Wise Use of our 12 Hours

This week was pretty good, on wednesday we had to go to Cordoba to do exchanges with the assistants of the president, I went with a brazilian named elder Da Silva. It was funny because we had the same trainer, elder Packer! Elder Packer says he is proud of his 2 sons..but yeah the exchange was good, we taught some of their investigators who are going to be baptized this week. On the way back, it was kind of an adventure because the taxi driver "got lost" trying to get to the bus terminal. I dont know if I believe him because the whole world goes there and its huge, but he drove us all over the place and by the time we got there it was super late and the taxi ride cost 300 pesos, the most expensive taxi ride of my whole mission I think. The mission had also already bought our bus tickets, but we got there 10 mins late and missed the last bus. Thankfully we found a different company there that had a late bus going to Rio Cuarto, if not we would have had to stay the night there. Its just a shame because the tickets the mission bought will be wasted now.

We slept in a little bit the next day because we got back at 3:00am. Im kind of tired of going to cordoba because its 6 hours of travel in one day, and we always have to get up really early and we get back super late and it messes up the schedule a lot. We will be going again on the 31 of this month, and again on the 4th. 

President has made a new system of exchanges, at least once a month the zone leaders from each zone have to go to the area of the APs to work with them for a day, the idea is that the area of the assistants will be an example for the mission. It should work out pretty well, because the APs and zone leaders have a lot of experience, so with all of the ZLs and APs working in one area Im sure they will baptize a lot there. We have to do the same thing in our zone, at least once a month we have to bring the district leaders to our area to work and make our area and example for the zone. It works really well, we tried it for the first time this week on Friday and we had a lot of success! Exchanges motivate everyone to work harder, and there are always little miracles during the exchanges if we work hard. This friday I was working with an elder named Elder Dayley, he is from Utah and has 10 months in the mission. We met this guy named Roberto who is super cool, he believes a lot in God and in the power of prayers, He said he would pray and that he would like to be baptized if God answers his prayer. We are hoping he will be able to come to church next sunday! His main problem is that he lives alone except for an old lady that he takes care of, but he says that she cant be left alone. We will figure something out though. 

Another one of the people we are working with is named Amelia, she is 56 years old and she told us that she has been meeting with the missionaries for 25 years and that the only reason she hasnt been baptized yet is because her husband isnt divorced from his ex wife, so they havent been able to get married yet. But in a situation like this its hard, because if they havent taken action for 25 years its not likely that they ever will. But you never know, God has a time for everything. Maybe they just havent taken action because they dont understand the commandments. We are planning to go and just talk really openly with them and we will see what happens! 

There is a catholic priest here who is a leader of "la iglesia de fátima", one of the biggest churches in Rio Cuarto. But in the past month he has talked to 2 of our best investigators and told them to stop meeting with us, and they did. It was really annoying, our ward mission leader says we should go into the catholic church and confront him and give him a piece of our minds. He said that if the catholics believe that their church is true, why doesnt their priest let the people use their agency and let God answer their prayers to find out which church is true? I dont think we are going to go in there though haha. 

Not that much else to write about this week. Ill share a scripture that I liked this week, its 

John 11: 9 Jesus answered, Are there not twelve hours in the day? If any man walk in the day, he stumbleth not, because he seeth the light of this world.

10 But if a man walk in the night, he stumbleth, because there is no light in him.

It thought it was a really interesting scripture! At first I was thinking of it more literally...its true that there are 12 hours in a day, and that if there is light you arent going to trip because you see where you are going. In the night time its a little harder to see where you are going, and you will probably trip. But I started to think about it a little bit deeper. Who is the light of the world? Jesus. If we are walking in the light of this world, we are walking with Jesus, doing and saying the things that he would say. We arent going to trip, because when we do whats right God protects us and guides us! He will guide us on the path in life that he wants us to take and the path that will lead us to happiness!  But if we arent keeping the commandments, we have no such promise and we will probably trip because we dont have the protection of the spirit to keep us safe and out of trouble. 

Thats it! Here are some sweet pics with elder Cortés. 

Love you all have a good week!!

Elder Christensen ​

20 Month Mark.

Today is my 20th month mark in the mission whaaaat! Less then 4 months left...exciting. The mission is great and I love Argentina a ton! I get excited about coming home sometimes, other times I feel like I will miss a lot of things about Argentina...its 50/50. Im happy because I know its just the next step and I want to keep progressing. 

Anyway, this past week was super cold! They were saying it was gonna snow, it was -1 C sunday morning, and yesterday morning it was -3. We almost froze to death on the way to church at 8:30 am, I dont really like the cold when we have to be outside all day! The worst is when we knock on a door and somebody says "chicos, its too cold to have the door open" and they close it on us.  I dug out the scarf and gloves that grandpa sent me in the MTC to use, it had been a while since Id used them. 

We also repaired the bikes this week! It has been over a year since I last had an area with bikes, its really useful to have them because without them we have to walk 30 mins just to get to the start of our area. The only bad thing is that its really windy here and really cold to ride around on a bike. 

We ate lunch with a family Gonzalez this week, they have a 16 year old daughter named sofia who they sent to Orlando last year for her 15th birthday..Its pretty popular here for girls to go to Disney for their 15th birthday. But they were saying that when their other daughter Delfina turns 15 they want to all go to Orlando with her, and stay in our house and cook argentina asados with us...sounds pretty fun, she is only 12 though so its 3 years away, I doubt it will actually happen. 

On wednesday my comp really had to go to the bathroom, and we were really far away from our house, so he was knocking on doors asking people if he could use their bathroom. The first couple doors he knocked on to use the bathroom, girls came out so he was too embarrassed to ask, it was kinda funny. But eventually one guy let us in so he could use the bathroom, and the guy was super nice and we talked to him a lot about the church and we were able to set an appointment with him to come back and teach him and his family. 

On sunday I we ate lunch with the bishops family, I found out that one of the bishops sons named Caetano was born in American Fork. That was interesting, because his mom was pregnant when she went to visit her parents who had recently moved there, but then she got really sick and had to end up staying there until the baby was born. After he was born they went straight back to Argentina as soon as they could. But he wanted me to ask who was the doctor that helped me to be born? Because he wants to know if its the same one?

I am really short on time but there were two good spiritual experiences this week..the first one was that I had to do a baptismal interview for an investigator of the missionaries who live in the apartment with us, I was thinking about it all day because they knew before hand that he was going to have a few problems in the interview because of his past. I really just wanted him to feel the saviors love during the interview, and to not feel like he was being judged in anyway. I felt it would be good to share the story of the woman who was caught in adultery, where they were gonna stone her but Jesus said whoever doesn't have sins, cast the first stone. I wanted him to understand that jesus doesn't condemn us for what we have done in the past, he just wants to help us to change and to go forward, "sinning no more". He (antonio is his name) felt really good, and had to have an interview with president correa with skpe, but he was able to pass! And he will be baptized next weekend! 

The other one was that we were kind of sad the other day, because none of the people we went to visit were home, and we had been rejected a lot and the people were just lying to us so we would leave. We really wanted to find someone to teach, so I said a prayer (it was my comps idea) and I felt really emotional, because I said in the prayer that we just wanted to do Gods will, and I asked him to guide us. Right after the prayer we both picked the same house to knock on the door, it was one on that same street and the lady there was able to receive us. Her grandma recently passed away a week ago and she has a lot of questions about the plan of salvation. I was really happy to receive a really quick answer to my prayer! 

Another fun thing we had this week was last night, we had an asado at the house of Sergio (deaf) and Nelson (blind) and they have a rock band, after the asado they were playing a few songs for us. It was honestly super impressive that they can play so well being blind, and the other deaf but they played great. The only thing is that the volume was so loud I almost thought I was gonna go deaf too..

Im out of time! Love you all, I hope you have a good week! 

"The Solution"

Week number 80 in Argentina baby, thats a lot! It was also my first full week with my new chileno companion! His name is Elder Hidalgo, I think I wrote a little bit about him last week, he has 13 months in the mission. I had met him before, his trainer was Elder Jimenez who was my companion before and he came to visit us one time. Being with Elder Hidalgo is a big change from my last comp...Hidalgo really wants to be the best he can be and he wants us to be examples for the zone. I was really happy when he said that, and we have been working a lot this whole week. We basically had no investigators when he got here, but we have found a ton of good people this week and we are super excited for them! 

An interesting thing happened on wednesday while we were visiting a member that has been inactive for about 3 years.  Before he went inactive he said he frequently received a ton of revelations and visions and stuff, for example that he had a vision that his first wife would die, and also saw the woman who would be his wife afterwards, and they both came true, he also said he has seen Jesus multiple times and has received revelation for the ward. He read a copy of his revelation for the ward to us, which talked about some problems the ward has and names specific people, and also has a solution at the end of it. He gave us the copy of his revelation afterwards. I don't doubt his revelations or anything, I think that all things are possible, but the one thing I thought was interesting was the solution that was at the end of his revelation.

It was the scripture Mosiah 2:41 And moreover, I would desire that ye should consider on the blessed and happy state of those that keep the commandments of God. For behold, they are blessed in all things, both temporal and spiritual; and if they hold out faithful to the end they are received into heaven, that thereby they may dwell with God in a state of never-ending happiness. O remember, remember that these things are true; for the Lord God hath spoken it.

To me that seems like an obvious solution to all of lifes problems..if we are keeping the commandments we will be blessed, we will have peace of mind and we will be happy. We will be able to handle the problems of life more easily because we can see the big picture of Gods plan. 

I explained this to the member who had shared with us his "revelation" and read this scripture with him. Alma 5:26 And now behold, I say unto you, my brethren, if ye have experienced a change of heart, and if ye have felt to sing the song of redeeming love, I would ask, can ye feel so now?

He had told us that he had had many spiritual experiances, but for the past 3 years he has been sad. His wife goes to church alone every week and she is sad too. I said "if you dont feel the same joy you used to feel in the church and in your life, what do you think you need to change to get that feeling back? You already know the solution..."

The scripture made a big impact on him. I invited him to come to church this sunday to be able to keep the commandments, the "solution" and he said yes. His wife was crying and she was really happy and it was a really good experience. He came to church on sunday and I was really happy to see him. I hope I personally can always remember "the solution" throughout my life because Ive seen it so many times in my mission in other people, and in myself, and I know its true. 

We had our first district meeting of the transfer this week. We met the 2 new sister missionaries in the zone, one is from Costa Rica, the other from California. I feel bad for her because she doesn't speak spanish and I remember how hard it was in the beginning. She is motivated though, we tried to talk to her in English and she said she wanted to practice Spanish! 

The 9th of July was independence day in Argentina. They didnt even do anything special to celebrate! Maybe in the big cities they did, but where Im at they didnt even shoot off fireworks or anything. They eat some traditional foods and stuff but I guess Im just used to fireworks. Looking forward to the 4th of July in America next year! 

So much other stuff has happened but Im out of time...mostly just a lot of good lessons and walking and stuff. Hopefully the scriptures I shared was a good enough spiritual message for this week. The pictures are of us in an ice cream store saying goodbye to the missionaries who got transfered, the elder who is with me in the picture is from new zealand. The other picure is from the district meeting with some of the new missionaries, not all of them were there though.

Love you all, have a good week! ​​​​

So Loooong....Farewell......

Hello my friends, I have just gotten my new companion. His name is Elder Hidalgo, he is from Chile in a town close to Santiago. He is my second Chileno comp, and overall in the zone we have 5 chilenos, and potentially more (because 2 sister missionaries are going to train this transfer, but we still dont know who their companions will be). Its a lot of chilenos, but they are cool! My old comp should be back in brazil by now, his plane was supposed to go out this morning. We took him to the bus terminal sunday night, lots of people came to say goodbye to him. He did things in his own way, and he kind of got tired at the end of his mission but there is a lot of things we will miss about him. He was really funny to have around. 

There is one family of members that especially are going to miss him...its a recent convert named Alejandra, and her sister guillermina who isnt a member. We went to their house like 15 times last transfer, and they were really close with Pereira (my last comp). Guillermina always said she would never go to church, but Pereira invited her to go on his last sunday to say goodbye. She actually showed up, and we were a little bit surprised. But we were even more surprised when she got up to share her testimony. It was really interesting, she started out by saying "Im catholic", but she went on to say a lot of good things about the church and the missionaries, and she started crying and said she felt really good in there with the members of the church. That was the first time in my mission that an investigator has shared their testimony on their first sunday. Me and my companion both shared our testimonies after, and then the stake president was the last one. The closing hymn was "I know that my redeemer lives" and there was a really special spirit there. Lots of people started crying and I really felt as if I could feel the presence of angels there. The spirit was really strong, I hope to not forget that moment. 

That was probably the best experiance of the week. Some other things happened, there was 4 baptisms in the zone, we were able to attend 2 of them. We ate a lot of Asados this week too, one of them was with this guy named sergio. He is almost completly deaf, but he wasnt born that way. He is a musician, he plays in a band and he became deaf from rocking out too much. After lunch with him we stayed for a little while and they did a little concert, he has a ton of instruments in his house so everybody was trying them out. It was really fun, and sergio thought it was super interesting how we all come from different countries. I was the only american there, with a kid from canada, new zealand, brazil, and sergios friend was there too from Italy. 

I really dont have a lot of time, most of today I spent waiting in the bus terminal to pick up my new companion. He was supposed to get here at 1, but he missed his bus I think and didnt have a phone to tell me. So I waited until he got there at 3:30. Then we went to walmart and ate dinner and just now we got to email, but we have to leave to go to ward council. I know my email wasnt that long but I have a lot of pictures at least. 

In the pictures, most of them are us saying good bye to my last companion, and there is also one with I think the worlds biggest mate. Its in someones front yard...

Talk to you all next week! Hope you are having a happy 4th of July! 

Love, Elder Christensen