September 20,2010

Man it was just a really awesome week! I loved it! It was pretty slow at first mainly because Elder Mancera and Elder Richardson were leaving and so there wasn't much of a motivation to work from them because they wanted to say good bye to everyone which is understandable. Once we got that out of the way we had transfers and everything went good there. Our companionship now consists of Elder Petersen, Elder Clifford, and myself. It is alot of fun to be in a three-some. It is so much easier to get things done because you have an extra person to make phone calls or to go into a single ladies house and lots of other things.
Elder Clifford is from the same town as my second companion Elder Robison. They are both from a small town by Las Vegas Nevada. I like Elder Clifford he likes to get things done and to have a plan which I have grown to like. It is always a good thing to get some fresh blood in an area to keep you from getting into a rut of things that you normally do. He has never been to the north of the mission before so the whole thing is new for him. I think he likes it though. He keeps saying how there are a lot of Hispanics here, Which is a 100% true statement!
Saturday we were able to have a 3 hour meeting with Elder Bednar! It was really really neat. It was kind of weird though because he is so funny and not as serious as he is during general conference but he is at the same time. First though what was really neat was that Sister Bednar got up and spoke for a little bit before her husband and she has some really good things to say. She asked us to thing about what we like about our companion and she said that everyone deserves to have a good companion. So she said "so you be that good companion." Then she told us to be the missionary that our mom thinks we are, and she said that the Lord deserves the very best missionaries. As I thought about it I realized that the word Deserves was pretty weird in the way she used it. I realized though that if anyone deserves anything than it is the Lord. It was really good and made me realize that I have a long way to go before I am ready to think that I am a good missionary.
Elder Bednar taught us a lot of really cool things as well. He talked about things that we do in the church that we aren't really supposed to do. Such as calling agency "free"agency. He said you never see "free" agency in the scriptures it is either agency or moral agency and he also said the same thing with Pre-existence. He said it is the Pre-Earth life. Pretty crazy when you think about it. He said something really funny as well. He talked about how there are people that get mad at General Conference because it is always on the same thing and people complain about it. He told us a story of a time that he wrote his talk submitted it to be translated felt it wasn't right changed his topic and then when he gave his second talk it was perfectly aligned with the other speakers that day. It showed that the Lord picks the topics, so he said "if you want the topics to change start keeping the commandments and we can move on and talk about new things like we want to!" It was pretty funny.
it was really neat to be able to be in the stake that Elder Bednar was coming to because we were able to attend to 8 hours of meetings with him in a two day period. Something that was pretty neat is we were have a lesson at the church with one of our investigators named Aldofo. We were showing him the special witnesses of Jesus Christ video and Elder Bednar walked by with Elder Ingram of the seventy and the stake President and the President Holzapfel. We were able to get them to come in and say hi. So Aldofo was able to meet and Apostle and member of the seventy a mission president and a stake president all at the same time and he didn't even know how rare that was! It was pretty neat.
Its been good though. President Holzapfel said he was proud of how much Spanish I know already and I am to to be honest. That's is about it. Hope you all are safe!
Elder haws