Dear Family and Friends,
We
had such a wonderful weekend enjoying general conference. We love the
energy we see the missionaries receive when they can not only watch and
listen themselves but also take investigators and new converts to see
and hear our prophet and the apostles speak to the world. We loved the
messages and also we are also uplifted by the wonderful things we heard!
This past week was change week and as always it was busy and full of excitement. It
was a bit different than normal because we received 4 missionaries from
Paraguay who are waiting for visas for Mexico and Argentina. They will
be with us for 6 weeks at least and hopefully they will have their visas
and can go to their assigned missions. It is a benefit to us while we
have them though because they speak guarani which always comes in handy
here! They along with the other 6 missionaries are all great. The other
six came from Peru , Argentina and California.
Elders Bravo,De la Cruz,Hemenway,Izurieta,Portillo,Garcia will be with
us permanently and Elders Barrios,Garay,Marecos and Hermana Ojeda will
be with us until they get their visas. We had fun welcoming them and
orienting them and by Wednesday they were off to their areas. Elder
Hemenway’s luggage arrived four days late but since we have been here
with 450 plus or more missionaries we have never had a lost piece of
luggage! That’s pretty amazing I think.
We
had only four missionaries going home this time. Elders Curtis,
Ayala,Massey and Paladines were all great missionaries and they will be
missed. We had a wonderful day going to lunch and
the temple and then a testimony meeting at the mission home. We really
love the blessing of seeing who these missionaries become during their
missions! We learn so much from watching them and serving with them.
This
change we welcomed a new assistant as Elder Paladines finished his
mission and went home. Elder Henriquez from Chile became the newest
assistant. We are seeing great benefits of having four assistants
for a bit as two are concentrating on division in the Asuncion area and
two are concentrating on the zones outside Asuncion. We continue to
hear wonderful reports from our missionaries of the good things Elders Clement, Durrant, Love and Henriquez are teaching as they go on their division.
We
also saw a change with our financial clerk as Elder Stewart finished
his training of Elder Clark and went back out to another area. Elder
Gleason also finished training Elder Cannon and went to a new area.
Elder Hair, the secretary to the president , began training Elder
Nielsen who joined us in the office. I love to
see the way these young men work so hard and accomplish so much in these
very difficult assignments in the office. Mark expects a lot of them
but they all do such a great job. We really rely on them to do many
important things for the mission.
Today
we were up at 4 am to drive out to Paraguari to speak at a morningside
for a young adult conference of about 450 young people. We enjoy seeing
the future of the church here in all those young adults. We talked about
having a vision of where we want to go in life and what we need to do
to make it happen for us. We shared a bit of our life with pictures of
the family and they always love to see pictures of the family! We
are so grateful for our knowledge of our Savior and for the
resurrection and the hope that we have because of it and the atonement!
We love this gospel and the opportunity to serve with our missionaries!
They are
wonderful!
Love, Mark and Sandy
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