1st Baptism

So story from Andres´s Baptism this week!!!!

We had the service on the beach of Lago Ranco and it was a BEAUTIFUL DAY! Super Linda! But it was super cold! The night before it snowed on the mountains surrounding Lago Ranco and there was a really strong wind rushing over the mountains that just made it deathly cold outside, which made the lake even colder!

But we started the service in the church where one of the members that i reactivated a while ago game an AWESOME talk on Baptism, and then after the person who was going to give a talk on the Holy Ghost couldnt make it at last min, so i gave one on the holy ghost. 

And then we all walked down to the beach together and sang a Hymn on the beach! It was awesome! I have a video of it, but you are just going to have to wait until i send my SD card home. And there is like a million more fotos of the baptism there too!

But then Andres and I Start walking into the Lake...and it is DEATHLY COLD!!!!! It was terrible! Andres Turned to me while we were walking and said ´´You better not chicken out on me right now´´ And then i replied ´´Hey you watch yourself or im just going to throw you into the water!´´ But we both walk out to where we are waist deep, and we are shivering we are so cold!. 

But then i walk up behind Andres, and i put my arm up to the square, and suddenly its not cold anymore. Not even a little bit! And the really strong winds that were coming over the mountains stopped. And Andres takes a little look at me, because i think he realized that something Changed too .And i felt different. In a way that i dont think i have ever felt before in my life. It wasnt the warm chest feeling of the holy Ghost. It was just an Incredible amount of peace. It was as though my entire body was just filled with peace. I dont think i have ever felt better in my life.

I then baptise him, and that was awesome.

But then when he gets out of the water he isnt cold at all and just had this super Huge Smile on his face! And then as we are walking back to the beach he makes a huge splash and completely drenches me in water that is suddenly freezing cold again hahahahahahaha. And then just to make it better right after the super strong wind from off the snow covered mountains starts back up. Just making the wound just that much worse haha
When we get back onto the beach he runs up to his mom and gives her a giant hug. And then everyone on the beach runs up to him and gives him huge hugs even though he is completely wet, but they didnt care. And Then as they are all hugging him i see it as my perfect opportunity to escape for warm clothes, so i catch my companion and tell him to run to the truck we came in and get a bag of clothes for me that i left under the seat.

Andres and I then both walk back to his house and Change our clothes. And then we sat for a min in the sun and i ask him how we feels. And he just feels great! He was super Happy.

Yesterday we gave him the gift of the Holy Ghost. And got him an interview to receive the Aaronic priesthood. When i told him that he was going to have an interview to receive that same Authority that i taught him about he just seemed shocked that God would Put so much trust in a kid like him who was just starting the path to return back to him. And so i gave him some reassuring words that i´m not going to share, and then he had him interview. He is scheduled to receive the Aaronic Priesthood the week after General Conference. I´m really happy for him. It´s kind of hard to explain.

It´s kind of too bad that some day i am going to have to leave Lago Ranco, I´ve definitely changed as a person alot here, and its probably the only place in the world that i know of that i can see how my choices has changed the lives of many people. I have two more baptisms scheduled for the End Of next month. I hope that i will still be around here to see them.

Love you all keep me posted with how your adventures are going!

No Words

Drunk or dog?

So i totally love this foto of my zone. It totally explains like the personalities of everyone. It´s fantastic. Just a quick little run down on it, the first three in the front are my zone leaders, and my district leader, and there is my right behind them, and we are all making the exact same face (not planned) And the 4 of us are all really close friends, and i want to go on talking about it but i´ll let you try to try using your imagination, But it´s like a game of I Spy mixed in with Sherlock Holmes style personality profiling. I thought it was super awesome!

I have a baptism this Saturday!!! It´s kind of funny we were planning it the other day, and the boy wants me to baptise him, and give him the gift of the Holy Ghost, and i tried explaining to him that normally one Elder Baptises and the other gives the Holy Ghost, but he didnt really care, he wants me to do both parts. But i´m sure i can talk him into letting my companion be involved a little bit hahaha 

But my story from this week has to do with this kid. I want to use him name but i´ll wait until after his baptism. But we had plans to go to his house and go over all of the baptism interview questions with him, and a couple of the commandments that we hadnt taught yet. So we are walking over to his house, and i call the mom to tell her that we were outside the back gate (they live on that is surrounded by a huge gate and we need them to let us in, and the property is huge too they work there) And so i tell that to the mom and i hear her yell ´´Hey Los Hermanos are outside the front gate go let them in´´ And then i here our investigator say ´´Ok´´ And then i think to myself ´´shoot she just said the front gate, that is freaking far away, it would take us like 10 mins to walk over there, and if he gets out there and sees we are not there he´ll spend the next half hour searching for us to see if somehow we got lost (he totally did that before, and that´s a super funny story, but i´ll have to save that one for another day) 

 

And so i tell my companion that we are just going to hop the fence and run to the front gate to meet up with him there. And my companion does not want to do that, because he is deathly afraid of one of the dogs they have (the dog is actually pretty terrifying, i just refer to him as the Hound of the Baskervilles). And he says he´s not going. And so i say ´´Ok well i am going in, if you want you can stay here alone on the edge of town late at night during the Chilean Independence week, i´m sure you´re only going to have to fight a couple dozen drunks. And my companion hates drunks (and dogs, but drunks more than dogs. Some days haha)

 

 So he agrees to come with me. So we start running over to where the front gate is when our investigator sees us, and so i try to stop running when the ground just slides away from under my feet, and i skid like 10 feet in mud, but miraculously i dont fall. And i stop all safe and sound. And he is super concerned and afraid that i may have hurt myself, and i assure him that i´m fine, and then i take a step towards him, and slip again, but this time i totally EAT IT! And i fall on my face and get COVERED in mud! HAHAHAHAHAHA And he saw that i was laughing alot so we knew i was fine. But then he told me that there was a bunch of visitors in the house and that the dad didnt want us to come over with them (and frankly i was pretty dirty so i didnt want to enter the house) so i told him thats fine because today we only wanted to teach him instead of the whole family. 

 

So we started going over all of the baptismal question when he started Talking about Thomas S. Monson, and how i asked if he believed if he was a prophet. And he told me that he had never heard of him before, and then i realized that i never told him that there is a living prophet! Great missionary right. And so i tell him about him and then bear my testimony and ask if he believes that he was a prophet, and he responds ´´Well i have never heard of him before, but i know that you would never Lie to me Elder Crockett, and so if you say that you know he is a prophet of God then i Believe you´´ And oh my goodness that made me feel so good. (I totally have plans to teach him today more about the prophet) 

 

but then we continued on with our interview and the kid is just amazing, some of the questions he answered better that i would have if you asked me when i was in the MTC. And then we got to the Law of Chastity. And this is one of the commandments that i didnt have time to teach prior to this point. So i teach him about it and then ask him what is it that you understand about the Law of Chastity, and he just gets super awkward, and say ´´umm... I dont know´´ and i say, ´´Ok, i am going to ask that question a little differently. Are you willing to live the law of Chastity´´ And immediately he SHOUTS ¨´ÝES!´´ So i figure that he understood that little Commandment pretty well hahahahahaha. 

 

And then we finished our interview. And just this past Saturday he had his official interview, and he´s good to be baptized. I´m so excited for him. He makes little missionary jokes all the time like when we are leaving his house he has to take us to the front gate and say ´´Bye mom, be back in two years!´´ I am positive that he is going to be a missionary in a couple of years. His older brother makes a bunch of im going to be a missionary jokes too, he has a baptism planned in October. He´s 21 right now. The one that is getting baptized this weekend is 15.
Welp i love you all! Keep me posted! 

Baptisms!!

(I love that he can barely conjugate any more and throws in Spanish words now and then.)

So i am going to tell you a story from yesterday. I was walking around in the streets trying to visit a couple of new investigators i have, and everything wasnt working all. Every single one of our plans were falling through on us. And As we were walking i got a thought that i need to visit a family, im asked not to use names so i will call them the Lincoln Family, so i had the thought that i need to visit this family. But i did not want to do it, because they absolutely love it when we come over, and give us a ton of food and stuff, but it is always a huge waste of time.

i was think ´´I get less time to work on Sundays, and i am going to take advantage of every second of it´´ so i told my companion about the thought, and he told me that he wanted to visit them. And so i said ´´Ok before we go over we need a solid plan so its not just wasting time´´ And we couldnt think of one so i just kind of blow off the thought keep walking through the streets. And all of my plans are still falling through, and i am getting tired of it. And my thought that i need to visit the Lincoln Family was just relentless. So i say to myself ´´Fine i´ll go visit this family´´

And so i tell my companion, and he is down to go there. And so we walk to their house, and they are just super excited to see us, and they start running around getting food and stuff ready when my companion says ´´Do you guys have any firewood we can chop´´ And just so you know my companion is super quiet in spanish and so i at first was a little taken off that he was even talking, and that he wanted to chop firewood when we were both already dead tired because we´ve been walking up and down hills all day long. But the mom says ´´Actually Yes i do´´ She then told her son to show us where it was and to help us with it.

And a little information about this family. They are all members except for the son. So he shows us where the firewood was. And i have never seen more firewood in my life. There was a TON! And so my companion grabs and Axe, and starts chopping wood. And so i was sitting there with the son. And i had the thought ´´Invite him to be baptized´´ And i thought to myself ´´Well it is literally going to take forever to cut all this firewood so i might as well take advantage of this time´´ So i start talking to this boy and it starts out with just talking about his school, and then just a couple other random things, and then i ask him if he read a pamphlet i gave him a little while ago, and he told me no.

And I honestly wasnt too surprised because every time we have passed over there i have tried to teaching him but his family always makes it really hard, and he normally doesnt like being there so he normally just leaves. But I realized that this boy could not leave us because he had to help us with the work or else his mom would be mad, and so i knew he wouldnt leave. And also little known fact i am a missionary, so i thought to myself ´´well if your not going to read the stuff yourself i am just going to teach you everything!´´

So As we were working i was teaching the restoration to him, and he was amazed at it. And it was as though he had never heard it before, even though missionaries had been coming over to his house for years now trying to reactivate his family, but then i remembered that he would always leave when i would try teaching him with his family around. And so i realized that it probably was the first time ever that he actually listen. So i taught him. And after teaching him everything. I invite him to be baptized and he says no. And so i think to myself ´´well thats fine because your stuck here with me so i am just going to teach you until you dont have a single doubt left.

And so i secret agented the doubt out of him, and taught him about it. And then little by little he starts running out of little doubts, and got to the point where he was going to pray for a specific date to be baptized and that he is willing to read and pray and do everything in order to find out if what i was teaching was true. And as soon as i finish teaching. the mom comes out and tells us to come inside to eat. So we go inside and i just scarfed down everything super quick so we could get out of there fast so we could leave him with the spirit.

And after we left it was super funny i was walking away with my companion and he turns to me and says ´´Wow you just murdered that man with teaching´´. He actually used different words than that but they are words you dont like mom, so i decided to misquote him, but that was the general message of his statement. (thank you, son)

But this week was pretty good. I had another investigator call me saying 'Hamilton I got my Answer!!!!!' (He found me on facebook like a month ago and ever since then he was called me Hamilton) And so i went over to teach him and he was super excited about being baptized and wanted to get baptized next saturday (because i am baptizing his brother that day!!!!) But i had to explain to him that he needed to go to church and stuff first, and so i set him up with a date on the 12th as well to be baptized. And he was happy and he said that it will be good for him because now he has more time to study the book of Mormon before he gets baptized. It was a good week. Actually really slow but we did some good stuff haha

Prepare for pangs Uncle Bill. PICTURES!!

Making tortillas in their kitchen.

Their house.  They sleep in the top.

Their front yard

Plays anything he can get his hands on.

Climbing trees.

The farms.

Just another day in Chile.

Such a great view of the farms.

Amazing sunrise

I love you, but don't let it go to your head.

So the other day my cell phone starts ringing, and its just super early in the morning (not really it was just like 10 am, but still, no one calls me that early normally) And i see that it is my new district leader Elder Virhuiti (i think its spelled like that), and so i think  Shoot, what is going on, something must be wrong, because we never call eachother this early in the morning unless its something super important And so I answer my phone and i hear Hey there good looking And my first though was YES I ALWAYS START TALKING ON THE PHONE LIKE THAT! (Random fact, every time i have to call a gringo that isn a sister missionary i always say something like that!)

And then my next thought was Wait a second Elder Virhuirti is from Venezuela, i dont think he knows how to speak in English So i decide that i am going to test his knowledge. So respond Sup Babe And then he laughs and he just starts talking to me in English. And we just have a super funny conversation in English. And then i we hang up, and my companion Elder Abarca Says to me Why did they call And i tell him, You know what Elder. I have absolutely no idea why he just called me

But its funny me and him are like super awesome friends now i freaking love that kid. I am super excited to get to work with him more. He is coming down to LAgo Ranco this Friday to come work with me, and my companion is going up to Rio Bueno to work with his comp. But it was awesome the other day i was in a meeting with him, and we were talking about goals, and he told me something super funny. He said In my country we have a saying. you have to work like a black man, to live like a white And Everyone just starts Cracking up, and i speak up, and i say Elder That is mildly Racist Then he says THats just how we are in my country. It sounds racist, but it gets the point across And then we had an awesome meeting about goal.

And i took the floor for a while and gave an awesome High Jumping Analogy that one of my coaches told me once back in highschool, about how if you try jumping right about the bar. You are going to hit it, or fall right under it. But the bottom line is, you arent going to make it. But if you aim to jump much high than where the bar is at, and work hard enough to be able to jump that high, even if you never achieve the really high goal, you are still going to be jumping alot higher than any of the people who was aiming right at the bar. Actually that meeting was probably one of my favorite meetings ever, because i am a firm believer in setting super high goals, because then i achieve super high results.

But it was awesome me and him pretty much Tag teamed that entire meeting and just did awesome teaching about goals. And i like to say in worked, i know in lago Ranco we have been getting a ton of work done, and i imagine that in Rio Bueno that are getting even more work done than we are here. So i want to tell you about my zone leaders a little bit too. I love them so much. They are awesome.

One of them looks like Harry Potter, and the other one is a big Tongan. And i am great friends with both of them. But last night Elder Poirier (Harry Potter) calls me at like 10.45 at night. Right before i was going to bed. And Tells me some really bad news about how the missionaries here in Chile Orosno arent allowed to work this Tuesday, or Wednesday. (which stinks, because next week is Chilean Independence week too, and so the missionaries arent allowed to leave for that week either. So i am going to be bored to death in my house for almost two weeks straight. But after i was done talking to Elder Poirier he says Tell Elder Abarca I love you for me And so i just Yell ELDER ABARCA! I LOVE YOU!

And then i hear in the background of the phone Elder Amone (the Tongan) say Hey tell Elder Crockett I love him, but say it in a way that it doesnt get to his head And so i say Hey i heard that Jerk! But i love you too Elder It was super funny. But anyways that it my Email for today, i feel like i wanted to ask you for something, but i cant remember what it was so it must not have been that important. Welp Love you all!!!!

New Companion!

Dear Mom you totally still take priority over all my friends just so you know. Just a little insight to how i do my internet is first i write my mission president, then you, and then i write my friends. So you are always in first place

Hey Dad I had a video game for the PS2 that i played when i was a kid called Kingdom Hearts, and it sounds almost exactly like what Lela wanted, you can let her play with those to keep her calm for the next month haha

So just so you all know when the Voice recording i sent home i wasnt trying to pull off an accent, that`s just kind of how my English voice sounded. The day that i pulled the Country Accent all day long sounded a million times better.

So I LOVE my new companion! He is awesome, we get along awesome. But before i get into talking about him i want to tell you my adventures of Ditchin my last companion in Osorno haha

I left my home at about 8 am, because we had to be in Osorno by 10 30 so that my companion could leave with the group heading down to his new sector, and its about a 2 and a half hours drive to get to Osorno so we left at 8. And as soon as we arrived (at 11) Immediately the other missionaries grabbed his bags and threw them on a bus, and right away he had to leave. And it totally happened super quick, when i got there i just saw a huge group of missionaries, and i was friends with almost all of them so i head over there, and start talking to them, when my old companion just kind of nudges me, and said he was heading at. And then he left.

I then learned that my companion Elder Abarca was coming from Coihuique, (way down south) And that he wouldnt arrive until about 10pm. So I have another Friend he named Elder Miltchen (I think it`s spelled like that), and so when he hears that i was going to be there all day he gets super excited and says ``Elder Crockett, you totally have to come out to lunch with me!`` And so we went out to eat, when we run into my first companion here in Chile Elder Larsen!!!! And it was super legit.

So we all went out to eat. His companion right now is Elder Neilson, and i was his travel leader when we came to Chile. But anyways we are all eating when Elder Larsen asks me who my new comp is, so i tell him Elder Abarca. And He couldnt even Believe it. He told me that Elder Abarca, was his companion in Paillaco right before i arrived. So when Elder Abarca left i got there. And then it totally remembered reading the area book, and seeing his name written all over everything. And so Elder Larsen was super excited for me.

After Lunch i met up with my friend Elder Amone, he is a super Legit tongan from Florida. And his companion was on the same flight a mine so i spent the rest of the day with him. We went to the mission office, the post office, and just all over the place It was super fun! I love that guy. He`s actually my new Zone Leader now. And Guess what he totally has a uke. But i`ll get into that in a min.

Well to make a long day short 10 o clock comes around, and i found myself in the buss terminal when i see the mission president walking with a huge group of Elders. And so i started searching for my companion when i realized something, that i already knew almost every single one of them, and i was wondering why they where all in the terminal, when i saw Elder Balbuena, when it clicked. It was all the missionaries going home that day. And so Elder Balbuena sees me and runs up to hug me and stuff, because me and him are super close.

But i am going to skip the next part of the story and go straight into when we had to say goodbye. It may have been one of the saddest moments of my mission. I just said goodbye to a ton of my friends, knowing that most of them i will never see again, because they are from all over the world, and so after i hug a bunch of them goodbye, i go and i stand with my friend Hermana Tipples, and it was so sad, we where there waving goodbye to the dieing missionaries (mission term for going home) And a TON of them where Crying! They didnt want to go home. And then i started talking about it with Hermana Teeples, and i Totally do not want to Die! I know i literally just started my mission, but i already love it here!  I can not imagine how hard it is going to be in Two Years to go back home. Now I still love you all, and i`m super excited to see you some day, but man it is going to be tough. Thankfully i dont have to worry about that for a long time though. So i`m solid.

After they all left my companion arrived in Osorno. And so i left with him Elder Amone and Elder Poirier (his new comp) And we stayed the night in La Union. The next morning i decided that i was not going to do my 30 mins of exercises, and that i was just going to play the Ukulele instead! I loved it so much!!! I then made it a point to shower last so that i would have a longer unbroken time of playing Elder Amone`s baby. But Good Next sense he`s my zone leader we can totally have intercambios, and so he said that the next time we`ll have one he`ll make sure that we are together so we can jam. I am super stoked for that!

And he totally knows where i can buy one in Osorno, he bought an alright Baritone Uke (not as nice as my baby, but lets get real mine sounds like Magic, and we are in South America so uke`s arent exactly that common) But he bought is for 20,000 pesos. Thats only like 40 bucks! I totally want to buy one! I`m not sure how i`ll have time to jam with it though, most of my free time goes to practicing the hymns for Sacramento meeting. Oh ya by the way i`ve totally been playing the Piano in Sacrament meeting for a couple of months now, i just dont think i brought it up.

Welp i wanted to tell you about my new companion, but i think that would take another hour so i think i`ll tell you about him next week. But hes awesome, love that guy to death.

Love you All!!!!