Elder Boyer...Chile Concepcion South Mission: Week 9... Abinadi, Spiders, and Service!!!

Wow this week has been a really good week. No baptisms, but it was a really spiritual week. This week I was reading in the scriptures. I was reading in Mosiah where it talks about Abinadi. Abinadi is seriously so amazing. He would have had to have so much Faith. I want to be like Abinadi. He testified of Christ even up until the moments of his death. He was getting burnt by fire and he was still testifying about Christ. Abinadi seriously has been my model this week. I have thought a lot about how he would think about things. It has really helped me this week.

I was also reading in Alma 5:27, it says, "Have ye walked keeping yourselves blameless before god? Could ye say if ye were called to die at this time within yourselves that ye have been sufficiently humble? That your garments have been cleansed and made white through the blood of Christ, who will come to redeem his people from their sins?" It later says “Have ye been stripped of pride? Have ye been stripped of Envy? If not ye are not prepared to meet God!" That scripture really helped me a lot this week. We have to live every moment preparing to meet God. We all have a lot to work on, but with the help from Christ, we can be made clean. We should live every moment and be able to say "I am ready to meet God", " I can walk blameless before God" Those scriptures really helped me this week. I know if we put all our trust in the Lord we can be made into the people God wants us to be. That is my spiritual thought of the week. I love you all so much.

So, I have noticed that I haven’t really been giving good detail in my emails. So I am going to spend time giving some details. So right now we are living in a little house. Elder Cardoso (Brazil), Me, Elder Sheffield (Pleasant Grove) and Elder Ehlen (California). All the missionaries in my house are so awesome. We do a lot of fun things to make the mission a fun experience. When we have spare time, we have nerf gun wars. We open all of the windows and doors and run around shooting each other with nerf darts. It is really fun. Also we have been catching all these bugs that we find in our house and we put them in a jar. So far we have caught over 30 spiders. We watch them fight each day. As a missionary, you find a lot of little things entertain you now that didn't entertain you before… haha.

I seriously love my city I am serving in. I am in a little town called Yumbel. There are seriously more dogs than people. The dogs here are super crazy. There are a lot of homeless dogs. They have all these diseases and are nasty. We have to always have a rock in our hand or act like we do. The dogs always come up to attack us, but we have to scare them off. The people here in Yumbel are so nice. We have been doing a lot of service lately. Doing service is seriously the best part of the mission. I forgot how much I miss work. The other day we spent a few hours shoveling rocks into a truck. It honestly wasn't that bad, but the next day I felt like I couldn't walk. Haha, it is crazy how fast you lose everything. I was so sore from working. At home I worked all the time, but out here in the mission, we haven’t done much physical labor.

Elder Cardoso and I have a lot of investigators. They are all so good. They just need to come to church. They cannot progress unless they come to church. That is the hardest part. They have all accepted a baptismal date, but they are too busy to come to church on Sunday. Some work, some play soccer, some visit family, some live in the campo, which is about 30 minutes away. We have been teaching them the importance of coming to church. This last Sunday we invited this family of 4 to come to church: Mom, Dad, 14 and 11 year old boy. This Sunday the 2 little kids came to church with all their friends.

We had like 8 teenage boys come to church… it was so awesome. After church we asked them what they thought. They said “baptize me”. These kids are seriously so good. It is sad because their parents aren't making the right decisions. We want to help them, but their parents don’t really like us. We told them to keep coming to church, and then we can baptize them in a few months.

So, I posted some more pictures this week. This family is so good. Sergio is the dad, and Martin is the little kid. Martin is my favorite kid here. This family wants to be baptized, but Sergio works every Sunday, and the parents aren't married. So we have to work on these few things, but they are super good.

Also, we have been doing a lot of service this week. I’m still trying to work out when I have spare time, haha. We found tires that we lifted up for exercise. I am still losing weight. I eat and feel full, but my weight continues to go down… haha.