October 28, 2013

Mom,

Fellowshiping nights are our activity nights for the members. We don´t always do like a lesson or something spiritual, sometimes they´re just for fun, so we call them fellowship nights.

That pancake mix and stuff is for all 4 of us yuscaran elders. It is a lot though, but we use it quite a bit. I think that we´re going to use the cake mix for some branch activity. We made some for the mothers day activity, and everyone went on and on about how good the cake was, even though it was the basic cake with frosting, so we´ll probably make a couple for the branch and a couple for us.

here´s what happened this week:

This week we had a special mission conference with Elder Ochoa from the Quorum of the Seventy come to talk to our mission. There were 3 sessions over 3 days, he talked to the missionaries in the city, in the south, and then us missionaries in the east of our mission. He talked to us about a lot of stuff and gave examples and demonstrations and stuff to show us how to be better missionaries. It was a good experience and I felt the spirit a lot telling me some stuff I need to do in the branch and stuff I need to do better. It was a good conference, and it lasted for the whole day on friday. We came back and had our weekly branch activity, not many people came to that, but it was still fun. Then, saturday morning we had an activity to clean the church, and we actually had a lot of people come to help with that, and we got a lot done. The church looks a lot better now, and we had a lot of fun doing it too. We started a water fight with the kids, and we all ended up soaked by the end. Even a few of the adults joined in and everyone that came got at least a little bit wet. Our investigator even came to the cleaning activity, but he didn´t end up coming to church yesterday, even though he said that he was going to. We didn´t have many people come to church yesterday. That was a little sad. But the old branch president is starting to come back to church, and that might help out because he knows a lot about the church and the doctrine and everything.

That was all the excitement from this week. Things are going well though. I get along with my companion well and everything.

Right now, I study like 3 or 4 chapters of the BofM every day to finish before christmas, because our mission president challenged us to, and I study PMG and spanish and I also read a lot of church manuals and other church books and pamphlets to help out each of the leaders in their classes. I´ve even read some weird books like the RS daughers in my kingdom to help out our RS president who can hardly read. Its all interesting though. I do sometimes wish that I could just focus on scriptures a lot more though too. Sometimes I have to go through all of our paperwork and financial stuff too in the mornings so I don´t always have a ton of time to study whatever.

Love,

Elder Ward

October 22, 2013

Hey all!

We had changes this week! My companion left, and so I stay here in Yuscarán my 5th change. I´ve been here forever! But it´s alright here, I´ll survive it here in my second area... My new companion is one of my friends from my MTC district, so we have the exact same time in the mission. He´s from Spanish Fork, Utah. It´s weird being with a gringo again and always talking english. Also, one of the other elders from the other area left this change to be a ZL, so we have a new Elder from Guatemala here training. So we still have 3 gringos and a guatemalan in this area, we´ve had that pattern for a few changes now. So we´ve been showing the new Elders around here this week and showing them how to do stuff with the branch.

We´ve been doing fellowshiping nights here in the branch every friday night, and this week we had over 20 people show up, which was cool, we even had some investigators and quite a few less active members. Yesterday in church we almost had 20 members, but we had our investigator come to church, so that was good. It´s been a while since we´ve had an investigator come from either area. So it was good to have people come this week and have a little bit more success here than the last few weeks.

I am enjoying being able to learn new things in this area and always see new things and meet new people and being able to serve the people here. Even though it is hard in this area and we have plenty of problems, I still know that I need to be here a little longer to help more people learn about the gospel and to help the branch here grow however I can. I know that each of the parts of this gospel are all interrelated, the missionary work, the temple work, the ordinances and blessings that come from the priesthood, each of the classes and meetings that the church has are for the same eternal purpose: the salvation of many souls. Each of us has been called to do our little part in the work of salvation, which will help us gain our own salvation if we serve faithfully. I have a testimony of this gospel and the many opportunities that we have to progress are a sign of God´s love for each of us. It doesn´t matter where we start, as long as we do start, on our journey to progress. I know that everything that this church teaches is true, and that the church is perfect, even when the people in the church are not. I know that studying the scriptures, especially the Book of Mormon, will change our lives profoundly if we strive to apply what the spirit testifies to our individual lives. I am grateful for the testimonies of all of you and for your love and support that helps me to be out here on my mission. I love you all and hope that you will feel God´s love and a desire to serve Him.

Love,

Elder Matthew Ward

Mom,

Sorry, we couldn´t write yesterday because when we got back from Tegus the power was out from 2 in the afternoon until 11 this morning, so we just barely got on to write to everyone.

This week was good. We had changes which I explained in my other email, but yeah, it was a good week. Yesterday we bought a ton of food from Tegus in bulk. We got 2 bags of 10 lbs each of pancake mix and 2 big things of syrup and 4 cake mixes that I have to make before I leave this area and don´t have an oven anymore. I´ll send a picture of all of it.

I hope that everyone is doing well.

Love,

Elder Ward

October 14, 2013

Mom,

I wrote so late last time because we got back late from an activity with the zone and then all 4 of us still had to email, and I wrote to you and to Mishelae, but I didn´t finish and I had to get off the computer, and then my companion wrote until really late, so I didn´t have time to finish emailing, so I just sent the messages that I had finished to you 2 and didn´t get to write to anyone else.

This week was good. It´s been kind of stressful with a ton of members asking for help (food or money help), but it´s been alright. Everyone in Yuscarán is sick right now, I swear... I have a cold right now which has been annoying more than anything. Next week is changes, so we´ll see what happens. I still don´t think that I´ll be leaving here for another change at least, but we´ll see if one of the other 4 leave this week. Other than that, not much has happened this week.

Love,

Elder Ward

October 7, 2013

Mom,

Conference was super good. We tried to watch it at the church, but our cable didn´t work very well. (we have cable and a TV, but the cable didn´t have all of the channels) So at the end we had to go to the other 2 missionaries´ house to watch it, because they had a better cable connection, and then we got on our laptop and streamed the whole conference in english for the 3 gringos, and we watched it laying down on their beds. It was pretty chill, and it was a good conference. I missed a few talks while preparing all of the tech stuff, so last night I had to go back and watch all of the talks that I missed. It was good though. I received some good answers, even for questions that I hadn´t even written down or asked for or anything. We were glad that we got to listen to priesthood session too, even though I would prefer to be able to watch it in a stake center.

Well, I hope that you are all doing well.

Love,

Elder Ward

September 30, 2013

Mom,

Yes we still always just contact in the streets, the members don´t help out to much right now, but hopefully little by little they will get more excited to help out and invite people to activities and church. Our investigators seem a little bit better now, we at least have a few that look like they should progress.

I´m glad that they´re going to broadcast priesthood session, because we were just planning on not being able to watch it here, because we can´t travel all the way out to our district center to watch it. We´re just going to watch on BYU internation TV here in the church.

We had district conference this week (yesterday), so we took a bus with like 20 members to the church building like an hour away. At first I was worried because the bus didn´t start for like 15 minutes, so we were late to pick people up to go, but we prayed and it started and we picked everyone up and were able to drive over and be to the meeting on time. The meeting was really long. They talked for 3 hours without any breaks or anything, and all of the kids there were getting antsy to go do stuff. It was long even for me after a while, but it was good. The district president talked, and so did our mission president and his wife. They challenged all of the members and everyone to read the book of mormon before christmas this year, so I´m going to have to get on that, because there isn´t much time left before christmas. It worked out well with timing though, because I´m just about to finish reading the book of mormon. It was a good conference and I was very glad that everything worked out with planning transportation and that so many members could go to the conference and learn there.

We also had interviews with the mission president this week. It was good to talk to him and learn some new stuff. It seems like president trusts me a lot from some of the things he´s told me, so it was good to hear that from him.

Also yesterday we had a deep doctrine class in the afternoon that I taught. I explained in depth the true meaning of Kolob as portrayed in the facsimile 2 from the Book of Abraham. I gave an analysis on the relation between the symbols of God and Heaven and Eternity and the Sun and things that go on in the temple as shown in the hieroglyphics. The only problem was that nobody came to my class, so I just drew the picture on our whiteboard for nothing. ;p No, just kidding, I didn´t give any class, but a couple of weeks ago I found a little like 30 page book here in the church about the interpretations of the 3 facsimiles in the book of Abraham and what they mean, it was really interesting. I learned a lot about the symbols from it, and so I was bored yesterday, so I drew it on the whiteboard when I needed a break from studying. It actually only took a little less than an hour, which is good for how good it turned out, given that I have little talent at drawing or art or anything. There´s a lot of symbols in it that are confusing to draw. So I thought that I would include a couple of pictures of that. :)