Week 51

Well another week gone by! And for those wonder from last weeks letter-planchar is missionary language that means "to chew out". Yeah so it has been a great week!  Wednesday we had an awesome family home evening with Benito Cortez and the Garcia family! Hermano Cortez is so sick!  Seriously,  he is the nicest man that I have ever met!  and besides that he is soo smart!  He can teach the restoration and explain the scripture better then me!  He says that people are giving him a hard time for wanting to change his life!  He always carries his Book of Mormon around with him and reads it when he has a chance!  He told us the people are making fun of him and telling him bad things about the church!  We watched the movie Jose Smith el profeta de la restoración.  His testimony was stregthened from being able to see all of the things that Jose Smith had to pass through to complete the will of the Lord!   We are teaching 5 or 6 families right now! It is so great!  Last week we were hoping to be able to help 17 people go to church but only 10 came! it was a great feeling!  We are feeling pretty great because the hard work is paying off!  I feel so blessed to be able to have the responsiblity to  take care so many families right now !  It is great!  By the end of this transfer we are going to see a lot of investigtors getting baptized. We ate so stuffed peppers this week!  They were so spicy even the mexican mssionaries were dying!  I am getting used to it! 

Tomorrow is the zone conference! We started getting things ready early this time so we are not going to be so stressed tonight planning the trainings. It is going to be great!

I love the Dallin H Oaks quote that you sent mom! This is so great and almost 100% true!  He only exception are the carne asada tacos that I eat in the street today!  haha. It is sooo good!  

Thanks for the sports update dad-  Sounds like a pretty sweet and interesting season! How is it going in basketball!  I heard the Cavs are stacked this year! Who is on their team?  and how is Jabari Parker doing! 

I will tell you next week what I want in the birthday package!  

I love you so much family!  The church is true and Joseph Smith is a prophet! There is so doubt!  This work is just too amazing!

Have a great week!  

ELder Quist

Week 47

Good afternoon!  

Well this week I do not have very much time to write!  Presient Bird just reduce the time to write to 1 hour.  That's not short because all of the other missions have the 1 hour, but I will have to get used to typing faster because I am used to relaxing and writing slow!  

This last couple of weeks have been amazing!  I will tell you more stories on Monday but everything is going great! Hard but great!  We are seeing so many mircales every day.  The Lord and his gospel are changing so many people.  

So last Tuseday we were walking the normal 35 minutes to the food. and something crazy happened!  I will tell you more next week but everything is great!  

Well I have got to go but just know that I am doing great!  If you could write letters a little shorter now and tell other people to start sending letters instead of emails that would help me alot and I will write more physical letters!  

Love you so much mom and dad!  That is awesome that you let Alex make his own choice!  You two are the best!

Love ELder Quist

Week 48

Mom, Dad and family,

So I'll start with the story from last week.  So almost everyday we go to eat in a colonia that is 45 minutes walking from our area because that is where all of the members live!  The colonia is pretty big and it as gated!  You could say that is like Lake of the Pines.  When I got to this area I just followed the elders that knew how to get to the members houses and every day we would cross the same patch of jungle weeds to get in the colonia faster and so that we did not have to go to the other side and go through the front gate! It saved us 20 or 30 minutes of walking!  We did that everyday for 2 months and I just thought that is was normal.  But on last Tuesday we went to eat at a members house and on our way back we were going to pass through the jungle part to leave the colonia and go back home.  It was raining and the grass was drenched!  We started walking really strange to keep the water from getting in our shoes. So we were 6 missionaries, you could say galloping  through the grass, when we saw a police truck in the distance getting closer.  We looked back and they were watching us, but my companion just said " keep walking and act like you don't notice them!"  So we did and then 20 seconds later I look back and I see 2, 200 pound mexican police men sprinting toward us with a beating stick and a machine gun.  We all turned around and walked calmly towards them and they told us to get in the bed of the truck and we had to give them our IDs. We did and got in the police truck as they checked them!  They asked us a lot of questions and planched us hard core!  It was pretty sick and I was almost laughing,  I don't know why, but I thought it was funny, until I thought about having to explain to president how we got in the jail and then I got serious. We somehow talked out way out of it!  They said they would let us free but the planched us so we would not cross the field again.  I guess the robbers cross that field because there is a path and then the people in the colonia get robbed.  I felt pretty bad and even worse knowing that we are supposed to be representing  Jesus Christ and surely that we not a good image to be 6  missionaries in a police car!  They drove us to the front gate and we hid our name tags and our faces so people could not recognizes us and then they let us go!  That was a humbling experience! I realized that I need to represent the Lord better and obey the laws better.  Really I felt terrible, but the good thing is that nothing to bad happened.  So that is my story.  Don't worry mom, I am good.

Life is great!  We had 9 investigators in sacrament  meeting on Sunday!  It felt so good!  The Lord is working miracles in the families!  

Benito Cortez read to 1 nefi 14 in the first night we gave him the Book of Momron!  He is amazing!  and he changed his schedule so he can go to chruch!  Life is good. The spirit has been touching my heart so often and He is changing my life and the lives of other people too.  I love the mission!  

I got the packaged finally!  Thanks you so much it was awesome. 

Thanks so much

Love you so much 

ELder Quist

Week 46

Well another year has passed!  This year has been the greatest of my life!  So many amaizng things happened that I never thought would happen!  God is good!

We had a pretty sweet New Year here in Paseo de Guadalupe!  We ate with ganas the first of the year with the Garcia family!  They are so sweet!  We had carne asada and it was amazing!  I ate like a pound of carne which is against the word of wisdom for not eating meat sparingly and that is why I got sick after.  The Lord chastened me for not eating sparingly, so I am not going to do that again!  We have had a pretty successful week here in our area!  We found some amazing new people to teach and that is exactly what we needed!  There is this man....Benito Cortez!  Wow---he is just so cool!  That man knows how to talk and not in a bad way!  He is just the nicest guy and just makes you want to be his friend!  We found him in the street contacting and looked for him a few times at his house without success. But were persistent because he made a big impact on us in our street contact!  And sure did that pay off!  We got there and he invited us in and the the lesson was amazing!  That was Tuesday and then on Sunday morning we went back and he had pretty much taught the lesson to us.  That is how well he understood the pamphlet.  He told us more about his life.  He is separated from his wife and has 2 kids.  He works in San Pedro(the richest city in latin america) in a resturant that is one of the top ten in all of Mexico! He is the bar tender.  That is going to be a real struggle because his boss likes his workers to try every new product that they are going to sell, so they can give advice to the customers.  So we will see how that goes, but he then came to church with us after the lesson and brought his son with him!  They really liked it.  Then later that day we found another awesome man!  His name is Javier and just so you can picture him, he looks exactly like the actor that plays Jesus in the church bible videos!  With the same hair and beard and everything! Javier is a sweet dude!  Our first lesson was awesome!  He asked us why we talked to him in the street. He told us that he felt like it was the Lord extending his hand to him.  Pretty sweet right?  Yeah he is an interesting man!  He has lived in all parts of Mexico before!  He says that he travels around the country to learn how other people live and learn from life experiences!  I am excited to teach that man!

We also found a guy named Gillermo last week.  We had a sweet first lesson.  He is a head chef for the Catholic seminary school for the future pastors of the Catholics.  He cooks breakfast lunch and dinner for them, but he isn´t necessarily Catholic!  He excepted a baptismal date from us which is not to uncommon.  The hard part is to help them progress!  I thought that he was pretty interested, but then he wasn't there for our next appointment and we passed by 5 times and never found him!  So we were going to give up and then our district leader Elder Farmer asked us if we were teaching a Gillermo. We said yes and he told us that one of his investigators works for Gillermo and that Gillermo was telling everyone at work that we had a baptsimal date and was going get baptized soon!  He palanched all the future pastors and told them that in all his time working there every day he had never once felt what he did in the 20 minute that we were in his house!  He told them all that there is something different about our message!  When I heard that from Elder Farmer, I felt so happy!  The spirit is so powerful.  The Lord uses his weak servants to bring to pass great miracles!  We still haven't found him again,  but we are going to go tonight to look for him.  I am excited!  

SO today we had a sweet campachana chef cook for us and we played soccer!  This zone is sweet!  We also ate jabaneros!  My ears were tingling, it was so spicy!  But now I am a true Mexican!  hahah

Well, love you all. Have a great week!

ELder Quist

Week 45

Family and Friends, 

Merry Christmas from Mexico where the Christmas tradition is to drink beer and eat tamales!  I was only able to participate in one of those two traditions and it was really relaxing.  There is nothing better then a veracruzano hoya de plantano tamal fresh from the pot.  hahah.  

It really was a great Christmas!  And actually I didn't eat tamales on Christmas day.  Just the 7 days leading up to Christmas and that was enough.  Like I told you on Thursday, we had a pretty chill Christmas.  We woke up and I made a delicious breakfast for my companion,  microwave oatmel!  Then we studied and did weekly planning for 5 and a half hours. We walked the members house that we thought we were having dinner with and then found out that it wasn't them. So we had to walk the whole 35 min back but it was worth it.  We had smoked ham, mashed potatoes and spagetti.  It was great!  Then we went to talk on skype and that was pretty sweet!  The most impressing things was how much everyone seems to have grown up!  Alex andBbrayden and Carter more then anyone else.  

The thing that I have been coming to realize is that he mission teaches me exactly what the Lord wants me to learn in the moment that the Lord wants me to learn something! And there is nothing better then being able to see how the Lord makes it possible for me to put the things that I am learning in practice during the Day.  

A new year!  I never thought that I would live to see the year 2015 but here we are!(hope I did not say that too soon, there is still 2 days!)  Just kidding mom!  It is really safe here!  I live in a guarded community!  and it is not a guarded community to keep people out.  hahah.  It almost gets as crazy as Lake of the Pines here...but quite. Because the LOP Possy isnt here.  But there is a gang of 12 year old kids called the Fogossos.  I don't know if that is a bad word in spanish so don't repeat it.

I watched the video "Thanks to Him"  this week.  Thanks to Him we all have new beginnings.  Thanks to Him, there is no such thing as endings.  Thanks to Him we all can have a fresh page,  a blank slate,  Thanks to Him we can forgive and be forgiven.  Thanks to Him my weakness will not always be weaknesses.  More then anything in this amazing year I have learned that EVERYTHING is THANKS TO HIM.  

 

Love ELDer Quist