Area Work

Dear family and friends,

It's been quite the week! Yet again! The best thing right now is our area! It's been kind of a tradition in our mission that the assistants' area wasn't that great, but we're doing all we can to find the right balance between office-type work and field-work.  I think we're making some progress! I love being with Elder Stroud; we're setting some high goals for ourselves and it's fun always trying to improve the way you do missionary work.  

We've seen some serious blessings this week! For example, Claudia (our date for the ninth) is rolling.  She's super set, reading in 2 Nephi 6, and can't wait for her baptism.  We asked her for references this week and she talked to us about her 17 year old niece, Cielo, who she proceeded to invite to the next lesson.  Well, she's also super prepared! This week they both came to church and had a great experience.

We also got contacted in the street by a lady named Cecilia! She just came right up to us and explained that her brother is a member in Utah and advised her to "go find a Mormon bishop" to feel peace in her life! She searched for a church building in Chiclayo, but they were all closed! She kind of gave up hope and came back to Trujillo.  This week, she went to buy bread, but for some reason felt to go to a different bakery than usual! Well, there we were, right in her path! We taught her today and she's really humble and willing to act on our message! 

We had a Leadership Conference Thursday morning, for which President had us translate a bunch of documents from English to Spanish.  You'd think that would be simple, but the problem was keeping the same look and format while adding a bunch of words (Spanish usually uses lots more words than English)!  So that was another interesting task haha! The conference went really well though, and then we capped off the week by giving six one-hour trainings yesterday during interviews.  You'd think that just standing in one room and training all day would be easy, but it's strangely draining! We came back from Chimbote pretty dead yesterday haha!

Thanks again for all your love and support and prayers! I love you all and hope you have great weeks!

Elder Hart

Talkin' Sports

Dear family and friends,

It's been an unbelievable two weeks!! My word I don't even know where to start.  I wasn't able to write last week because President last minute asked one of us to go down to Chimbote with him for the open house activity, so I've got lots of recapping to do! 

The biggest thing was probably transfers.  Elder Rice, my companion, is now at his house doing who-knows-what, which is weird to think about! I'm now with Elder Stroud from Washington and it's been a blast so far.  He's a huge sports fan so we've done quite the amount of sports-reminiscing the past week.  From Keena Young and Austin Ainge, to Sam Cassell and Kwamee Brown, to Darren McFadden and Manti Teo.  Haha we've talked lots of sports.  And he's a big BYU fan to make things even sweeter! We've also done lots of talking about our work though, both our area and our work with zone leaders and missionaries.  I'm super excited for the next two transfers!

There are just a million things that have happened this week, which overwhelms me so much that I probably won't write about any of them...also because I'm about to hit the hour mark.

But I love you all!! Me and Elder Stroud are gonna go play some ball at a park with the "best team in all of Trujillo."  I guess they always get together Saturdays and play.  It´ll be the first competitive game of basketball I've played in a long while! Haha wish us luck!

Love ya lots,

Elder Tanner Hart

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