Happy Father´s Day

Well well well,

Another very busy and interesting week has come and gone, and I enjoyed Reading your emails! I think that’s awesome Collin, you are going to be staying in Utah until you leave on your mission because that means we are going to have more time to hang out together! I hope your birthday went well because ehhm… you haven’t written me.

Curt and Holly, thanks for the updates, sounds like work and everything is moving along well. Maybe I can help out with work on this cabin you have been talking about? Sounds pretty cool to me. That’s crazy that you guys have been married for 9 years, and it’s been so long since we were those little nerdy twerps haha, I can still remember your wedding day and complaining about all the pictures and the sun. But 9 years… Congratulations, you guys have an awesome family. Oh and ill do my best to not die in a volcanic eruption given that San Felipe where im at is 3 miles from an active volcano and in the mornings we can see lava flowing out of the top… its pretty cool to see and the other day there was even a small earthquake.

So things have definitely been moving along here in San Felipe. Our focus for our area this week was to find more new investigators to teach because the ones the other missionaries have been working with here haven’t been too positive. So like I already told you last week, we have great support from the youth and our ward mission leader (for probably the first time in my whole mission) so we have been doing divisions and trying to contact references and everything in our area. It’s been raining a ton lately here as well, so pretty much every day I am just getting soaked, but it’s just another one of those things that you have to deal with while being a missionary. I went on a couple different divisions with missionaries in the zone this past week as well, which was really good mainly because I’m getting to know the missionaries and the things that we need to do better and improve to do better. One thing that we have really noticed here in our zone is that the missionaries definitely have the need to being able to teach better. There are a lot of missionaries that don’t know how to teach very well in a way where the people can understand and truly fulfill with the commitments we as missionaries invite them to do. So that it is one of the things we have planned to be able to help the missionaries with and do practices to help them see how they can teach better.

We also had interviews with President Ruiz this past week, and I don’t know if I told you all, but my first companion Elder Russell is now an AP, so me and him paired up and did interviews with every companionship in the zone while President Ruiz was interviewing each of the missionaries individually, and I really realized how bad some missionaries need help to be able to have more success in their areas. Some companionships aren’t planning or even studying, so we have a lot of work on our hands. My own interview with President Ruiz was really cool. Its just that these past few days I have been a little stressed out and frustrated for small things that I wish would be different ranging from people that aren’t progressing in our area, to not having enough time to really study effectively with my companion and be more unified, to having rebellious or disobedient elders that don’t have respect for authority and how I deal with all that. So I went into my interview and usually Im not a huge talker and I don’t ask President Ruiz a ton of questions, but I asked him how I could improve on that. Obviously I can’t write all that he said, but we just talked about how in this life everything isn’t going to go according to plan, or according to the perfect scenario that we have in our heads. Sometimes as human beings through influences of others or internal desires we have a perfect picture in our head that we want to achieve, and when it doesn’t happen we can feel frustrated or disanimated. What he told me is that what matters most is if we are making progress and getting better. Although maybe I won’t be able to study or have the relationship I want right away with my companion, I need to be actively working on it and day by day, week by week progress. Same thing with the zone or progressing investigators. All I can do is put goals and do my best every week to achieve the goals and get better little by little. We put goals together for me in these last weeks of my mission to be able to finish strong or Terminar con Honor as he has put it. He just really animated me to have these goals in mind and work little by little, week by week so that when I finish my mission, maybe everything won’t be perfect or how maybe I wanted it, but I will have made progress and I will have made myself a better missionary, the zone a better zone and left my small mark on the missionary work here. That’s what I want to do and that’s what I will do. I think here on the mission I have learned and I am learning the importance of making goals, planning to achieve them and working on a scheduled basis to achieve them. I think I am learning that if I want achieve something, nothing is impossible. It just requires a lot of planning and action on a consistent planned basis to be able to achieve it. President Ruiz said that the Lord has blessed me with the opportunity I have right now to continue the mission a few weeks more, and that he has helped out and healed my toe so fast because of my righteous desire I have to finish the mission strong. It really has been a personal miracle, because just 6 weeks ago, my toe was MESSED up, and now I am able to walk miles every day without pain or too much discomfort. I am really blessed to have this opportunity, and I really want to take advantage of it. I just ask you to pray for me to always be excited and focused on the work these last few weeks and that my toe can continue to heal correctly.

One of the fisrt miracles I have seen of the many to come in these last few weeks of mine was that on Sunday Elder Amador and I split up to do divisions and bring everybody that we had invited to church. And nobody wanted to come. I literally sat down with a guy named Jacinto, the father of the kid we baptized last week, and tried to get him to go to church for half an hour even after he had said Saturday night that he would go, but he refused. All the other people said no too, and we got to church after getting a ride on the back of a pickup with like 50 other people and almost dying (a story for another time haha) pretty sad and frustrated. Luckily a teenager in the ward had brought his 10 year old cosin to church that hasn’t been baptized, so we were happy when we realized that, and then 15 minutes into sacrament meeting Jacinto Showed up all by himself and ended staying for all of church! It was amazing, and after sacrament meeting, a member came up to us and introduced us to 2 young women that work with him that had come to church! So we went from having nobody in church to having 4, and we challenged 3 of them to baptism for the end of this month and they said yes! We also wnet with the little cousin of this member, and found out that this cousin´s brother isn’t baptized, and neither are his parents, and we had an awesome lesson with them and challenged them to baptism as well and they all said yes! So basically yesterday was a day of miracles, and I just want to be able to keep it up, we are pretty stoked for the people we have now, even if we had to get soaked to the bone yesterday walking around in the mud to do so haha.

So I am pretty stoked right now and happy to get to work and make the most of my extension! I love you all a ton as well and I have to wish dad a Happy Father´s Day! I hope you had a good day, and that you were able to have a dinner with somebody to celebrate. I think we had prime rib two years ago when I was home…

I love you all and have an awesome week!

Cariñosamente,

-Elder Henderson