Solidaridad Lo maximo

Dear Family and Friends,

It is an amazing life. We had the baptism for Frany on Saturday! She sacrificed a lot and changed her life to be able to be baptized. She is a single mom and she quit her job to be able to come to church on Sundays. Frany has gone through a lot in her life but I think that overall she really just feels the love the Savior has for her when she lives the gospel. She is not very shy so she has already made quite a few friends in the church and the members have helped her with her difficulties more than Elder Limao and I were able to, being young as we are. Her son Francisco just barely turned 8 but I don't know how to teach a kid yet, his attention span is so short. I think it would be a good experience to teach him though, figure out how to get down to his level of simplicity because then I would be able to teach just about anybody.

This was the last week of this transfer and Elder Limao left me... He is now a zone leader in Villa Salvador and my new companion is Elder Styler from Delta Utah. He is a good missionary and has been a zone leader for most of his mission and is now our district leader. Just a tad bit different leading the different I feel like the host of a party and I am trying to inflict a good time here. But this transfer should be really good, there is a lot of work to do.

I am beyond grateful for Elder Limao and my training, he is a great missionary and a good example and we were able to get along really well. He did a really good job here in the ward, the people love him a lot, I want to be just like him when I grow up. He strengthened the ward extremely and baptized 11 people in his 5 months here. I really will miss him, we became really good friends.

We worked hard this week, as always and it really feels good. I have adjusted to living on this hill and like I said I am either going up or going down but that might help with the amount of rice I eat. They all said the food would be delicious and it is, there is a whole bunch of weird names for their food. Thursday was Elder Limao's birthday and our pension bought Papa Johns. Yeah the better ingredients, better pizza Papa Johns. I am not paid for this advertisement. We also received 5 cakes but don't tell mom.

Sorry I know you are all super sad about the lack of a voice recording this week but I didn't have time so I will leave you my spiritual message on here with boring old letters. Just read this in your head with my voice.

Elder Cook in this last conference talked a lot about humility. It goes back to the, we are nothing without God type of deal. I have seen that it is really hard for a prideful person to lower themselves down low enough to be influenced by the spirit, or humble enough to change their lives. We need to allow God to make us better than we ever could on our own and sometimes that means really submitting to his will and not our own. He has the best in mind for all of us. God changed Paul, then Saul, his direction from bad to good and for us who think we are doing good we need to allow God to change our direction upward. God cannot work with someone not willing to change.

I love all you guys and hope you know how much the Lord loves you. This is His church and we have prophets who are really his servants. I testify of all these things, every missionary testifies of these things.

Love you all,

Elder Craythorne

P.S don't forget about Light the World. Let us see who can do all 25 without learning how to love his neighbor while doing it, ready go.

Solidaridad 11

Family and Friends,

As always it was a good week here in San Juan. I am nearing the end of my training.  This week we had divisions with our zone leaders again because they pertain to our district. It was a good experience as always to be guiding the area, stepping out of my comfort zone and leading the lessons. This coming week is the last of this transfer and really anything could happen but more importantly I will be done with training!

In Peru, religion is, just by default, a big part of the culture. Everybody believes in God and just about everybody has been baptized Catholic. Here, church and state aren't separated so they preach religion in school. This means one of two things either they are open to learning about us and reading the Bible, or they are super closed off to receiving us.

Seeing as how the colonists didn't start celebrating Thanksgiving here in Peru, while you guys are stuffing yourself it will be a regular day here. That doesn't signify that we aren't grateful, let's see where this takes us. It is easy to be grateful when we receive blessings big and small, perhaps it might take some effort on our part to see the smaller ones and really accept them as blessings. However, our lives, our families, our world are all blessings so shouldn't we be grateful for everything, including our challenges. Especially our challenges. Would we truthfully and sincerely mean it if at the end of a hard day, not an exhausting day, but a day that we really feel miserable and hopeless. Would we pray at the end of this day and thank God, who gave us our lives, and thank him for our difficulties. As a missionary, every day is different and yes some are hard but I am grateful. Like I said last week, the doubts and questions that my investigators have cause me to study and strengthen my knowledge about that subject.

As you can imagine, the people are really excited because Peru is going to the World Cup for the first time in 36 years. They had a game on Wednesday against New Zealand that went into the night and all we could here was the cheering and the fireworks when they scored. 

We had the chance to watch the face to face between Elder Oaks and Elder Ballard and the Young Single Adults. Bare with me to see if I can explain my thoughts clearly. As members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints we believe in both inspiration, the hand of God directing the things in our life, and agency or our ability to choose. A great question is how do I know if I am doing what the Lord wants me to do and not just something I want to do.  In short, the two apostles said the link between divine inspiration and our agency is initiative. We need to secure that we are living in such a way that what we want to do and the Lord's will for us will align.

We have an investigator right now who hasn't come to church yet because he sings at parties Saturday night 11 pm to 8 am on Sunday. One could ask, well if God wants him to go to church why doesn't he just give him a different job?  However, what God wants is that we make that choice to change our lives to be better. Ultimately, his decision to sacrifice his time to come to church and do the things he has felt prompted to do will complete the process of inspiration.

Have a good week I love all you guys. 

Love,

Elder Craythorne