August 20th-27th, 2012

dear family,

thanks for the updates and everything. i´ll keep a look out for the package mama, thanks! i hope everything went well with gramps surgery! i´m sure it did. yeah dad it still is raining, but mostly in spurts of about fifteen minutes of hard rain, then the sun comes out and we roast in the sauna, then it repites haha. i´m used to the heat and the sweat now, doesn´t bother me, just have to drink lots. me and my companion get a long pretty well. we disagree on some things but we´re working on it. i´m learning a lot of patience here in the mision. as well as other things, the most important thing i´ve learned so far i think is how to recieve revelation. all you have to do is invite the spirit with prayer or scripture study, and then ask yourself questions and search the answers in the resources available, and in your mind. i think a lot of times we forget that a key part of recieving revelation is the meditation. we can learn through modern day prophetic revelation, for example in doctrine and covennts that some of the prophets recieve the most profound revelation just through thinking about things. like section 138 where the prophet has the vision of the spirt world. it came to him from reading the scriptures and then thinking about them is the key. every day we teach as missionaries that to recieve an answer to wether or not the book of mormn is true you have to read, MEDITATE, and then pray. sometimes we skip over that middle step but it is the mas important. the lord will confirm to you in the prayer what you have already thought about and drawn conclusions about.

this week was kind of a huge bummer, our baptismal date that was really a sure thing, fell through and cindy couldn´t be baptized. it´s cause they were´nt able to get married cause the offices were closed on friday. thursday night i remember telling elder wheeler, ´this is going off too smoothly, i´ve never had a baptism go off this smooth, i hope something doesn´t happen´ then the next day they weren´t able to get married. i jinxed it haha. this saturday though it should happen. we desperately looked for another baptism but couldn´t find one. we were following up on a lead of a nine year old girl whose parents were members, but after a lot of work we finally found her and she only had eight years old! that was another bummer, and then saturday night we went to visit miguel, the niño we baptized last week, and he was in a bad mood and told us he wasn´t going to church the next day to get confirmed. lo and behold him and his family didn´t show up for his confirmacion so last night we went to visit them and found his dad drunk in the street. so we brought him to his house and tonight we´re going to go see them so miguel can get confirmed this sunday. we have other investigatores who are being lazy and not getting married or fulfilling with their compromisos so we are going to leave them and look for others. president of the mission has asked us to focus on the elect people that are willing to be baptized the fastest as possible. this week we are going to improve on that.

we have high hopes for this week, it´s the last week of the transfer and perhaps my last week in tres valles so we´re gonna go out with a bang aka a baptism. we found a great family of four yesterday but the problem is they can´t read, that makes it a lot harder to teach but we feel they are escogidos de dos semanas. i´m to the point where this letter would be easier to write in spanish i think. some of the words come to my mind first in spanish haha and it´s a hassle to put them back into english.

thanks for the e mail dust, that´s pretty cool about your filming the hippies!

i love you all and hope you have a great week!

time goes so fast we have to do the things most importantes today!

love elder broadhead