Bellamar Baby!

Dear family and friends,

Another short week! I'm writing today Friday because we're headed up to Huaraz tonight and will be spending our day tomorrow training! We normally go up with President, but he's going with his family to take a little vacation so we're going on the bus tonight like the normal people.  It's a seven hour ride, so we'll be on the bus from 9:40 tonight to 5:20 tomorrow morning.  President is going to let us go to a place called Lago Llanganuco on Monday with the zone there in Huaraz, so that'll be pretty sweet too! 

The area here is running a program called the Open Chapel, where the whole ward gets together and does a huge tour of the church for investigators and less actives and such.  President Rios trains every ward about two weeks before the activity to teach them how it works, and this past Sunday he was in Bellamar, my old ward.  He had my come with him to...basically just to push the arrow on the computer to bring the next slide on the powerpoint up haha.  But the point is, I was there.  It just so happened that I was able to eat lunch and dinner with my old pensionista and attend church, all three hours, in that ward! What a blessing! Man alive, I love that ward.  I was even able to see Daniela, an investigator I taught all six months I was there, be confirmed that sacrament meeting! It was definitely a tender mercy being there that Sunday! 

We had multizone trainings Tuesday and Wednesday morning which went really well.  We focused on teaching the restoration to meet people's needs and not just teaching the same lesson over and over again in robot mode.  Elder Oaks said that people generally just want THE RESULTS of the doctrine, they don't really care about the doctrine itself at first.  When they start feeling the blessings, THEN they get interested in the doctrine.  We often as missionaries sit down in an investigator's house and blast them with straight doctrine for thirty minutes while they think, "Don't care about prophets, don't care how your church was started or the name of it's founder, don't care about your book that you guys carry around" etc.  They don't care about that stuff, they just want peace and happiness and blessings! So our goal was help people take the doctrine of the restoration and apply it to someone's specific situation.  It seems so obvious but it was really complicated for lots of missionaries! There's definitely more work to be done there!

We were also informed that Elder Uceda from the seventy is making a surprise trip to our mission this coming Friday! Completely out of nowhere, and he's coming and leaving the same day! Pretty weird...we're thinking President Rios is getting called as a seventy.  It has to be that! What else would it be?? He was actually Elder Uceda's assistant in the Lima North mission so they go way back, it's kinda neat.  Elder Uceda also wants to interview the office missionaries (!!) and have a two hour training with all the zone leaders.  It should be a crazy week preparing for that!

Just to close, I wanted to say that everything said about scripture study is true! As a missionary, you take your study time for granted.  We get an hour every day to study from the scriptures and Preach My Gospel.  However, with the early multizone trainings this week, we hadn't had time to study a few days in a row.  Even being a missionary, having studied like 600 days in a row for an hour, there was a difference in my life when I didn't study the scriptures! I felt different.  I was missing a closeness with Heavenly Father and felt a little distanced from the Holy Ghost.  I studied this morning and felt back to normal.  Just like EVERYONE SAYS in EVERY GENERAL CONFERENCE, daily scripture study is so important! My testimony of it grew again this week.

Love you all, have a great week!!

Elder Tanner Hart