3/3/2025 - Week 85 - I'm officially a missionary!

Finally, after 73 days of service in this area, I am finally part of a formal Spanish unit of the Church! 

For those of you who aren't familiar with how congregations work in the church, there are "wards" which are the largest type of congregation (usually like 80-200 people) and then the next largest group is called a "branch" (can be as small as 10 people to around as big as 80). Now we get to the level where we're at right now in Western Hills, OH, which is called a "group" (lovingly called a twig or stick because it's smaller than a branch) which is a very tiny group of members. As of right now, we have 1 active Spanish member, but thats why we're here, to fix that and grow it into a branch and eventually a ward!

Not much else happened this week. 

We had a couple of good lessons, a couple of less good lessons, and way too many cancelled lessons (including 2 where we had members show up and the friend didn't answer the door/weren't at their house, major RIP). 

We had exchanges with the MR2 Elders and they both came down here and we had a good time and made a lot of progress here! We ended up finding 5 friends that day alone (which is a lot for this area so I was hyped) including a niña whose name is Susej (pronounced like Susie with a latino accent, but it's just Jesus spelled backwards). 

We taught both of our friends named Albeiro in back to back lessons and we basically taught the same thing to both of them, so I was pretty discombobulated after teaching two people with identical names basically identical lessons. 

Sadly, only 2 of our friends came to church on Sunday, but we were able to teach them both during the 2nd hour and we stayed for the baptism of one of the English friends here in the ward. 

We also had Zone Conference this week and I wanted to share a little bit of what we learned as a spiritual thought to end this email. 
Our Assistants to the President (who are some of my good friends out here on the mission) shared a part of the John Tanner video (the link at the end of the email, its awesome and you should watch it) where it shows his conversion to the church and how he exercises his faith to have his lame leg healed so he could be baptized. During that video there is a part where the missionary asks John Tanner "Do you have the faith sufficient to be healed?" To me that's a very important question. Do you have the faith sufficient for what you desire most. We know that God is a God of miracles. We know that He is "mighty to save." When we are faced with a problem, who better could we turn to. Simply we must have the "faith sufficient to ________" (fill in that blank with whatever miracle you need). Ask yourself that question daily until you have grown your faith sufficiently to receive that miracle, then fill the blank in with the next miracle and continue the process. Never forget the simple, yet powerful scripture "For with God nothing shall be impossible" (Luke 1:37)

Hasta la proxima! Send me an email!










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