Week 15

Hola!!

This email is going to be a little shorter but Its been a good week!!  We had zone conference and a few other meetings and lots of studies!  Ive learned a TON though!  One of the highlights was participating in the world wide day of service!  We got to put on the "mormon helping hands" vests and clean up tonsssss of garbage!  When I say tons I mean YEARS worth of stuff!  The people were super grateful and it was a really good missionary opprotunity!  I loved serving!  It was pouring rain the whole time and super fun.  I LOVE BEING A MISSIONARY! 

 We got to work with members this week using Facebook!  They prayed about who they should send a video to and then shared it along with a super simple testimony!  It was really powerful and its helping to prepare the world for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ!  If you guys have time I would suggest dedicating an hour of your Sunday or something to doing some type of online missionary work!  It will bless your lives and the lives of your friends and family!  

Womens conference was really good!!  I felt the spirit most strongly during the songs and prayers.  It really hit me that when we pray, we are gathering as disciples of Jesus Christ all around the world talking to our Heavenly Father.  It was also a really sweet thought knowing that I was praying with you guys at the same time! I love you so much!!

One cool experience that happened this week was with Priesthood blessings!  My companion wanted a blessing and I decided I wanted one too!  Hermana Egbert was going to get hers in English, and I decided to see if I could understand it in Spanish.  So I asked our district leader, Elder Cespedes to give me a blessing.  He speaks zero English and can't understand it either.  Hermana Egbert got her blessing first and went first.  There was a line in hers that talked about how angels our going before us as a companionship and helping us.  And that these same angels are taking care of our investigators when we aren't able to.  Then I got my blessing next. Because Elder Cespedes doesn't speak or understand English, he didn't know what Hermana Egberts blessing said.  But when he gave me mine, he said almost the exact same line word for word that Hermana Egberts blessing said!  So, I know without any shadow of a doubt that the Priesthood is real.  Its Gods power on the earth today and it is such a blessing.  Heavenly Father knows us personally and loves us.  I also learned that we all have help from both sides of the veil.  We have angels bearing us up when we are weak and not feeling the best.  I also really believe we have angels helping us in good times as well!  Either way, we are NEVER alone.

I love you all so much!  Our investigators are doing really well and I'm super excited to watch General Conference this week!!  Do all you can to be able to watch it!!  What a blessing it is to have a prophet on the earth!!  I love you all and have an amazing week!!

--Hermana West

Week 14

It's been an amazing week!!  I have grown a lot.  I made Chilean bread with a member and saw lots of dolphins!  Dieciocho was this week too and it was pretty uneventful in the day haha.  The real partying starts at night.  We visited the hospital and went to see people who don't have any family or who rarely get any visitors.  That was probably the sweetest experience of my mission so far.  The Spirit was so strong there and I really felt like that is exactly what the Savior would be doing.  Then we went and visited a widow, Hermana Carmen, and had a little dieciocho party with her for an hour.  The gift of tongues has felt very real this week.  I have really been working a lot harder and applying myself even more.  It felt like one morning I woke up and could speak Spanish!  I don't understand everything and cant say everything, but I can have conversations with people by myself, help teach a TON more in lessons, and talk on the phone with people now.  There is no way that came by myself.  Heavenly Father has been blessing me with the gift of tongues as I've really tried to work for it--as with every other spiritual gift.  Also I've realized a lot that I'm continuing to grow in areas of communication.  As a companionship, there can be absolutely nothing in your relationship that will drive away the Spirit, or you cant do the work.  We get a long really well and are super good friends, but just like as with married couples or siblings, there are little things that need to be resolved.  You have to be completely humble and constantly be working on having a stronger relationship so that you can bless the lives of others.  If we treat all of our relationships like this, we are going to grow a lot.  Its very important to keep the Sprit with you and be willing to let go of things that aren't important so that you can continue doing the work of the Lord.  If we don't always have the Spirit with us, we are going to be harming ourselves and the lives of others. This week has been really good here in Estrecho!  We have really been trying to keep doing everything Elder Bragg told us to do and we have been seeing miracles.  I have been trying to study the Restoration everyday and I have really come to feel the importance of it.  I have realized that the reason we should usually teach through the Restoration is because if we teach it right, it covers both the Plan of Salvation and the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  As we have used it to teach contacts and investigators, and as we ourselves have understood it more, we have seen miracles in contacts and lessons.  We have had 2 very powerful experiences with teaching the Restoration this week!  One of them was with an antiguo investigador named Myrna.  Missionaries have been teaching her for a long time but she never has realized the need for one church.  We have been struggling to help her realize this for the past 2 months.  This past week when we were in her house, I just had a very small prompting to ask her if we could watch the Restoration video with her.  We did, and by the end there was such a power in her home.  It was probably one of the strongest overwhelming moments of peace I have felt outside of the temple in my entire life.  She was silent for awhile and then told us that she believes Joseph Smith is just like all the other prophets since the world began and that she feels he was a good man and could have been called of God.  We asked her if she believes that Joseph Smith was a prophet and after a long moment of silence, she answered yes.  THAT WAS HUGE!!  For almost a year missionaries have been teaching her and she hasn't made much progress.  She has always felt that all religions are good (Which is very true. They are.  They just don't all have the fullness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ but they have pieces of it and they are good people) and she shares with missionaries of all different religions.  But when we really focused on teaching her through the Restoration and letting the Spirit do the teaching, she was able to figure out for herself that Joseph Smith was a man called of God to restore the Gospel of Jesus Christ on the earth, never to be taken away again until the Second Coming of our Savior.  The other experience we had this week was with a contact we had made from about a month ago.  We were walking to an appointment and I felt like we should knock this house.  There was loud music booming and a man cam out with long hair and lots of tattoos.  He didn't appear to be super interested, but we gave him a Restoration pamphlet and asked him if we could come back.  This past week we stopped by and he let us in right away.  At first we were a little bit nervous for our safety because people don't usually let you in that easily, but we didn't feel the Spirit say not to.  We started talking with him about the Restoration and the Book of Mormon.  He told us that he has always had questions that weren't able to be answered by any other religion or book, even the Bible, and that he wants to know more!  He pointed to the Book of Mormon and said, "I want to know more about that book."  It was a really powerful moment.  He invited us to come back and continue to teach him and his family.  Another huge miracle.  I know for myself that Jesus Christ and Heavenly Father did appear to the boy Joseph Smith and they did restore the Gospel of Jesus Christ through him.  Also one of our investigators CAME TO CHURCH AND BROUGHT A FRIEND!!!  That was a huge miracle!  During the whole meeting the Spirit was really strong and at the end, both of them said they loved it and want to keep coming.  I think we are really going to start seeing leaps and bounds of progress with them!  What a blessing it is to be a missionary and be able to see Heavenly Father work miracles in the lives of our investigators and my life as well.  Even though there are hard days, it is SO good to be a missionary!  I love you all so much and have an amazing week!!
--Hermana West

Week 13

Hola!

This week has been tooooo good!  Its starting to warm up a little bit here I think!  Well, I cant really tell...but there is a lot more sun!  We have been trying to help it feel like a new transfer because we are staying together so we changed up our house!  We switched rooms and made it feel more homey (how do you spell that hahah).  Its been really fun.  The only downside of this week was when we were knocking doors and a dog jumped up and bit my companions elbow and then tried to attack me!  Luckily we wear HUGE coats so nothing happened.  Mostly it was just really funny and we laughed about it for awhile after.  Friday night Hermana Egbert and I slept HORRIBLY!  We aren't sure why, but both of us woke up about every hour.  When the alarm went off Saturday morning we were EXHAUSTED, but we were obedient and got out of bed to start our exercises.  It was all I could do not to fall asleep while trying to work out.  Hermana Egbert ran downstairs and looked out the window and said, "Wow there is a super pretty reflection of a sunrise in the window across the street!  Want to go see it?"  If you know me, that wasn't even a question!  We booked it out the door in our sweats, slippers and all, and raced down the street to see the sunrise!  We got to the street and It was really pretty, but we knew there was more that we could see!  We ended up jogging like 5 more streets down to this big open area on top of a hill and we were able to see even more, but it didn't cut it!  Hermana Egbert and I looked at each other for a second, had the same idea, and the next thing we knew we were on the beach watching the sunrise!!!  IT WAS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL SUNRISE I HAVE EVER SEEN!!!  The sky was GOLDEN and full of sooo many beautiful colors and the ocean was incredible too (its still weird to see the sunrise on the ocean instead of the sunset).  But it was honestly one of my favorite times in my whole life!  It took longer than our 30 minutes of exercise time, but we just got ready extra fast!  Anyway, even though we were super tired and had no energy, because we were obedient and got up on time and were willing to do our exercises Heavenly Father blessed us with one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen!  If we hadnt been exactly obedient, we would have continued our day and never have known what we had missed out on!  There are HUGE blessings that come from being obedient, even if sometimes we dont see them right away!  DONT MISS OUT ON YOUR BLESSINGS!!! Also, the work is going really well here in Estrecho!  This week we really took weekly planning super seriously instead of just doing it because thats what we do.  We made a list of exactly how many investigators we have, less actives we can work with, and people we could follow up with.  Then we made a plan for each individual person and how we were going to be in contact with them and what lessons they needed, etc.  It took a little over 3 hours to do, but we really felt like Heavenly Father was really happy with us.  We are figuring out how to be more like the Savior everyday in the work.  Before this, we didnt feel like we were having a TON of success, but we knew we were giving our full effort to the work.  After we made a list, we figured out we have 24 investigators, 7 of which are progressing, and from there if we were able to teach the people that live with them we would have 14 new investigators!  That was a really cool realization!  Heavenly Father is very much in charge of this work and He goes about doing it almost unnoticed and we have to be paying attention to all the little miracles we see in our lives everyday!  Then we listed the less actives that we have been working with and realized we have 11 of them and if we taught the people that they live with we would have 13 more investigators.  So in total, we could potentially have 48 investigators to work with if we work inside out.  It reminds me of that quote that says, "The gospel of Jesus Christ doesnt take the people out of the slums, it takes the slums out of the people and they take themselves out of the slums."  It really does start from the inside because thats where the core is and where the strength starts!  So we are going to really try to work harder to work inside out this transfer.  We are also really working harder to follow the Spirit on the first prompting!  Usually we do, but sometimes we make mistakes.  Yesterday we were walking along the beach contacting people and both Hermana Egbert and I had the thought to contact a woman who was walking in our direction along the shore.  We were kindof far away and would´ve had to go out of our way to talk to her when there were lots of other people around us we could contact.  We ended up not doing anything about it.  She kept walking and we stopped for a minute and watched her walk away wondering if the feeling to talk to her would leave or not.  We looked at each other, realized how dumb we had been, said sorry to Heavenly Father for not following the prompting right away, and then ran in the sand for about 3 minutes to catch up to her.  Im sure it looked really weird, but we gave her a Gospel of Jesus Christ pamphlet, talked to her for 20 seconds because she wasnt super interested, and then left.  Who knows why we needed to talk to her. Maybe somewhere down the road she will be converted or someone in her family will read the pamphlet and be interested, I probably will never know.  But I do know that God knows, and He is in charge of this work.  Im so grateful for Jesus Christ and that because of Him we can repent and have second chances!  Im still learning how to be better everyday and its going to take a whole lifetime and more, but the happy thing is that we CAN be just a little better everyday!  I love being here and being a missionary!!  I love you all and hope that you have an incredible week!!  

--Hermana West

Week 12

Hola!
We had transfers last night and (drum roll)...WE ARE SAFE!!  Hermana Egbert and I get to stick with each other for another 9 weeks (this next transfer is going to be extra long because President Isom is going out of town)!!!  We are so relieved hahaha.  We are coming up on the 18th of September (a super big Chillean Holliday) and everybody is getting so excited.  Which by the way, our p-day might be switched for that. So If I don’t email that day don’t be stressed.  This week we have seen lots of miracles!!  On Wednesday, I was feeling a little down in my energy and made Hermana Egbert give me a full on pep talk with jumping and push-ups and everything.  Hahah. It sounds dumb, but honestly it helped so much and I was reminded of why I’m here!  That night we saw so many miracles.  So we have been doing it every morning before we leave, and it has made ALL the difference!!  When we have a fire for the work and a love for Jesus Christ, it flows over into everything we do!  When we got rejected, it didn’t bother us.  When we contacted someone, they could feel something different and wanted to know more!  That’s the key to missionary work.  Always remembering why we are on a mission and that we have the amazing opportunity to represent the Savior!  But really, we have seen so many miracles.  For example, usually each week we find one, maybe 2 new investigators if that.  THIS WEEK WE FOUND 10!!!!!!  And the difference is our faith!  Sometimes we can be a block for people that Heavenly Father has prepared to receive the gospel if we choose to think about how tired we are or how long we have been walking.  And the weeks before, we honestly thought we were showing great faith!  We did have good attitudes and we did have a fire for the work, but nothing like we have had this week and it has made all the difference!  When we are EAGER to follow the promptings of the Spirit and we SEEK more opportunities to serve and open our mouths, then we are blessed!  Granted, in other parts of the world there may not be people that are as prepared, but we still have the ability to do all in our power to find the people that are.  Whether they are few or many.  But I’ve learned that I can ALWAYS improve the quality of my faith.  And as I do, I see more miracles happen in my life and in the lives of those that I serve!  What a blessing it is to be able to repent and become a better person and missionary each day!  I love repentance and I’m so grateful for it!!  One of those miracles is with 2 of our investigators. They are the ones we found when I was having a rough day and we were able to teach them in English.  They are married, he is in the military and she is from Mexico. They are super golden and have incredible questions!!  He doesn’t believe in God, and she is super full of faith!  They are really smart and incredible people.  Last night we had a really cool lesson with them!  He was super eager to learn more about our church.  He asked really amazing questions and thought about our answers.  Because of the Sprit, we were able to answer him in a way that touched his heart and helped him think about what he really believes.  At the end of the lesson, we invited them to read 2 Nephi 31 and pray about the Book of Mormon and what we were teaching them after.  He said, "I will.  If I really want to know I’m going to experiment on the things you are saying." (How prepared is he?).  He doesn’t believe in God, but we invited them to say a kneeling prayer with us before we left.  Again, he said he would experiment!  Before the prayer he said, "I’m really grateful you guys came over tonight.  If I wasn’t interested in what you had to say, I would have gone to another part of the house.  But we have all reached a really critical point tonight and I’m going to read the Book of Mormon while I’m gone (He’s leaving on a military assignment for a little bit) and I would love to talk about some things when we meet with you again.  But I can promise that my wife and I are going to keep talking about what we have talked about tonight after you guys leave.  Really, thank you for coming."   Then we said the prayer, and after you could tell that he felt something different.  It was really a blessing to be able to see the Spirit work through my companion and I, and then to see the Spirit really working in him.  That was a huge miracle.  They are super special to me, and I am so blessed to be able to know them and be an instrument in the hands of God in their conversion.  The mission is the greatest thing I could be doing right now!  I am so grateful every day for this opportunity!  I think about the line from "Called to Serve" a lot when it says, "Called to know the richness of His blessings".  We really are so blessed to have the Gospel of Jesus Christ in our lives!!  This is a gospel of Happiness!!!!  I love you all!!  Have an amazing week!!
--Hermana West