Letter - December 30th, 2013

      Christmas week :) Wow, personally going into this last week I was a little bit sad, not too much, but I went into the day thinking, awe man, we don't get a break or anything this day, but it turned out a lot better! It really made me so happy! On Christmas pretty much everyone didn't have work, so we were able to visit with a LOT of people, and on top of that a ton of people gave us a lot of food and candy and hot chocolate and stuff like that, so it ended up being a super good day!!! Christmas' in the mission really are special, especially because I got to talk with the fam and Em!!!! It was great to see all of your faces again, and to see Jon's random weird humor :P haha. But yeah, so Christmas was really good, and it was super funny, we had SO many tamales, we had tamales for lunch, and then members gave us more, I guess tamales are something like everyone eats on holidays!!! And it was interesting......tamales are like the stuff that are wrapped up in the corn stuff, and normally they're filled with meat and whatever else is in them, but we had like these sweet ones, like dessert tamales, they were good :)
  
     So about the work, it's been good, and something that has been helping is that missionary book that I got for Christmas, the Highly Effective Missionary. From that book I have received so much revelation for our area Camargo. And that is........the members. We have always known that we need the help of members, but now we're finally putting that to work. Something that has been said over and over is that the work won't succeed without the help of the members, so we started to put that to work...yesterday. In the 3rd hour of church we were to have about 30 minutes to talk about whatever, and so we decided that we need to talk about the missionary work, and how the members can help us. Elder Norris came from an area where he had so much success and had the help from the members all the time, and so he didn't want to say anything that would offend anyone, cuz he was just mad, so he didn't want to say anything, and my companion doesn't know the ward or the situation as well, so that left me and Elder Conklin.....and Elder Conklin already doesn't talk very much. ----deep breath in, deep breath out---- I was about to get in front of the ward and pretty much tell them that they aren't real members because they're not helping in the missionary work. So I got up there, me and Elder Conklin, not knowing what to say....and so I started.....I just started talking about the work and how part of the work is the members, and then after I explained that, we started talking about ideas, what the members can do to help. And we weren't getting to far in our conversation, when I just felt Elder Conklin needed to say something. And he did, he asked them a question, "how many of you really believe this church is true?" Of course all of them raised their hands. And then he talked about if you really believed in this church, and you were really converted, you would help in the missionary work. After that we got an idea, and we're going to implement it in the work this week.......it was just a super cool experience though. The spirit took me and Elder Conklin over, and we figured everything out. Afterwards Elder Norris told us that we did a good job!! It's just what was needed!!!
    
     So yeah, that was the highlight of my week! I felt so spiritually strong that day!!! So yeah, we're excited to implement these strategies in the work this week. I'm kind of a weird guy, but I like to compare the work to a game....board game. This board game is very tricky, but there's a way to win, we just have to use the best strategy!!! But yeah, you guys are awesome, and thanks for all the love and support, it was great talking to you all this last week!!! Love you all!!

-Elder Loveless