. It was a fun drive, and it was really cool to get to know our presidency a little better, but gosh, President was HAULING. The speedometer didn't go below 140 kph pretty much the whole time. For all of you in the Imperial system, that's about 90mph. Poor Elder Nieto was next to me for it and got my fingernails dug into his thigh whenever there was a mildly large bump.
The work has gone well! We've had a lot of great lessons this week and we were even able to put a couple of amigos on date! Unfortunately, we didn't have anyone come to church yesterday, but they all had some pretty good excuses, i.e. someone got bit by a dog and needed medical treatment. But we have high hopes and high faith, so now it's just gotta be the Lord's timing!
I've really enjoyed getting to know the members recently. They're all super nice and way funny, especially the old dudes. A lot of the younger guys in the ward have served missions as well and have some really cool stories and advice for us, and some of them are pretty good with English as well, having learned from their American comps. Basically all of them find my last name hard to say tho, I've almost had to give everyone a lesson on it, but they got it now. Kinda.
DISTRICT WARS!! So our zone started this thing called 'district wars' TM Elder Bain. Basically, every week for the rest of the transfer, we have been challenged to meet a certain quota with something, something like finding new people, having lessons with members, cualquier cosa, and there's extra little challenges, like 'share this scripture with someone new today!' or 'teach someone about the Holy Ghost!' It's been fun times, and everyone in the zone has been killing it. Elder Bain says he's not losing a game he invented though, so we've been going really hard with it. Go us, slay, pop off kings.
Okay, time for the big sad. We have pretty much no agua. No idea what happened. To describe a little bit of the situation, any and all cold water has stopped running, and the hot water has very VERY low pressure. Oh, and the shower isn't running at all. (We used the other elders' pension to shower thus far, so we dont stank worse than normal) But yeah, super annoying to wash dishes, takes forever for us to manually fill the tank to flush the toilet, and i can barely wash my hands well enough to feel comfortable touching anything. The funny thing is that we got a bunch of stuff in the pension fixed a couple weeks ago, including getting hot water running to places it wasn't before. So legit, hopefully we can get that fixed. Appreciate what you have before you lose it, everyone.
At least I'm not gonna be in Pico for the majority of the week. That's right, I'm actually in Bahía rn so I can get my documentation done and be here ☆legally☆ and ☆not as a tourist☆ anymore. So yeah, that process takes a couple days, and the zone leaders want us to do divisions with them in Santa Rosa on Thursday. Gonna be a pretty interesting week again, but I'm excited! Maybe I'll be able to get Mickey D's in Bahía. That'd be cool.
Alrighty, now that all my week is out of the way, it's time for my Talk of the Week, or Talk of the Semana, acronymed 'TotS' and as which SHALL HENCEFORTH BE KNOWN.
This week's is 'All Thy Children Shall Be Taught,' by Sister Colleen K. Menlove, April 2005.
"Children need to know that having faith in the Savior and following Him will help them receive peace in this troubled world." That quote pretty much sums up the topic of this talk. Parents have a responsibility to teach their children about the great love that Jesus Christ has for them and help them gradually come to understand the full meaning, sacrifice, and power of His Atonement. Sister Menlove mentions that one of the best ways parents can do this is through example. Either through showing the fraction of Christ's love to their children through their actions, or through the use of the Atonement themselves, always repenting and becoming better. What I took from this talk as a missionary is how central Christ is to our church. It doesn't matter what age you are, you can have a testimony of Jesus Christ and His love and devotion for you. We really try to emphasize that as missionaries as we try to explain that it's never too late to come back to His fold and become one of His children. We also get to show that great example of repentance as we also better ourselves day by day, whether spiritually, emotionally, linguistically, or what have you. Missionary work is really a blessing, yall, I'm telling you.
Whew, this is probably my longest one in a while! But yeah, that's pretty much all for this week! I'm so happy to be out here, working in this great gathering of scattered Israel! Thanks a ton for always having my back! Stay safe and trust in your Savior!
Elder Montgomery
(He didn’t include any pictures this week, but I snagged a few from his Google photos…)
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