New area new companion. Work to do!

Well shoot, the internet here is horrible, so I can't write a whole lot today. Pero que bueno because to be honest don't have a whole lot to say. The elders that were here before haven't really left me with much, I got here (my new area is called Chavez, like and hour and a half away from Tlahualilo) and there is practically nothing, so the whole week we have contacted. I know there are a lot of cool ensign stories about contacting and what not haha but I have never had such an experience, contacting is just separating the wheat from the tares one grain at a time, haha and the people here are no where near as open as they were in Tlahualilo, actually my area right now reminds me a lot of Durango - AKA Sodom and Gomorrah - haha but hey if the other elders did very little to improve the work here, it only means that there are more elect for me to find and baptize.

Did I mention my companion is an American. Yes yes, my first American companion, and let's just say he's not a fan of studying the language, so the Lord has given me a lot more of a chance to speak and help my companion. 

Haha yup that's about it... . .

How to be a missionary- Big brother advice

As Matt got his call this week, and as he will be leaving soon to serve his mission and because I have been thinking about it a lot lately, about happiness, and The Atonement. 

I love what I have learned about happiness in the mission. I have learned how happy God is and how anxious He is that we can be happy as well. In Abraham 1:2 Abraham explains perfectly what the gospel, righteous living, and the blessings of the priesthood offer to us. Happiness, peace, and rest. Alma is one of my favorite teachers of happiness. He himself having tasted misery and then the true happiness of the gospel is a powerful teacher of what Christ and the gospel offer us. Alma 41. The laws that we have to understand to lead us to happiness are just as real as the laws that we have to understand to make a plane fly. A lie that Satan has put in the world is that there are lots of ways to be happy. There are a lot of ways to find pleasure, a lot of which actually kill our happiness, but there is no other way to be happy other than to be like our Father. In this chapter it says that the nature of God is the Nature of happiness, that God knows how to be happy. I am only starting to understand happiness but I have learned enough to realize that it is true, happiness is found in our Father. Christ offers to bring us to our Father so that our happiness can be complete.  

I have been trying to study about the atonement to try and understand what Jesus Christ did for us. And I just wanna share a couple scriptures that helped me and hope they'll help Matt. First in DC 19:16-19. I love these verses so much. In this Jesus Christ Himself explains and testifies of His atoning sacrifice. First He tells us about His divinity, testifying of what was really sacrificed, "I, God." the atonement was the physical and spiritual sacrifice of a God, a perfect being that descended from Godhood with His Father, to save his helpless brothers and sisters. Next He tells us in a few words what that sacrifice included, a payment so great it caused a God to sweat blood, to cry to His Father and ask if there was some other way. His anguish was something eternal. Next He tells us what we must to do receive the grace of such a sacrifice, if Christ was willing to descend to the deepest pits of hell to drag us out, there would have to be something required of us, repentance, it would be painful, would require everything of us, just like the atonement required everything of Him, but because God is good, it would be a price far less than that that He paid. 

And to end He told us that He suffered these things, not so that He could be glorified, but so that His Father would be, and so that we can be saved from ourselves. CHRIST SUFFERED SO WE DON'T HAVE TO. That is something that is so essential in the atonement, the hell that Satan and we put ourselves through is not necessary, Christ suffered so that we don't have to. God, the Son of God, gave everything, so that we don't have to lose everything. That is something that every missionary needs to learn and then to teach. Christ suffered so that we don't have to. There are so many miserable people that just choose to be that way because they won't come unto Christ, misery is the bitter cup that we insist on filling after Christ drunk it and gulp her down ourselves. Why do we do that? 

Don't be miserable on the mission Matt. Be obedient, don't waste a minute of your time, in the MTC, in your training, in the field, not a minute. and hey don't worry about a new language, haha your gonna look stupid....every freaking day. Get over it. If you pick it up fast, que bueno, if not your humility more than your ability to speak is the purpose of your mission.  

Matt look up the talk Becoming a Consecrated Missionary By Tad R Callister

Keep Praying

You will never guess what happened. On Monday we got told that a senior couple were coming to Talhualilo to help us out and that the Elder has been a branch president 3 times before so he was coming to be branch president. That's right people I am now serving with the mexican version of Grandma and Grandpa Roberts. Haha they are named Elder and Sister P, and to be honest I could not be more happy, the extra responsabilities we had were taking a lot of our time so President Ramos decided to help us out because we are actually having a lot of success with the investigators here. 

 

They will be focusing right now 100% on reactivation and retention. HAha so we spent a lot of the week introducing them to all of the members here in Tlahualilo. HAha I never realized how freaking fast we walk until we had to show the misionary couple around and I would start walking normally and after like 2 minutes I realized they weren't right next to me so I would look back to see where they had wandered off to and I would see two little dots on the horizon trying to keep up....oops...hahah.   

President R. (Mission President), his wife, the district president and like 6 other leaders all came to lil Tlahualilo to sustain and set apart President P., more priesthood than Tlahualilo has seen in....ever...haha. 

We have had really good lessons this week with our investigators and they are all progressing really well. April is looking to be a months of baptisms every week, gotta just keep praying hard and helping out our investigators. God has done so much to help us, when we got here we had nothing, NOTHING. All the other elders told us that being sent to Tlahualilo is like going to outdarkness in the final judgement...hahah yikes, needless to say I was less than thrilled when I showed up. 

 

But after three months of working our hardest, literally there are days when we are running from appointment to appointment, we have 0 time and right now we have 7 investigators with a baptismal date and a lot of others that are listening and changing their lives. We started  lessons with these people hearing how they would never come to our church, how they didn't know how to read so how could they read the Book of Mormon, how the Virgin Maria is more important than Jesus Christ.... and I'm not kidding at this point we can't get to appointments fast enough. 

The Lord really is giving and has given us soo much here in Tlahualilo. Keep Praying

Elder Roberts 

 

 

Changes required to be happy

I don't know how we lucked out to find R. but this man is one of a kind as far as investigators go. I have never had an investigator as easy as him, he does and accepts everything we tell him.

One perfect example, he has been studying with the Jehovah's witnesses for a long time and so he believed, naturally, that Jehovah is our Heavenly Father and prays to Jehovah in the name of Christ. We knew for him to be converted obviously he needed to understand better the Godhead. So we spent a whole lesson on God, Christ, and The Holy Ghost. He was a little confused after the lesson and told us the he believed us but it was hard for him to accept that Christ is Jehovah, so we gave him some homework in the Book of Mormon and the Bible and told him to pray about what we talked about....

In the next lesson he told us he insisted on saying the prayer, and prayed very fervently to our Heavenly Father in the name of Christ. It was so powerful to hear him say a prayer so fervently to his Heavenly Father and the change that he has felt in his life because of it. We also taught him about President Monson this week and the importance of a living prophet, he took one look at the picture of President Monson and asked us if we could print him another copy so he could hang it in his house and told us he can't wait until general conference to hear the words of the prophet of God. He showed up to church this week and told me he can't wait to be baptized and started to cry and told me that he has been waiting to be baptized in the true church for a long time he will do whatever it takes to get baptized.

He dumped his girlfriend after the lesson about Chastity, chucked his coffee after the lesson of the word of wisdom, prays with all his heart to understand and progress, and to top it off invites his friends to listen to us to, but they aren't as interested...haha.

It honestly humbles me to be this mans missionary, there hasn't been a baptism in Tlahualilo in a long time and there have been hundreds of Elders sweeping this area and it just happened to be me and my companion who found this man.

We had four of our investigators show up to church and all 4 will be baptized within a month. Also we had several less active members show up making our attendance more than it has been since I got here. The Lord is blessing us so much as we just work and pray and don't take crap from Satan. Its not to say that he doesn't give us a lot of hard times, but one of the key things in the mission is to learn damage control and trust me when our investigators are progressing if we don't put in the extra effort Satan goes to town, but if we do everything we can Heavenly Father blesses us with the words, and service necessary to save his children.

I have learned so much about God on the mission and about His very real desire to do everything to save His children. We are also teaching a less active member that is an angry, lost 19 year old kid....who does that remind me of.... He tells us all he wants is to be happy and he doesn't understand why God doesn't help him out. He tells us that he doesn't even know what he wants to be happy just he wants to be happy. He doesn't read his scriptures, or pray, and in church he just sits around and plays on his phone, and he asks us where is God.... haha it really is exactly like me.

Where is God? If we don't do anything how can we expect God to solve it all for us? In the mission I have really learned what it means by the faith is action, what it means to be saved by grace after all we can do. God will not do something for us that we can do for ourselves. If all we do is ask God to make it all better and then sit around and wait what can we expect from a God that has given us everything we need to make it back. I really have learned what the gospel can give us, how to progress grace by grace until we reach our potential as children of God, the gospel really is for our happiness, Christ offers us happiness, the trick is for us to learn how to live his gospel.

It's the hardest thing in the world, some days it requires everything I have to just say okay Father, I'll do it, but in the end it really was what I needed.

Cleaning the Font