25 July 2010

hola family, okay mom yes thanks I’m wearing my retainer, I am on the second bottle of the cream, Can you send some more, and I have been out of pills, but idk if you can get those. Nathan I will be praying for you to have your baby on 11 11 11. that would be sweet. One Nephew this year on my birthday and one on 11 11 11.  No mom I didn’t receive the second package yet, thanks for sending it though. I love getting packages, I don’t care what’s in it, it’s a package.

I want to say thanks to Sister Shepherd for sending a letter to me and to my comp, in was in English and i had to translate for him but it made him very very happy. I said it is the first time he has got a letter from anyone besides his girlfriend or mom and was really excited. We are going to go make a copy of it today so he can have one. He liked it too because he can read it and practice English. Thanks.

If anyone else wants to do that it was a great idea.

We got the new mission president this month from Utah. I got to meet him last week, he is awesome. He is a very spiritual nice person. He is very strict but nobody cares because of how loving he is about it. His wife too is a great person. She can speak Spanish too. she loves to talk with all the Latino elders in Spanish. Every time I have seen her, just twice, she is with all the elders like how are you doing, how’s the family, how can i help you and everything. I am really looking forward to working with them. This mission is changing a lot for the better. There were lots of things that were not very good. He is here cleaning up the mission. Before the other president left he wanted to mission to be good for the other president to he sent home like 20 elders. That is something very sad that they got send home, but then again it is something happy that this mission is going to be full of good elders. This next transfer which I will probably leave Asuncion, they will be 17 new gringos and like  7 Latinos. That is a ton. And there is 30 something elders ending their mission. Lots of the elders i know actually are going home. All the ones that are here training, and our district leader.

This week, don’t ask me what happened but my espanol has been way way better. I have not been afraid to speak during lessons. Me and my comp have been teaching a lot, and now I actually contribute to the lesson. it’s great. We are getting along great too. The ward is growing a lot and we are starting to do lots of great things. I don’t want to leave here next change but we’ll see.

We are going to start have a night of commandments every week. They have them all over Central America. It’s just a normal activity that we teach a principle or something. Then we have an activity or game thing we play. and have food and everything. It’s because here there are lots of like he said this I’m not going to church and stuff so just to unite all of the members. Also we bring investigators to bond with members too. This ward is really struggling right now with a lot. The first meeting nobody we had with all the leaders nobody showed up, only us and the bishop. But me and my companion have been working tons with the leaders and changing things here. The bishop here is a great person, but just has like 5 years to be a member so he doesn’t know how to do it very well. SO we are helping him out. Everythings going great.

Time here is flying by like I can’t believe i cant explain it, its not real, I’m in Guatemala, wow, crazy. But i next Tuesday i complete 6 months. I don’t want to think about that. I from now on will forget how much time i have, i just want to work until my body can’t move, and I hope that will be 2 years when my body shuts down, haha . no but everything going great but I’m going go and play some soccer or basketball at the church.

Adios, love Elder Gardner ( canchito, is my name in this ward, haha, ask Jason or Nathan.) its like little white boy.

11 July 2011

Hola fam, So i have lots i want to say but dont know where to start. Well i woke up in the middle of the night yesterday and was freezing, had a headache and the runs. Yesterday, after church i slept the rest of the day and went to the bathroom about 10 times. I feel better today but still have the runs. One thing that i really annoying is that my comedor gave my  some pills and something to drink. I don’t really trust their medicine here. They are all sick here. So i don’t know what I’m going to do, I don’t want to take them. But she is going to ask me if i did. And she went out and bought them for me so I don’t want to just blow it off. I’m hoping i get better really fast so i can just tell her thanks but im better. But idk. I hate when members do that, everyone is like oh elder take this here, oh take this. I say no, but they insist. I’ve learned for the next time that im not telling anyone I’m sick because i don’t want theirs medicine.

Oh Jason you emailed me in Spanish a couple of weeks ago, and i was happy because i basically understood, but there was a few words I didn’t understand so I wrote them down and asked my comp. He said who wrote you a Mexican wrote this. he said those words were like way Mexican slang. I thought that was funny.

Oh so we had a not very cool thing happen but a story. I don’t know what it would be called but it was the lord that set it all up. So on Wednesdays we have a meeting with the ward mission leader. Our new investigator Manuel is a ward missionary so we went to his house to get him before the meeting. he said that the ward mission leader called and said it was cancelled. Me and my comp said oh well lets go to the church anyway because he didn’t tell us anything. So we went and called him and said it was cancelled. So Manuel left. But I had to go to the bathroom before we left. And so my comp started to shoot some hoops. Then we left after like 5 min. As we left somebody was coming in the gate. It was one of our investigators Wilson, the cousin of Manuel. He was balling and had his hood up and didn’t look good at all. we don’t know exactly what happened, but his wife and kids told him to get out of the house and they never want to see him again. He told us we wanted to kill himself, and wanted to just die. We talked with him and told him that Christ suffered for all your pains and afflictions. And that all was going to work out in the end and everything.

The thing that almost made me cry or pass out is that he has only been to church 2 or 3 Sundays, we had not been able to teach him anything. But he wanted to die and he said all he knew is that Sunday he felt peace and joy at the church and so he went to the church. He had no clue that we would be at the church or that anybody would be. He said that if we were not at the church he was going to go home and take the machete he has a chop off his head. I am very glad that we and him were led by the spirit to the church. If we weren’t in tune with the spirit he could be dead. Now he wants to be baptized with his mom and brother this month. 

But it was amazing to me how everything worked out perfectly. He didn’t know what to do so he went where he felt peaceful and joy the church looking for the missionaries. And how we met him in the parking lot as he walked in. It just shows us how much the lord is in everything and knows his children. Instead of somebody committing suicide we are going to have a baptism and change his life forever.

We found a new investigator the other day. Another story i believe of how the lord is over all. She has a 2 year old kid who has a parasite and might be going to die. But we were looking for somebody else and found her, my comp said something like we have a message about Christ and how he suffered for all of our sins, sicknesses and trials. I think that is what made her think and be like okay you can come in. because she is going through a hard trial with her son being sick right now. First of all we asked is she had any question. She wanted to know what is the difference between our church and others. My comp said not like straight up but it a nice way that we have the authority. Her next question was what is our purpose in this life. I taught her about our purpose in this life and shared alma 32 34 that says this is the time for men to prepare to meet god. And then we talked about the atonement. The one problem in the future is that she has school every Sunday. But it ends in 2 months. But i liked something my comp told me, he said if she really gains a testimony she will change her schedule or figure out how to go to church.

Something really sad happened yesterday, we showed up for the priesthood correlation meeting in the morning. And nobody showed up. Well the bishop did. But nobody else. How can we help them understand the importance of magnifying their calling and being at meetings.

But all is going good. Just have the runs, but im in Guatemala so that’s normal i guess. I have almost been here 6 months wow. Time is flying. I will be home in no time. I don’t want it to go fast but got to go.

adios fam

elder gardner

P.S. Hope your back gets better Joseph.