He Is Risen!

Hello Fam!! :)

This week was incredible!!! We had President Nelson come to our mission this weekend to talk to us! it was an experience that i will never forget, he had such a spirit and power when he talked. It is so true that they are called of God to be His Special Witnesses here on earth :) Something that he and his wife talked a lot about this weekend, being easter weekend, was the resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I love the words in Mattew 28 that say "He is not here: for he is risen." I share the feelings that our Prophet, Thomas S. Monson, said about these words, that there is nothing more comforting than those words that the Angel spoke to Mary. Because just from our knowledge of the Ressurection, we know that we too will be ressurected, that one day we will have the chance to live eternaly with our families if we follow diligently the Doctrine of Christ. I have a firm testimony that He has Risen and because of that we too will rise in that great day. Something that Sister Nelson taught about those words is that we can apply it to our daily lives. As we repent and apply the cleansing power of the atonement of Jesus Christ, we too can be risen every day to a higher level spiritually. She goes on to explain that as we repent , people will say for example "where is timmy that used to lie all the time?" and we can say "he is not here, for he has risen." As we learn this princple we can know that we can always rise above our trials and defects and because more like our Savior. I know that this has happened with me, through the great power of the Atonment i have been able to rise up to be a better son of my Heavenly Father and that the old me is not here, but i have risen. I have seen it in a lot of the people i have had the chance to see, i am seeing it in Pablo who just got baptized that he is rising, the old him is no longer there, and he is rising up. He even is helping us teach Claudia and prepare her for her baptism this weekend! I hope we can all apply this into our lives, especially during this great time of year that we celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. I love you all! have a great week, sorry for the long email, haha!

Love, Elder Stuart 

From Elder Stuart's Mom:

I thought I would forward a bit of my email from Ryan so you get a little more information about this past week!

Hey Mom :)

Happy Easter! I had a wonderful sunday! how was yours?? Thank you! i am super happy for Pablo and Claudia!!! also it is the first time the APs have baptized in like 4 years, so that was pretty cool to do.

It was an amazing conference Mom. Yeah the whole mission came up Friday so that was a nightmare for us to organize everthing and get them to their hotels safely. then Saturday morning from 9-12 we had a conference with him, and there was a small chior that sang. and it was amazing :) Some of the things he told us blew my mind. then he was in our stake conference this sunday too and spoke so that was cool! 

General Conference & Investigators

Hola Familia!!

whats up?! THis week was amazing!! Our investigators are progressing very well. Pablo and Claudia are doing super well, we went with them this week and we took out a date for them to get married the 5th and they will be getting baptized the 8th :) Im super stoked for them!! Please pray for them so that they can complete with this covenant they are about to make! Hermano Rigoberto Castillo is doing really well as well, we went saturday morning and we watched the first session of conference with him in his house! he loved it!! but he says that he still isnt prpared to be baptized, so we will keep trying to help him and see what it is that he needs to make it!

Conference was absolutely amazing! I hope you all were able to take something out of it to apply in our lives and recieve answers to our prayers and the questions of our hearts. For me the best part was to hear the many testimonies of the Godhead. It was amazing how many testified of God our Eternal Father, His Son Jesus Christ, our Savior and Mediator with the Father and the Holy Ghost, the testater of the two and the comforter for us in this life. I know and have learned that the more we learn about them and their natures we will have more desires to follow them :) What a great conference with such great messages!

Well this week was great! i hope you all have a great week!!

Love,

Elder Stuart

Working & Praying for a "White" Christmas

Sup Fam!

This week was super great!!! With the Navidad coming up we are super excited here in the mission! Things are going super well! We had a few actividies this week in the community with Christmas and they went super well! Also we had an acctivity in our ward, and we had 9 investigators show up!!! It was such a great Christmas miracle! We are still working hard and praying for a christmas baptism and that here in the misison we can have a white christmas full of people making convenants with the Lord!

Challenge of the week. read luke 2 and think about how the birth of our Savior has blessed your life and share it with someone!!! Love you all, and may you all have a wonderful week full of the spirit of Christ! Remember that He is the true gift and the reason for Christmas :):)

 Well that is all for this week, because we will be talking next week! I Love you all!

Elder Stuart

Neuquen!

Hola Familia!

This past week was great! Now we had transfers... and here comes more changes! I now got transfered to Neuquen with Elder Clemens! Im so excited for this next chapter of my mission to see all the miracles and experiences that I will have while i am here in Neuquen! My time in Cipolletti was a great part of my mission, the people there are so nice and work hard in this Work of the Lord! This week I really learned a lot about the grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, something that i have been studying a lot lately is how important it is to learn from the times we fall, and pick ourselves back up through the atonement of Christ and become more like Him :) Great week! Im excited! And i hope you all have a great week! 

Love,

Elder Stuart

Chos malal!!!!!

Bueno. This week on my way to chos malal i thought that my comp was already there, but he ended up getting on the bus (which was 12 hours....) about half way through and he thought i was there. Turns out we were thrown into a white wash and nobody told us! We got to our area about two in the morning and only had a few notes from the Hermanas (yes we kicked out some hermanas and stole their pension ;)haha) We then looked through some of the area book real fast, and went to sleep with those names in our head. 4 hours later... haha we got to get up and get going! The zone leaders called us and gave us a challenge to have 21 lessons this week.... that is very difficult, even when you have investigators to teach. And we didnt! They told us to just try and teach people on their door step or get in for a short lesson. So we took the challenge to the Lord and asked for help. We started going, and holy cow the lord really answers prayers. The people here are so happy and nice, that we were able to start teaching people in their doorstep a quick little lesson. We got to Sunday night and it was 8:30, we had 20 lessons and thrity minutes. We had spent the last two hours looking for someone to teach but everyone was just rejecting us. We decided to say a quick prayer. We started walking down the street, and we saw this lady we had contacted the first day here, she was sitting outside alone, and called us over. we sat down, and she started to tell us that two people she knows had died this week (was that right english? haha) and so we were able to have an amazing quick lesson with her about the plan of salvation. She was so happy and said it really helped her. I can testify that the Lord answers our prayers and after we have done all we can do, we pray and ask for help and guidance, he will lead and guide us to were we need to go and what we need to do. Through the grace of our Savior we can see miracles. 2 Nephi 25:23, we know that it is through Christ that we can be saved and see miracles after we have done all that we can do. I love this work and I love my Savior so much.

Some interesting facts now!

We are in a group here in Chos, we have about 20 members... max.. and meet in a little rented place they have. Our leader de group has been a member for 6 months! haha he is such a Capo! He was able to recieve the Melchezidek preiesthood yesterday as well so that was really cool! This area is amazing, and i love it, and there are actually mountains!!!

Love you all. thanks for your support, and have a great week!!!

Love,

Elder Stuart

Service

Hola! This week i have learned a lot of things! First. If you are going to give lunch to the missionaries for them to cook... give them something easy.... not just a full raw chicken. hahaha this week that happened to us! A family couldnt have lunch with us so the night before they just gave us this chicken to cook. We dont have an oven so we couldnt cook it like that... so Elder Elwood just looked at me and said ´well i guess we arent eating tomorrow!!¨hahaha it was so funny, but we ended up making something and it was actually delecious... kinda.. haha! But that was a skill that we learned this week! THis week i have also learned a lot about service. We have been in kind of a slow patch here in Godoy trying to find new people to teach and help them along. We decided to change up our methods, because if something isnt working you need to change it until it does. So we decided to look for more ways to do service this week. And it worked so well!! Matias is now progressing so much better because we went and helped him with some things he was building and cleaning up in his yard and we just created a bond and he opened up even more with us. We were just trying to do service where ever we could and we found a lot of people through that! When they see that we are normal people and that we are here to help and not just talk about Christ, they are more willing to open up and let us talk about Christ becuase they feel more comfortable. Makes me think of what we learn in Mosiah 2 how when we are in the service of our fellow beigns we are only in the service of our God. It is so true!! Go out and do some service this week! It is great!

Also this week i feel like all the other churches had a ¨bash the Mormons about Joseph Smith´week. Because we had more people than ever talking bad about him and yelling at us and stuff like that. I just want to testify to you all that I KNOW that he was and is a Prophet of God. Just like it says in Doctirne and Convenants. He did more for mankind than any other person save Jesus Christ himself. I am so greatful for Joseph Smith and all that he did for us and all we have today becuase he was brave and humble enough to fall on his knees and ask God. Now we have the book of Mormon and i can learn more about my Savior and how i can be more like Him. I am so greatful for that. I will defend him, and my Savior forever. (rant of the week over. haha) 

I love this gospel. I love my Savior. I know this is the truth and it can change lifes. Have a great week everyone. I love you all!!!!

Love,

Elder Stuart

Missionaries

This was another great week! The family that we found and are teaching are amazing! It is a husband and wife about sixty years old, named Juan and Antonia. They are so amazing and so prepared by the Lord! It is amazing to see the Lord´s hand in the lifes of the people here. The first time we taught them and shared the story of Joseph Smith they were both crying at the end and told us that they have been asking their whole lives which church is true and they feel like they finally found their answer! And now everytime we go over they get tears in their eyes and tell us that when we talk about the Gospel that they can really feel something different, a different spirit and that they can tell that it is different. They also came to church this Sunday and loved it!! I know that they are going to get baptized really soon!

 

 It is amazing to be a missionary and really see how this gospel and our Savior can change the lives of people. And i am so greatful for this oportunity to be an instrument in the hands of our Savior.The experiences and the spirit that is felt everyday by a missionary is amazing. Yes sometimes it is hard but I love something that Elder Holland said ¨why would we expect it to be easy for us when it was never easy for Him(Christ). Salvation was never easy. Salvation is not a cheap experience.¨It is so true! The mission is hard. But the joy and happiness and the spirit you can feel with those special moments is worth everything. We are lucky to be missionaries in this day and age and see how the Lord really is Hastening His work. I love the mission!

Things are great! I hope all is well with all of you back home. Remember our Savior. Never stop praying. And have a great week!!

Love,

Elder Stuart

Christmas Miracles!

Hola familia y amigos!

This week was such a good week!!! First off it was Christmas and that was way fun, we were able to meet up as a zone in the chapel and we made tacos and played sports for a long time! It was a lot of fun. Also got to talk with the fam so that was pretty great! So Christmas was a pretty great time :) Also I loved it because it was a time that we could really focus on our Savior and really have Him more in our lives. It is a wonderful time of year.

Also... Samantha came to church!!!!! We woke up really early sunday morning and went out to Godoy to look for her to bring her to church and she came!!! She said she loved every second of it and really felt something different there. She especially loved the sacrament. It is amazing what this gospel can do to the lives of every person. Especially the importance of the sacrament. It is something that we can do every week to become clean again and start over. It is a promise we can make to always remember our Savior, and if we do so, we can ALWAYS have the spirit with us to lead us, to guide us, and to help us along the way. WHAT A PROMISE!! And I know that when God makes a promise He always comes through with it, we just have to put in our part. We really have seen that here in Godoy the past couple of weeks. All of our work, fasting, and prayers have finally payed off and Samantha told us she wants to be baptized this saturday so ¨start filling the faunt!¨hahah that is what she told us! It was amazing :)

I know that the time we spend on our knees asking our father in heaven for help is never wasted. He is always there listening. And when the timing is right, he will bless us with all that we need. ¨when life gets too hard to stand, kneel. I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas full of the love and spirit of our Savior Jesus Christ. I love you all and hope you all know how much you all impact my life. Have a great week and always remember to keep praying!!

Love Elder Stuart

Almost Christmas!

hola familia y amigos :)

It is almost christmas!! It really doesn´t feel like it though... haha because it is hot, there is no snow, and just different. But the feeling is still there!! haha I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas season this year, and remember the importance of our Savior and the true meaning of Christmas. :) 

 

This week was a little difficult, we didn´t have any investigators show up to church... again. So that is the fifth week in a row... it is hard because a lot of them have desires to be baptized, but can´t because they dont come. Especially Samantha, she has such a strong testimony and is in Alma already in the Book of Mormon, but she doesn´t come, so she can´t be baptized. :/ Also Brian and Guadalupe like disappeared this week and we don´t know what happened so they weren´t baptized. That was hard. But we will keep working with them and press forward with faith, because if we keep working at it with faith, eventually they will come unto Christ :) It is hard knowing what is waiting for them, and them not taking it! But we aren´t going to give up! We have contacted a lot of people this week, and hopefully some will turn into some good new investigators. 

 

Saturday was fun, because we did this activity in the plaza, and had a big screen and showed videos of christ and christmas, and sang songs, and found a lot of people to teach! it was awesome! Then yesterday we had a big nativity scene with our two wards, and we got to watch them do that! So that was fun. Things are great and I am learning a lot. I am learning a lot about our faith, and how after the trial of our faith is when the blessings come, i really have seen that while I am here in the mission. Faith is so important, and we will be blessed for our faith. Love you all. Have a great week. And keep the Savior in your heart and what he did for us. I am praying for all of you! Love you!

 

Love,

Elder Stuart

[I asked Elder Stuart a few questions and here were his answers:]

1 Yes i do   (Do you do your own laundry?)

 

2 Everyday for lunch, because they dont eat dinner here really (How often, if at all, do you eat with members?)

 

3 We usually get some milenesa from a members polleria and cook it, or go buy something  (What do you eat if you don’t eat with members?  Do you guys cook or go out?)

 

4 There really only is the indio here, and i sent pics of that, we usually just write, buy, and play soccer! (On P-Day, do you have a chance to visit any sites?  Are there sites in your area?)

 

5 I think I am healthy ;)  (How is your health?)

 

6 Everything is holding up well  (How are your shoes and clothes holding up?  Your towels?)