THIS PAST WEEK WAS A GOOD ONE

hola mama

well this past week was a good one. we found four new investigators. we have only taught them all once though and we are going to go teach them again tonight. about the photos mom, i havent tried to bring my camera to the ciber to send any photos, sorry. elder soderquist is great. he is from woodbrigde virginia. sorry, i dont have much time today, we got to the ciber late and now have a cita in five mins. that is pretty much my week. i feel like my castellano is coming along well and i am understanding people well. o yeah, we got about five references we are going to contact this week as well. so that means more new investigators hopefully! i just read 2 nephi 31 the other day and its amazing. talks about why baptism is important and why if christ was baptized, all the more reason we need to be baptized. sorry this is so short! diculpenme! chau!

elder jones

MY NEW COMP IS ELDER SODERQUIST. HE IS GONNA BE A GREAT COMP IN MY OPINION

well, we just had transfers. elder cox is now in necochea in his last area, i think his area there is keken. my new comp is elder soderquist. he is gonna be a great comp in my opinion. i think the work is going to pick up here. last week was ok. it wasnt our best though, we didnt teach many lessons either. but we do have one investigator right now who is getting close to being baptized. she is named baulina. she tells us how she wants a church in which there is no drinking or dirty dancing parties. we have told her well hey, this is your church! but she just havent received an answer yet. so we are working on that with her. she also needs to go to church as well. she told us she sells stuff on sunday mornings and we are going to teach the dia de resposo with her.

 

well, all i need to do is just find investigators. it was hard considering elder cox had already knocked all of general cerri. we couldnt ever really find places he didnt already try. but now its gonna go well. unfortunately that really is all i got for you. nothing big happende last week. just contacting and looking. thanks for the scripture mom. well i love you and i will talk to you soon. general conference is almost here! woohoo!

 

elder jones

THIS WEEK WAS HARDER THAN MOST

hola buen dia.

my shoes are doing fine. when it rains though, they get super dirty/muddy. my comp has a pair of galochas, or rubber covers he puts over his shoes that protect them from getting muddy. they are a great idea. hint hint jaja. my favorite food, that is a good question. i do like milanesas and the fideos (noodles) they make here. so far i havent really disliked a food. the only thing would be noodles filled with spinach. they are not my food of choice jaja. i weighed myself the other day and i weigh about 100 kilos. thats like 220 lbs. i think i have lost 20 lbs since the mtc. i havent really noticed any difference in people being gone on vacation. 

this week was harder than most. we had a total of 6 lessons taught. we didnt find any new investigators and got no new references. we have no progressing investigators and its getting tough. we even went out to campo to look for houses and found nothing. our goal was find many new investigators this week and get fechas for the last week of this month but nothing. it was tough on elder cox and i. we got frustrated with every rejection we got from doing contacts and noone letting us in. we are praying hard to get help with our work and to find new investigators. this is our main goal as of yesterday. references and new investigators. well that is all that really happened this week. the cut on my head is now gone though. so that is good jaja. well i hope all is going well. i heard about the tsunami and earthquake in japan. it very sad. we are praying for the people there. but we also know the mission work will pick up as well with helping the poeple! well i love you mom! chao

elder jones

REFERENCES ARE THE KEY TO HOW MISSION WORK PROGRESSES

The highs and lows of missionary work continue...but Taylor seems to be handling it well.  He is learning and growing from it all which makes my heart happy!

And, while it is hard to know he got hurt, and I wonder if he shouldn't have had stitches or how bad the "cut" really is, at least I know he is still my boy through and through!!

buen dia.

 

hermana lanari told us that silvanva talked with them and that she already knows some members and i think the missionaries as well. daniel and ara are doing well as well. ara came to church and daniel had apparently went to campo with his parents. we only had one investigator in church yesterday. and it was melina, peter (a member) girlfriend who cant get baptized because of her parents. noemi, ara´s mom, and jorge didnt come either. we were sad when they didnt show. so ara had come by herself with the lanari family. yeah, we have taught ara´s mom and brother pretty much all the charlas and noemi wants to get baptized but she is juntada with another person. but it sucks because he is only there 3 or 4 days each month because he works in rio negro which is like 8 hours south. we asked jorge when is he gonna get baptized but he didnt say anything. we are thinking about restarting the charlas and trying to get a fecha with him. we dont have any fechas. actually that is a lie. we found an investigator the other day whose name is maria. she said she would get baptized if she knew this was the true church. so she said she is gonna pray and we are going to visit her tomorrow. baptisms i count as in my companionship. fast and testimony meeting was good. elder cox and i gave the sunday school class. i feel like we did well. i kinda went along reading the maual for teaching but it was good overall. i didnt mess up my words to bad jaja.

 

so we are being pressed to find more investigators. we are trying to find as many as we can. they want us to always be asking for references. references are the key to how mission work progresses. so always be on the lookout to give the missionaries references! it helps them more than you think! so we had about five citas we set up yesterday in the tarde all made by contacts. everysingle one of them failed. it was depressing. i feel like i have contacted all of cerri as well. but i know the field is white all ready to harvest. i know that with continued searched, the Lord will bless us with investigators.

 

so guess what happened to me yesterday. we were on the way to a cita. i was walking along the side walk, and while one walks on the sidewalks in argentina, you need to stare at the ground or else you will trip. well i was walking along trying to not trip when i hit my head on something. the way they do trash here is different from the states. they have poles with baskets on top in front of their houses where they put their trash so the dogs dont get into it. well i had hit my head on on of the baskets while trying to not trip. so i just keep going thinking it hurt. we get to the cita and elder cox looks at me and tells me i have a big cut on the side of my head. i now have a two inch long cut that starts just above my temple in my hair and ends just above my ear. one cant see it unless they look at me from my right side at my head. but i feel like everyone now stares at me when i walk around because i got a huge cut on my head. but o well. i know it will go away soon, i hope jaja. well, that is about it! i love you and hope all is going well!

 

elder jones

I JUST WANT TO BE A TOOL IN THE LORD'S HANDS AND BRING THE JOY AND HAPPINESS I KNOW AS THE GOSPEL TO OTHERS HERE IN ARGENTINA

I don't think that the work can be summed up any better than Taylor said it in that one sentence I used as the headline for this post.  As a mom, I have been proud of all my boys for different reasons throughout their lives, but I have never felt such sustained joy!

hi everyone!

well this past week was a good one. daniel and ara both got baptized and confirmed! the service went well, when it was time for daniel to be submerged in the water to be baptized he freaked out and thought he was drowning before he went all the way under. so they had to do it a second time. the second time he went all the way under jaja. ara´s baptism was graceful. so it just goes to show girls are more graceful than boys jaja. so in church we had six investigators, excluding ara and daniel. daniels parents, aras mom and brother jorge, and a couple others. we also had about 50 in church in total! that is a record elder cox said since he has got here. a couple of inactive families came and it was great. one of the familys we have lunch with every week and the other we had family night with last week. they said that things had started going bad as soon as they stopped going to church. but they are coming back because they know they will receive the blessings for doing so. we found two new investigators this week and got a fecha for them for the 19 of march. so we are doing pretty well from what i know so far. i have heard that the most a missionary has got in baptisms is around 45. i was told by president to set a goal on how many baptisms i want. so i have set my goal at 45 for here in the mission. i just want to be a tool in the lords hands and bring the joy and happiness i know as the gospel to others here in argentina. so i am doing well here in cerri so far. i just hope it continues and the lord keeps on blessing us for our hard work. well last week not much else went down, we spent a lot of time searching around for baptismal clothing for ara and daniel. it took us until saturday morning to find clothing. it was a bit stressful but it all worked out. i heard that my zone this past week had 9 baptisms and 9 confirmations. i dont know if i already told you but president detlefsen and the member of the seventy who is over argentina set a goal to have 180 baptisms here in this mission this month of march. it is possible and i hope we can get it done! well that is all this week. i love you all and take care!

elder jones

A CRAZY WEEK, ANOTHER BAPTISM AND A GOAL OF 100 BAPTISMS FOR THE ZONE THIS MONTH!!!

No email problems this week!  After seven straight weeks of sending my email to Taylor Monday morning around 8 or 8:30 A.M., to make sure I didn't forget anything, knowing he didn't write until about 11:30 A.M., this week I sent it on Sunday evening to try and avoid the problems of the last couple weeks.  What a blessing, because today Taylor wrote at 5:10 A.M.!!

hola!

well sounds like all is going well back home. keep looking for the job mom! you will find something im sure. you are just finding a lot of people going to argentina arent you? well this is probably my most crazy week yet. a lot has happened. well to start off, silvana got baptized! but there is a super long story behind it. to start off, tuesday we had district meeting, afterwards, we did divisions and i went to maldonado and elder cox went to cerri with elder milne. so i am out with elder metcalf and we are doing contacts when i get a phone call from elder cox saying we are having a baptism that day. i was a bit confused. so he tells us silvana is goning to get baptized that night. apparently, while cox and milne were walking by a store, they saw rodrigo, silvanas son. he said that they were leaving that night. apparently, facundos friends had threatened her and she was planning on getting out of there and heading down to go live with her mom. so milne and cox went over to her house and told her she was getting baptized that day. so we called president detlefsen, got his ok and we had an emergency baptism. we also confirmed her as well. so after her baptism, she left an hour after her baptism with her kids. it was sad to see her and her kids go but what can we do? we got her address so we can send the missionaries over to finish all the lessons with her. so everything will go well there!

we also had zone conference this week. so i met all the missionaries in my zone. surprisingly there arent any hermanas in our zone. it was pretty cool seeing president and his wife as well. they told us that our gol is 100 baptisms this month and 180 next month! its a lot but we can totally do it. hopefully we have two baptisms this coming saturday. one of them is daniel ruiz and the other is abbigail lopez. her nickname is ara. yesterday both of them went to church, and we also had three other investigators in church. so we had five in church yesterday! daniel and his parents came, ara and another hermana who we tried to get a cita with but didnt. so we are having a pretty good transfer so far. well, those are the highlights of my week. i love you all and wish you the best!

con amor

elder jones

I FELT THE SPIRIT PRETTY STRONG THERE IN THE ROOM AND THIS MEMBER IS JUST GOLDEN

I was so anxious for Taylor to receive my email this week because I thought maybe, just maybe, he might respond to something I told him about home in his email back to me.  I was  wrong!  Aside from being scared again that he didn't even actually receive my email, and having to re-send it, hoping the second one would get to him, his email was a pretty typical Taylor email, not that there is anything wrong with them.

The story I shared with him in my email that I thought he might comment on was about a talk given in our Sacrament meeting yesterday by his former priests' quorum leader, Brother Dave Hada.  Brother Hada had been asked to speak with Danny Chamberlin, a returning missionary, but Danny's talk got postponed and Brother Hada's didn't so his remarks were somewhat missionary oriented.  The following is what I shared with Taylor:   At one point, Brother Hada was talking about how Bishop Miller (about 4 bishops ago) had told him that he was going where he was going on his mission because someone there needed to hear from him.  Then when he was on his mission he served the first 14 months in Madrid and then got transferred to this small town with no history and no culture and was kind of bummed.  He didn't know why he was transferred there.  Then one of the assistants told him that the president was actually shocked that that was where he was supposed to be transferred to as well, but that was what the inspiration was.  Brother Hada then remembered what Bishop Miller had told him about there being people that needed to hear from him.  Brother Hada then read us a story from his mission journal about a lady named Carmen that he baptized that he knows was the reason that he was sent to that small town.  It was what he said next that brought me to tears though!  He said that "There are people out there waiting to hear from Dallin Jones, just like there are people waiting to hear from Taylor Jones.  I read those blogs and they are something special."  I hope Brother Hada's experience will resonate with you in some way.  I sure like being able to share things like that with you! 

Enjoy Taylor's letter this week!

hola!

jaja tell colton i love him very much. yeah so elder cox and i pretty much ran the branch yesterday jaja. elder cox plays the piano in sacrament, i lead the hymns, we open the church up and set up chairs for sacrament, we prepare the sacrament, we participated in the confirmation of rodrigo, who yes is ten years old, and we also gave talks in sacrament. surprisingly i didnt do half bad giving my talk. i read parts of jesus the christ and talked about his ministry and how he is key in our salvation. and guess what mom, i did it without writing a single word down on paper!! jaja afterwards, an member came up to me, hermana alonzo, and told me congratulations and what not. i asked her what for and she was just telling me how surprised she was at how well i spoke in castellano. i thought i did horrid at the pulpit but i guess not! elder cox then spoke on the book of mormon and used a bunch of quotes from elder hollands talk on the book of mormon. his talk was way better than mine by far. then after church, another hermana came up to us and asked us for a blessing. so we sat down and talked with her and she told us how she is preparing to got to the uruguay temple soon and she has been praying for a job a lot. last night after her prayers and asking for a job, she told us some one called and offered her a job and she was thrilled. so she had all the faith she needed for a blessing to work, she just want the blessing because her ankle and big toe are in pain and she has an infection or something. so i annointed and elder cox sealed the blessing. i felt the spirit pretty strong there in the room. afterwards she invited us to come over for lunch another day. so we are going to go over soon and have asado with her.

so silvana has been having difficulties the past couple weeks with facundo. she has wanted to get baptized real bad and what not but she cant move out of the house and facundo hasnt budged at all. so they have been fighting and what not. facundo has been keeping the money that silvana gets for the kids each month and spending it on alcohol and cigarillos. he also has kept the food to himself as well. so silvana has been eating all her meals with the family next door who is a member. and they dont have a lot of money either. but we have been praying hard and found out that facundo is now gone! apparently, from what i understood, facundo hit silvana and then she called the police and they came and told him to leave and he cant come back. so now silvana is going to go to a lawyer and try to get something worked out. but we set a date for her baptism for the 26 of february! we are so excited! our district and zone leaders want us to try and move up the baptism to this week so we will see how it goes down. we also could baptize daniel ruiz this saturday and we are going to try and pull out a fecha with another investigator who is about 10 as well. her name is abbigail and she is the other neighbor of silvana and hermana lanari (the member who brought us silvana). this member is just golden, she has brought us two families! so we are working with this family. the mom, noami, said she would get baptized if she knew the church was true. but she is living with someone and is married to someone else. so before she can get baptized, she has to get divorced and remarried or move out. so if all goes well, we can have four baptisms this month alone! elder cox and i are praying real hard to get these things done to. well, that is about all that is going on worth reporting. so i get your package you sent tomorrow at district meeting. if i can think of anything i need i will let you know so you can send it with Pia Dates. well i love you all and hope you all have/had a good valentines day!

elder jones

my scrip for the week is mosiah 24. we read it and compared it to silvanas situation

Find Mosiah 24 in the Book of Mormon here