An Almost White Christmas - December 26,2011

Dear Family!!!

Thanks for the great letter. It´s always so nice to hear from you all. I´m glad to hear that Christmas went well.

I really enjoyed Dad´s mission story. It´s always great to read those. I loved to hear that Vicenta is still active in the church and that there are great fruits that come from missionary work. It´s amazing to think that helping one person find the gospel will affect future generations forever. Thank you, Dad, for being a great missionary and for helping Vicenta find the truth.

It was great to talk to you all on Saturday and get to see your faces!! It´s weird how much Kim, Melanie, and Mason have changed. Everyone is so grown up! It´s crazy how fast the time goes during those calls but I always enjoy it anyway. Were you able to understand my Spanish at all? Haha, hopefully at least Dad knew what I was saying.

Well, from this weekend we have some good news and some not as good news. I have fotos from Ana´s baptism, but she didn´t end up getting baptized. Her and her entire family got to the church and everything was great. We started the baptismal service, had the talks, everything was wonderful. When it came time to baptize her, it turned out she had fear of the water. So we were in the font (I was baptizing) and after the prayer, she didn´t want to go under. We gave it a shot, but she did not want to put her head in. I definitely had to learn some patience. We will prepare her more and try again.

On more of an up note, we had success in getting people to church yesterday. There is a family that we have been working with for a while, named the Ñamandú family. The son, Agusto, went to church last week without the parents. This week the kids were out of town so we tried with the parents, Félix and María José, to get them to church. On Saturday we committed them and on Sunday morning María José and Jade (the 5 year old daughter) went to church. It was really exciting because we have been working for a while to get them there. She really enjoyed it. We just had Sacrament Meeting combined with the 3 wards. The bishops of each ward gave talks and the meeting was realllly good. María José enjoyed it a lot. We are excited to see them continue progressing.

This past change we have been working a lot more with complete families. In our ward, over the past 5 years there have been a lot of kids and single people baptized, and very few of them are still active. So we have been working a lot harder to find and teach families. The next goal is for the entire Ñamandú family to get to church. That will be very exciting to see.

Everything is going very well here. We are working really hard and praying harder to have success. I am very grateful for my companion, Elder Curtis. I feel like he is helping me to become the best missionary I´ve ever been. Thanks for everything!!! Love you all

Elder Snow

Some Really Great Miracles This Week - December 19, 2011

Dear Family,

It was really good to hear from you this week, thanks for writing such a great letter!!! I´m sorry my letters the last couple of weeks have been kind of sub par. This one won´t be much better because I only have like a half an hour today.

 

Well we have seen some really great miracles this week. We have been trying to work better with the members and as a result we have seen a lot of success. I think I will give you like a run down of our investigators real quick

María Ana- She is a 9 year old girl. Her dad and her grandma are members. She lives with her Grandma here in Costa Bonita and her dad is an active member in another ward. We have been working with her for a while and she has several attendances, we have just had to be patient because she doesn´t understand super well. She doesn´t go to school so she isn´t the fastest learner, but she is humble and really wants to do what is right. We have seen some really great miracles with her since we set a date for her to be baptized. We had decided that we would wait for her to attend a couple more times, but she expressed her desire to be baptized so we put a date with her for this Saturday, the 24th. And since we put the date she has been progressing a lot more. So she should get baptized this weekend. We are really excited.

The Ñamandu family -  A family that we found a little over a month ago. It is a dad (Félix), mom (María José), and three kids (Francisco, Agusto, and Jade). They are are really quality family, they just haven´t all made it to church yet. This last week we visited them with bishop and it went really so we were happy about that. We visited Agusto, the 12 year old, with a couple young men from the church and he was really excited. He went to church yesterday and loved it, hopefully he talks it up to the whole family.

David - Wow, we have seen some great miracles with David. This last week we had such a great, spiritual lesson with him. He is very smart and intellectual. It is neat to see how he thinks things through and as a result is able to feel the Spirit. On Saturday we read 3 Nephi 11 with him and the lesson was so great. We talked about baptism and he was really receptive. We asked how he would feel to be baptized and receive a remission of sins and we could tell that the spirit really touched him. He also went to church yesterday and had a good experience. We are trying to work with the members to support him as well.

So I don´t have much time. Thank you all for writing me. It is always especially good to her from Kim and Melanie. Speaking of that, Happy Birthday, Melanie!!! Sorry it is a couple of days late.

And Happy Anniversary to Mom and Dad and Dan and Lauren!!!! Hope it´s a great one.

I love you all so much. Thanks for everything!!

Elder Snow

We Really Have Our Work Cut Out For Us - December 12, 2011

Dear Family,

Wow! I really appreciate every one of you. That letter this week was classic. I had some really good laughs (which I shared with Elder Curtis, as always) as well as some really great spiritual moments. I love that every time I read one of your letters, I feel some kind of prompting from the Spirit on something that I can do better. I just need to put them into practice!!!

We have had a really wild week. We`ve been going all over the zone trying to help lots of missionaries and working our tails off in our own area as well. This month we have started out kind of cold as a zone so we are working so hard to finish the year really strong and fulfill our goals. We have been praying a lot for the families we are teaching right now and have felt so much the help of the Lord.

I haven`t written too much on the new families we have found, and I have little time right now, so hopefully next week I`ll be able to talk a little more on that next week.
This week we have had a couple of really spiritual lessons. We have been trying to work very closely with the members, especially the leaders so that we can get some member support for the new families that we have found. On Wednesday we did a noche de hogar with Alonso and Daisy. They have been a little down lately beause the divorce hasn`t gone through. So we shared a Christmas message. We decided to read about the Savior´s birth in Luke 2. After we talked about what gifts we could give to Jesus Christ this Christmas. It turned out really well. It reminded me of home and how we would often read the story of the Savior`s birth on Christmas eve. They had a sweet little Nativity set too so that added to the good feelings. We also did a noche de hogar with Bishop Mora`s family and did the same Christmas activity with them. We have been working a lot with Bishop Mora and the first Counselor, Brother Correa. They are such great families and Elder Curtis and I have really grown to love them.

This week we will work even harder. We have set goals for this month as a companionship and as a zone and we really want to achieve them. We have started out a little slow, so we really have our work cut out for us. I know that with lots of prayer, fasting, and hard work we will be able to achieve them. So next week will be a letter full of miracles.

I love you all so much!
Love,
Elder Snow

PS Mom. could you send me Grandma and Grandpa Vacc´s email so I can write them thanks for the BDay cards? I have received all of them, but I haven`t written back. It`s super expensive to write by hand now, so I think I want to send them a quick email.

It's Just So Exciting to Be a Missionary! - December 5, 2011

Dear Family!!!!

 

Hey thanks for a great letter this week. I really enjoyed the part Mason wrote me about his fantasy football team. Hahaha Mason is always a favorite of my mission companions. I love sharing his little letters with my companions and they usually think he is pretty funny. I remember Elder Woodruff especially enjoyed Mason`s descriptions of how he dominated in Basketball and Soccer, haha.

 

Thanks, Dad, for sharing that experience of your mission. That is one of my favorite parts about receiving emails every week, reading about your mission experiences and recognozing how much they have shaped your life. I really appreciate it. I was very impressed with the story about Nilson Bueno and how much the Lord had prepared him. It`s just the greatest feeling in the world when a missionary is led to a person that God has prepared. Elder Curtis and I have especially felt that this week.

 

This week has really been one of the most blessed weeks of my mission so far. We went crazy in finding new people and the Lord blessed us so much. We found several families this week that are really great and I have faith will progress. It`s just so exciting to be a missionary. I love the feeling of finding a new person and being able to help them come closer to Christ.

 

For a little bit of an update on Alonso and Daisy. I have talked about them a little bit before, Alonso is the man from Barcelona that is living with Daisy, a member. We have been waiting for the divorce to go through for a really long time now. We got a little bit of news and it seems like it should all go through this month. Elder Curtis and I have been praying and fasting a lot for their family. They have been through a lot but have endured it all with so much faith. Yesterday after church we were sitting with them in the chapel and we could tell that the stress was really wearing on them. Both Alonso and Daisy mentioned that everything seems to be going well for them now, with the exception that the divorce is taking forever to go through. I have been so impressed and touched by their perseverance in attending church through it all. I know that for a lot of people it would be easy to get discouraged and just throw in the towel. It`s tough because they are trying to do what`s right, but that blessing just still hasn`t come yet. I know that the Lord is sustaining them in their trials. The Lord has to test us, even if we are doing the things right. This past week I studied about the people of Alma and how they were in bondage to the Lamanite and wicked priests of king Noah, even though they were doing everything right. Sometimes the Lord sees it fit to try our patience and our faith. I know that that is the case with Alonso and Daisy, and I know that they will pull through with the help of the Lord.

 

Sorry I don`t have too much time to write again. We had a leadership counsel today so I`m in a hurry a little bit. Everything is going so great here. I love the work, I love my companion, I love the Lord. I love you all so much!

 

Love,

Elder Snow