6/7/2017 0 Comments June 07th, 2017To be straight honest, I am not good at writing group emails. I am sorry to all of you guys that are still here and want to know how I am doing.
The week was full of lots of different things. I was able to do two baptismal interviews to a man named Hector and to a women named Constanza. It really makes me nervous to have such a huge responsibility, but I was able to feel the Spirit super strong in the both interviews. It is really special to be with the person and talk about the gospel and read scriptures and to listen to their testimonies about things that they have learned. Both Hector and Constanza are going to be baptized this Saturday! Great news right?!!! I also got to dance in an activity that my ward did. My mom will attach the video to this email so you guys can see it. Keep reading the scriptures and doing your best to love your neighbor! Love you a lot more than my tiny emails express! Elder Scott
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5/31/2017 0 Comments May 31st, 2017The last thing I expected to read when I opened up my email was that Marissa saved Childish Gambino from a desert island in Florida. My family is a very interesting family. Mom I am going to start right off the bat answering your questions because I know I am horrible about keeping you guys updated. How is the teaching? I am not sure if this questions has to deal with how teaching is going in our sector or in a broader sense. But to make it brief, it is really fun for me. This past zone meeting we watched the Bible video about Jesus forgiving the woman that had committed adultery. If you really study the bible and Book of Mormon, it is really amazing the way that Christ taught. When the Pharisees approached him, telling him the woman should be stoned, he didn't respond right away, rather he kneeled down, calmly drew in the sand and let the situation calm down, then said that He among you that is without sin, let him cast the first stone. He addressed the Pharisees question, made them and the whole entire group think about their cleanliness and also taught them a lesson in only a sentence without getting mad or causing a scene. I am trying to do that with my teaching. When I teach the people, I try my best to listen to what they say and not think about how I am going to respond, but rather focus on the Spirit and the impressions that I receive. I try and teach simply and I try my best to answer their questions based on scriptures and personal spiritual experiences. It is hard to put it all together at once, but God blesses me with lots of chances to practice! Have you found any new investigators? Elder Gonzalez and I have decided to white wash the sector. If you don´t understand the words white wash, it means to start from zero. We slowly realized that the people we were passing for a visiting were not progressing and keeping commitments, so we decided to go back to basics and spend tons of time contacting in the street and knocking doors and trying to find prepared people. After all, it says in the scriptures that God will place people in my path, I just have to talk to them that pass me to be able to find that one person that is ready. How easy! Maybe I will go through a million people and never find a single one, but the people aren´t the only ones who are getting taught in this whole thing. I am learning a ton too. I love practicing contacts and meeting people. Are the members in your ward good about referring their friends? No. Members. You had your lifes changed by the gospel and recieve blessings every single day because of it. Return the favor. It is a commandment. "Every member a missionary" The week was great. I met a crazy dude from Denmark that spoke English and we talked about lots of things together I cooked lunch (mejor dicho hice un sandwich) We helped 2 families move. It killed my arms but I get muscles and someone got helped. Literally no loss at all We practiced a dance for the talent show this friday I got 2 letters from my family! LIFE IS GREAT AND I AM SMILING LOTS LOVE YOU ALL!!!! Elder Scott 5/24/2017 0 Comments Life Is GoodThis week has been a roller coaster. I am sorry for not writing a good group email last week. I will try to summarize this week. 1. I had to teach the third hour class at church without notice which was really fun. I taught about the importance of scripture study and it went really well. 2. I get super sick with stomach pains and headaches and it was super rough. We had to go to the doctor and now I am on a special diet until my stomach stops freaking out. 3. I turned 19! Feels weird being older, but great at the same time. The sisters from my ward bought me a cake and I bought myself a mate (look it up if you don´t know what it is) and some incense sticks. Personal study with mate and incense is the best 4. We made cookies with my ward mission leader Hermano Miranda and we discussed life. He lives on the 16 floor of his apartment building and so after we talked about the investigators that we teach, we ate cookies looking at the sunset. A great meeting if you ask me. 5. We did pendones with the sisters from our ward. Pendones is when we put a sign in a crowded area and contact the people that are walking around. I was able to talk to a guy named Enrique that is Catholic and I talked to him about the purpose of life and why we have problems. It feels great to be able to help other people understand things. 6. I completed 11 months of being a missionary! Seems crazy right? Time is flying by. I am almost halfway done and I feel like I started this morning. I love the changes that I have been able to see in myself. Now that I speak better Spanish and now how to teach people better than I did before, I get frustrated when they don´t want to make changes in their lives, but everyone has the power to make their own desicions. I have also been able to develop a lot of paciencia and a love for reading the scriptures that I never had before. To put it really short, this week was super happy. I get discouraged and frustrated sometimes, but I know that God loves me with all my heart. I will never be perfect, but I can try my best to be Christlike and if I make mistakes I have the atonement tfo Jesus Christ o get me back on the right track. It makes me feel comforted to know where I came from, what I need to do here on earth to be happy, and what the outcomes of my choices will be after this life. Everyone that reads this, I know God loves you too. Let Him know it. Say a prayer of thankfullness everyday and especially when you are feeling sad. The more of ourselves we give to Him, the more He manifests Himself to us in our lives. BE HAPPY! SMILE! SERVE SOMEONE IN NEED! I love you guys more than you know Elder Scott 5/10/2017 0 Comments A Day with PrezThis week has been really interesting because Elder Anguita, my comp from Argentina, finished his mission and went home and I got to spend a whole day with Pres and Sister Gwilliam before our special changes. I am now with Elder Gonzalez, who left the office to be my companion! He is from Medellin, Colombia, has a year and a half in the mission and is a really good guy. He has a bunch of crazy stories about things he did before, and I am really happy for this change. He is really obedient and humble. We have been able to do a lot of things in the short time that we have been together and I feel like he is helping me to work to my full potential. I will include some pictures of him. It was a super special experience to spend for that much time with Pres and Sister Gwilliam and see them in a more relaxed environment. We went to a temple session and after we went out to eat. During the session, I sat next to President Gwilliam and it was really cool to see his unique reverence and how he acted. You can seriously feel the goodness coming from him when you are close to him. I especially liked going to eat. To go eat, we had to drive through Santiago downtown and the people are terrible drivers here and we almost got in like 5 car accidents even though President was driving perfectly. Hermana Gwilliam would try and give him advice or tell him things and he would call her by her first name when he got frustrated and it was really funny. When we got out, President and Sister Gwilliam walked with Anguita and I and we talked about life and how I felt and it was really interesting to see how much she remembered about me even though there are 150 missionaries here in the mission. At the restaurant I ordered the "Mr. T" burger which comes with a half kilo of meat. Best hamburger I have had in a very long time. Those two are really special to me. Like a 2nd mom and dad. They love me for who I am and they just want to see me get to my full potential. Oh and we also found out that President Gwilliam had a Porsche before which makes him even more cool. We had some great experiences during the goodbyes of Elder Anguita and it was cool to here some of the thoughts of the members. One of them, an older woman named Lucia told us that the most powerful thing that a missionary can do is testify. A missionary can be super funny and get along really well with the people, but the people can really see if they are a great missionary through their testimony and how they feel when the missionary is offering it. We had a great testimony meeting this past Sunday. Without a doubt one of the best that I have seen in my whole life. I felt the spirit so powerfully. I feel such strong peace and love and I feel safe when people offer their testimonies. Such a neat experience to be able to listen to testimonies of our friends every month. Super random, but my trainer, or first companion in the mission, Elder Gularte, came to visit Santiago this week. He came to visit me totally out of the blue one morning. It was super fun to see him again. He hasn´t changed at all. He still is super loving and is always laughing to smiling. He also has a crazy beard now. Our finding and teaching has gone really well this week. Elder Gonzalez and I have hit the ground running. We have been doing our best to take advantage of the time in between citas and talk to people in the street and teach with the Spirit. It has been going really good so far. Just this last week, we found Roberto and Raul. Raul is a man we contacted on our way to correlacion. He has a cleft lip, so it was an interesting challenge to talk to him, but he is a really interesting guy. He and his wife teach a class to people that are addicted to alcohol and drugs and they are really religious. We were able to teach him about the Plan of Salvacion and the reason why were are here in this Earth and why we have problems and challenges sometimes. It went really well. I am super excited about Roberto too. He is a guy that we met trying to find a less active in an apartment building. He was leaving his house to go buy something, and we asked for his help finding the apartment of the woman because we were a bit lost. We started to talk about life, and he told us that he is retired and lives with his Mom that has health problems. We shared a few short things about prayer and again, The Plan of Salvacion and we set a cita to go back and we taught him last night. He told us that what we taught to him sounded familiar and that it made sense. He said that he would be baptized. There is no question, no doubt, no fear, no problem that the gospel cannot solve. God does not want us to be sad or lost. He loves us so so so very much, if we apply the gospel in our lives we can feel a peace unlike we have ever ever felt before. Roberto felt like what we had taught him was something familiar because it is a truth he knew it in the pre-mortal life. I love the person I have become and how I feel living the gospel. Life is amazing. Take care this week guys. I love you all very much Elder Scott 5/3/2017 0 Comments Earthquakes and cold weatherThis week has been great. It started to be cold again (finally). When we wake up in the morning it is especially freezing because not a single house in Chile has heating or air conditioning. Not a single one. It is all good though because I would choose the cold over hot any day. I just wish that we could have a thunderstorm or it would rain. Santiago weather is either super hot or super cold. Nothing in between. Literally nothing more than that. The stuff you have heard about all the earthquakes is all true. It is very likely that before the next time I right you guys another earthquake will have happened. If not an earthquake, a temblor. The earthquakes are just like feeling turbulance in a plane. Everything starts to move and shake and stuff starts falling down. It is crazy. Look it up on youtube. This week we found a really good family. We were looking for less actives and we ended up finding a girl in her thirties called Paulina. We knocked on her door around 8:45, and she told us to come in. As we talked to she and her parents, we found out that all three of them are members! We are really excited to reactivate them. We have been working a lot with Benjamin, a guy from Colombia and Claudio, a mechanic of heavy machines. Benjamin has a desires to learn and has accepted everything we have taught really well. We taught him about the BOM yesterday. Claudio´s mom is really sick right now, so we are teaching him about Plan de Salvacion. The both are progressing really fast. I am excited to see what all happens. I had several experiences this week that I really liked. One of them was a service project that we did for a woman in another sector. She asked us to do was scrape the paint off of her house with spatulas so she could paint it again. It took so much work to scrape off the paint, and there were like 8 missionaries there so while we scraped, we talked about life and stuff that had happened to us and after about 40 minutes of intense scraping, one of the missionaries asked the woman how long she had been a member. She responded that she was not a member. The missionaries from the sector hadn`t told us anything and all of us just assumed that she was a member. After hearing that she was a member, I began to think about the conversaciones that we had, to try and remember if anything “not missionary like” was said. That is a feeling we should not have to feel as missionaries or as members either. True integrity is acting as Christ would all time no matter who we are around. One of the most important things we do. Watch what you say to other people this week. Another thing I really loved was a división that I did with one of the asistentes from our mission. He is named Elder Allred and he is from Idaho. I really look up to him. He is one of my heros in the mission. After the division I was thinking about the traits of a good leader. To me, an excellent leader is confident and not afraid of what people might to do to them. They have a firm testimony, they know when to be serious and when to be funny. They are concerned about others and are good examples. We all should apply these traits everyday. I think one of the moments that takes the cake for favorite moments this week was getting mail from Grandma Harmer. A little while ago, I asked her for some family history information, and I got the letter this past Friday. It was an envelope with a bunch of stories about our family and how the crossed the plains and became converted and other spiritual experiences. I loved reading and learning about my family. It is super important that we know where we came from and that we do things so that our great, great grandchildren or whoever it might be can know who we were and the experiences we had. Write things down! Keep a journal! Take pictures and save them! Tiny moments this week: 1. We left the phone in one of the members houses after lunch so we didn`t have our alarm clock, so right before going to bed I drank 2 liters of water so I would have to wake up to use the bathroom during the night and not sleep in. It worked perfectly. I woke up without an alarm clock. A blessing if you ask me. 2. One of the members of the ward, Romauldo, that was inactive was reactivated 4 months ago. He blessed the sacrament for the first time in his life. He is a really loving man. He has problems with his knees and it is difficult to kneel. But he blessed the sacrament kneeling down even though it was extremely hard for him. Talk about being converted. 3. I learned the secret to feel the Spirit more and feel more confident; Chill. Before in the lessons I would always talk fast and try and fit lots of information into what I say, but this week I have been trying to slow down and make what I say more powerful and following the spirit. It has been great. This week was super great over all. I am super excited to talk to my family next week! Love you all! Elder Scott 4/26/2017 0 Comments Winner, winner chicken dinnerThis week, we had a day that all of the citas fell through, so we were contacting people in the street and tracting, and we got the feeling to pass for a less active that lived close to where we were, and so we passed for there house, which is a Elderly Person Care home, and the less active was too busy to attend us alone because she was serving dinner to the old people. What ended up happening was that she sat us down with the old people while she was serving them, and we shared a lesson with the 9 super old people and her at the same time. All the old people had different religiones, and they asked us a lot of questions, but I was able to feel the Spirit and I feel good about lifting the spirits of some old people. This week we had a church activity on Friday. Every single member had to take a plate of food to be judged by three judges. All of the members ended up bringing stuff. There was about 30 different plates and being good members or our ward, Elder Anguita decided to bring something too. Elder Anguita cooked Milinesa and I decided to cook Orange Chicken (the kind you always cook mom). Long story short, after all the judging was done, ELDER SCOTT TOOK THE CAKE AND WON THE WHOLE THING. That is right. 1st place. Out of a bunch of old women and moms and dads, an 18 year old gringo Elder won. I was so pumped. I won a glass bowl as my prize. One of the best days of my life for sure. The only lame thing was that the day after I was sick. I threw up twice and had terrible diahrrea. I am going to blame it on someone else´s food though. I was super sick for 2 days and had a really high fever, but after church on Sunday I was all better. 4/12/2017 0 Comments This week...This week has been a lot better for me. I have been able to enjoy it more and have been a whole lot less stressed which makes me feel better. My comp and I have been getting along better too which is great.
Life here in the mission has been going really well. Elder Anguita and I have been looking for new people like crazy. We have been working a lot with antiguos and with less actives too. I use to get frustrated before about not being able to find good people and I judged my effectiveness as a missionary, but the other day in my personal study I read a verse that really impacted me. It is in Mosiah. It says that being an instrument in the hands of God is bringing people unto the knowledge of Him. What the people do with that information is in their hands. We just have to make sure we communicate it to them in the way that is right and with the Holy Ghost. Some missionaries never baptize and come home thinking they are a failures and wasted time, but the truth is, if they work hard to inform every single person they can about the blessings they can have through the gospel of Jesus Christ, they are not failures. Just like PMG says, hablar con todos. This week I had divs with our leader de Zona Elder Mataitusi. That guy is my hero. He is really humble, really diligente, really smart and he works hard. During our divisions we talked a lot about obedience and why some missionaries come to the mission and get up late, leave the house late, and don´t do what they are supposed to do. It really is crazy how many people do it. We also drank a lot of mate (if you don´t know what it is look it up) and we got yolked together. We also had lunch with our bishop, Obispo Sierra. That dude has the craziest life story. He is from Honduras, but he moved to Miami, met his wife, moved to Utah to study and then moved to Chile. He and his wife are really strong in the gospel and they have 5 kids and the wife just barely turned 30. The both of them are fluent in English, but don´t ever speak it with the missionaries. They speak it in their house though and the wife always says funny things in English. I love them. They help me a lot with my accent in Spanish! That is one of the things I am working on now. I have the grammar more or less down, I am just working on improving and perfecting my accent. The wife made me read a book about My little Mermaid. It was hilarious. I love them. I think the coolest moment for me personally this week was a lesson we had yesterday. We found this less active man named Jamie. He is in his 60's and lives alone and doesn´t work because of sicknesses. We entered the house, and first thing that we noticed was just how poor he was. He literally had nothing. He served us a single serving bag or potato chips and a few cookies and a glass of coca cola and we started talking about the gospel and how it has affected his life. He told us that he has stopped going to church, but things that the missionaries taught him always stayed with him. We read 3 Nephi, Chapter 11 together, a verse every person and I felt the Spirit really strong. We were able to answer all of his questions, and I know the Lord is blessing me for being obedient. I love life. PS. Jones I played soccer today in a huge soccer field! I will send you pictures! Be safe guys! Elder Scott 4/5/2017 0 Comments April 5thThis past Thursday was one of the hardest days I have had in the mission. My companion was sick and so we couldn´t leave for a portion of the day, and I don't like feeling useless. I studied the scriptures for a long time trying to feel better but I was just kinda mad at the world. I was mad that we couldn´t find anyone to teach that wanted to listen to us, I was comparing myself to other missionaries, thinking about the success they have and I was judging myself pretty hard believing that I wasn´t a good enough missionary to help anyone. That night when I went to bed I cried for the first time in a few months. The mission is hard. It is not for the faint of heart. The thing is, a few things that happened during the week helped me realize that Heavenly Father really is watching over me The day after, I had divisiones with another missionary and he saw that I was stressed and he gave me advice to feel better. God sometimes helps us in the form of friends. This missionary gave me suggestions about how to contact people, how to find people, how to realize my divine potential and how to look for my spiritual gifts. I was able to watch general conference. For those of you guys that don´t know what that is, it is a group of meetings, where the leaders of the church give talks. What really struck me about it was how much they talked about our purpose here on earth. We are here to for a purpose. We have to follow the example of Jesus Christ and as we do, we will be able to ready to live in his presence. Elder Anguita accidentally smaked me in the face with a Book of Mormon. I couldn´t see for a day, but it made me realize how cool it is to have a body that helps me do things. I am really trying to be obedient and follow all of the mission rules and every meeting we have as missionaries, Hermana Gwilliam does a game where she asks us if we made our beds, cleaned things, all that stuff. If you answer no, you have to sit down. I was the last one standing and I won a bag of food. It was great! The theme of zone conference was bautismo. I really loved all the things that were taught, and my testimony was strengthened about how nessecary it is that we are baptized so we can live with Heavenly Father again. I was able to go to the temple, my favorite place in the world, and help complete some temple work and feel the spirit. I was also able to help with a few sealing sessions, and we helped seal more than 30 families together! To sum up everything, sometimes in life we feel let down and sad and useless, but really, Heavenly Father is always here for us. He loves us. Just because we pass through sad times, it doesn´t mean he hates us, or has forgotten about us, he just wants to allow us to learn something. If we are loyal and follow him even when it is rough, we will be able to feel peace. I can testify of that. It really helped me this week I love all you guys. The gospel is true. Don´t take it for granted Have a good week! Elder Scott 3/29/2017 0 Comments I don't know how to sing....This last week, we had a special church service. They called it super Domingo and the members invited a bunch of friends, and there were special talks and the missionaries had to give a special musical number. We planned to sing a melody of Sisters of Zion and Armies of Helaman with the piano and make it all pretty, but it was a complete disaster. The Hermanas didn´t practice and they sang really quiet, so Elder Anguita and I had to make up the slack and we sang our dang hearts out. On the last note, I was the only one that caught the cue to come in, so I sang a good ten second solo. It was hilarious.
The teaching right now is hard. We are in a really strong ward, but when they split the sector, the Hermanas, got the sector with all the ward members and we got the hard part with all of the houses and the ghetto little apartment buildings. All of the people that the missionaries taught before live in the other sector and now are with the hermana´s. Elder Anguita and I have been contacting, contacting, contacting, and contacting some more. The people we have contacted aren´t progressing very fast, but we are always looking for more. Three of the recent converts went to the temple for the first time to do baptisms for family names so that was really special. Romaldo and Maria Eugenia are going to be sealed this September and I am really excited for them! This past Monday, the zone leaders gave a really good class during our zone meeting and I wanted to share a bit of it with you all. A lot of times we look at other people and we think that they are more lucky, or that they were born ready, or that they are rich, or have had blessings that we have not been able to have, and for that reason they are better. We blame our failures on other people and things. The thing is, WE ALL CAME TO THIS EARTH WITH THE SAME POTENTIAL. We all have the potential to become Gods of our own worlds and have all the things in this world we could ever want. All of it depends on our diligence. If we want something, we can have it, we just need to be diligent and put ourselves to work. So, if there is something you want, you can have it! Don´t waste time! Don´t procrastinate! Do the necessary things to achieve it! You got this! I love all of you guys a whole lot! Don´t do drugs and be safe! Elder Scott :) 3/22/2017 0 Comments 9 monthsI have been in the mission for 9 months now. Isn´t that crazy how fast the time has gone?!?! It is ridiculous how the life as a missionary changes you. When a person dedicates their time to the gospel, they get so many blessings.
1. I know how to cook (kinda) 2. I know how to run a budget. 3. I know how to do laundry. 4. I understand the difference between want and need. 5. I have discovered a crazy love for the scriptures. 6. I know how to love people that hate me 7. I know how to solve problems through the gospel. 8. I feel clean and focused because of the atonement. 9. I know how to give up what I want. 10. I know how to hold my tongue. I think I could make a list of at least 95949 of those. I am really interested to see how life after treats me because I would honestly consider myself a different person now and I have only been through 9 months. This week we were able to help out with the burned down bakery doing service. We had to scrub ash off of the ceiling and walls with brooms and water. It was super intense We did a capilla abierta and we helped gives tours to a whole bunch of people and I did contacts with a youth from our ward and it was really cool to do contacts with someone that wasn´t a missionary! This week we had a really cool experiences with being led by the Spirit. During the planning in the morning, we would plan specific areas to go contact, and during the day, in those specific streets, we found people that needed help! It was really cool to see how the Spirit helped us plan for the day and helped us find them! Love you all a whole ton! Be safe this week! Elder Scott |
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