Prosser - Mission Week 61

Que tal?! Ya estoy aquí in Prosser y santa vaca dios esta dándonos un montón de milagros! 

Well it seems like a month has passed since my last weekly email haha. Sooo much has happened this will probably be a super fat email. It'll be worth a read, I promise :) There's some funny stuff and lots of miracles! 

So Last Monday and Tuesday was packing. E. Escandon was headed home so we took him around a little bit to say goodbye to some missionaries and then we dropped him off at the Mission home, said our final goodbyes and left. I included pics of this is the last email I think. Anyways, we headed home and continued packing. The next day it was Me, E. Jones, and E. Carr in the tripan until transfers so we did some cleaning and headed to the office to do some last minute work. When we got to the office E. Thaler our vehicle coordinator said, "Hey Elders did you hear about E. Escandon?" We said, "Uhh like how he's going home? Like, he's done with his mission." Then E. Thaler said, "No, how he is in the hospital. He jumped off a railing and has a compound fracture in his ankle" 

We started freaking out because he was supposed to fly home at 11 that day and we were worried to see what happened and how bad it was so we made some calls to find out where he was. We found out he was 'resting' at the AP's apartment so we drove there to see what was happening. When we get there, E. Escandon is playing mini golf in the living room and when he sees us we all just start laughing so hard. Apparently what happened is that morning, he got ready for the day, and kinda swung himself around the railing of the stairs and landed on his foot wrong and it dislocated his toe super bad and like broke the skin. He was fine though, he could walk on it with a little boot thing. He got caught at the insta care for just a little too long and so he missed his flight home and ended up having to stay in the mission an extra day. The whole situation was super funny. (And don't worry we went  back and corrected E. Thaler's lack of information) We got to say goodbye to E. Escandon one more time before he actually went home :) 

We visited some members, Hno. Ramos and Hno Aballay to say goodbye and that was good. They're the best! 

Wednesday was Transfer day so we got up early, pack all my stuff to the transfer site and got picked up in an RV to go to the new missionary meeting to meet my trainee! I kinda had a sneaking suspicion that this would happen, but I ended up getting Elder McBride who is from my home ward in South Jordan! It's super crazy that we are in the same mission, let alone companions, let alone Trainer & Trainee. Suuuuper weird but super awesome haha. We've been having a blast in Prosser so far. We finished up that meeting then shopped and drove to our new area! 

Prosser is an awesome area it's gonna be sweet! We share a car with the English Elders here so 1/2 of the time we are a walking area. I've enjoyed it more that I thought I would, it's kinda fun to just walk around and talk. We are talking only in Spanish while we walk which is good practice for E. McBride. In our area we have some super prepared people. La familia Peña is a family we are teaching. The daughter got baptized about 4 months ago and now pretty much the rest of the family wants to get baptized too! We just have to get them married and teach them the rest but they are super excited about joining the church! 

Gerardo is a man that I actually used to teach in my first area in Basin City and He now is staying in Prosser so we are teaching him here now! He knows the church is true, he just feels like he can't get baptized because he has made too many mistakes in his life....we're working on that haha. 

God also blessed us with 4 new people to teach this week and 3 of the people we are teaching came to church! Our branch alone had 14 investigators at church! It's been super fun to be District Leader too, I really enjoy getting to know everyone in the district and helping them achieve their goals as missionaries. 

We did the special Christmas meeting yesterday and it was really successful. We had a lot of sweet, spiritual musical numbers and we also had a linger longer to help people build friendships in the Branch. 

Anyways, there was a lot of stuff in this email but it's been a jam packed week haha. I'm exceedingly (I know I say 'super' too much haha) excited for this Transfer, for my district, and for my companion! I've had the opportunity to testify to many people this week that God has restored his church on the earth and I feel that testimony deepening and strengthening every day! Los quiero, me encanta ser Misionero aquí en el WKM y me encanta predicar en español! Oren que sigamos viendo milagros! 

- Elder Thompson

Estoy Embarazado - Mission Week 60

Hey ya'll que tal

Sooooo to start with the good stuff... It's Transfer week! I am getting transferred to Prosser as a District Leader, Trainer, and still a tech missionary haha. I was expecting to get released as a tech but since we had a few people go home early this Transfer they weren't able to keep the area open and had to combine it with another. Basically elder Jones and I will just be "on-call" to fix people's phone problems in our own areas. It's suuuuper weird. Elder Jones is going to a walking area in Pasco (it's my old area which is cool) as a trio. Anyways I'm suuuuper excited for this next transfer its gonna be sweet. I'm gonna have a son!! 

This week we had zone conference which went pretty well! The only sad thing that happened was due to some miscommunication one of the zones from our conference had to go to a different one so our talent show was smaller. Everyone loved our video, though, and we still had some solid talents. I'm just glad it's over I'm not a huge performer haha but it was fun 

This was Elder Escandon's last week as a missionary and it's super weird since I've served around him for like more than half my mission now.  Because of that we've been pretty busy packing, cleaning, and visiting members and people we are teaching since we are leaving the area as well. *Live update* we just dropped E. Escandon off at the mission home. Super sad haha I'm not looking forward to doing that lol. I got to see Elder Ward tho and say bye so that was lit. 

We had our branch Christmas party and it turned out well! They decorated a lot and it almost looked like a wedding or sometjing haha. There was a little program of the nativity and we had Mexican and Peruvian food. Suuuuper tasty. They called up all the missionaries at the end to give us a Christmas gift which was super nice of them. I honestly love Kennewick a ton I'm pretty sad to be leaving. 

We had one final lesson with Tom & Grace which was good but a little frustrating... I won't go into it but basically Tom is just a very intelectual person haha. Apparently he stopped reading the BoM because he found some 'critical flaws but it's still overall a good book'. Anyway it was super sad to say bye to them and Valentina and I hope that some day he will open his heart and read the Book. 

We had one last dinner at Hna Valdivia house and it was super sad. She loves E. Jones and I so much she was bawling. Honestly, she does so much service for so many people not including the missionaries and is a real example of Christlike service. I'm going to miss her a ton but I'm also kinda glad to leave her because now it will be possible for me to lose weight haha she feeds us so much delicious food :) 

There were so many awesome spiritual experiences in Kennewick, honestly some of these days have just been filled with miracles and spiritual experiences I'm super bummed to leave but super excited for the future. I was able to see a lot of the missionaries in my future district today and everyone is pumped to work super hard! 

Anyways that's all I can think of haha we are kinda rushing so hopefully I didn't miss anything important. 

Los quiero 

- Elder Thompson 

Fotos: 

- RIP Elder Ward

- RIP Elder Escandon

- RIP Kennewick SP District & Hna Valdivia 

- RIP Tom & Grace & Valentina

Videos - Mission Week 59

Buenas noches, I promise I'm not being apostate, we helped our mission president out with something for like an hour and a half today and he said I have to communicate with home so here I am :) 

This week was a blur. We have been preparing for zone conference. I'm not sure if I mentioned this already but we got asked to MC for our Christmas Zone Conference. Sooooo basically we are in charge of organizing the whole thing. It's been a little stressful too cuz this is like the ONE 'fun' thing we do as a whole mission all year so people have some high expectations. We decided to do an entrance video and it turned out super good. It took us sooooo many nights in the study room just thinking of ideas till we landed on one we liked. We also spent a lot of the week collecting the different talents and things that will be happening in the zone conference. It looks like a decent lineup, we have a lot of singing, a few skits, and then a few other random acts. I'll letcha know how it turns out. 

We FINALLY had another lesson with Tom and Grace and Valentina. It was pretty good overall, we talked about commandments. We found out that the Velez (the family they live with) got called to serve a mission in McAllen Texas and they leave in February. We also found out that they are going to go their old English ward until then soooo we have to pass them off to the English Elders. It's kinda sad but I think it will be better in the long run since Tom & Valentina don't really speak Spanish so they can get some better fellowship in that ward. 

We tried by our golden fam this week but they didn't answer the door. Holidays are busy times :/ 

I don't think I've talked about "The Christ Child" yet..... And I'm not sure why cuz it's pretty much just the best thing ever!! If you haven't seen it yet go to www.lighttheworld.org right the heck now and watch it. It's a 18 minute video of the nativity but it's accurate to the Scriptures and to history! I've seen it literally 50 times at this point and every time I have new thoughts and feelings about it (I even cried once :) ). We've had an awesome opportunity to visit a bunch of members and show them this video and It has been AWESOME. They all love it. Honestly I'll probably watch this video every year for Christmas till I die. 

We went to the temple this week and that was awesome as well. They did a cool remodel on the inside in some parts so that was cool to see. Afterwards we went to the distribution center and I got this cool Book of Mormon that is organized and edited like a play so it says Who is speaking, where they are saying it, and what time. It doesn't add or subtract anything from the Original words so it's just a different way to study it. Pretty excited to use it with Come follow me 2020. 

Today for P-Day we did a white elephant gift exchange and it turned out super good. Highlight gifts: Haunted clown doll, a potato and Dijon mustard, coffee maker, and a dove decoy. Then we played some mafia and I got picked to be mafia which never happens so I got wrecked. My partner in crime and I 

Anyways that's how things are going!

Los quiero

- Elder Thompson 

No hay mal que por bien no venga - Mission Week 58

 Buenas tardes familia, amigos, hermanos, hermanas, etc

This week was awesome! 

The last couple weeks (as I have mentioned) have been kinda slow and hard but this week was like a straight 180. We were super busy and had some awesome miracles happen! It was an awesome testimony that sometimes the Lord allows us to go through hard times to test our faith and see if we are really committed to following him. 

Miracle 1: 

We met these two dudes that live super close to each other. One dude is Jorge, the other one is Alejandro. We felt like we should stop by them. We got into Jorge's house and he had 2 other friends there. As we started to talk to them and teach them it got super frustrating super quick. I don't really know how to describe it but they were just kinda unresponsive.... We would ask a question and they would just sit there and stare at us and say "pues no se... Pues es que pues........." And then the ONE guy of the three was not understandable... Like I've been speaking Spanish for a year now I have a pretty solid handle on understanding but this dude was impossible to understand. Anyway it was just lame. Sooo after we went to Alejandro and had the best lesson of my mission so far!

He let us right in and we started the Restoration with him and his wife Silvia. We seemed to say all the right things, and they answered in all the right ways. The spirit was super strong and as we were leaving Alejandro said something along the lines of "Yeah we can tell you bring a good feeling into our house, and we also know that what you are telling us doesn't go against anything we already believe in." It was super awesome and we came back 2 days later and they were there again! We read 3 Nephi 11 and same thing, a picturesque lesson. We are super excited for them!! 

Miracle 2: 

Thanksgiving :) 

Thanksgiving was super awesome, we got invited over for dinner with Hna. Valdivia as usual and she was super stoked to cook us a real American Thanksgiving. There were 6 missionaries, 5 members, and 2 investigators there so it was a party. It was honestly really good probably better than most Thanksgivings I've had in my life (sorry fam jaja this lady just knows how to cook!) We spent the rest of the evening singing our musical number that we perform in 2 weeks. 

Miracle 3: 

Media referral! I honestly never thought I'd get a media referral in my life as a missionary. Media referrals are the kind where someone goes on comeuntochrist.org and fills out a form to get a BoM, Bible, or just a visit with the missionaries. They are pretty rare, and when they come they usually go to the English Missionaries. Elder Jones and I were super surprised when we got one in our area since 1. Our area is super small and 2. She actually spoke Spanish haha. We messaged her to set up a time and Maria was there waiting for us and her new BoM! Apparently she has gone to lots of churches over the years, but hasn't liked any of them except for ours. We had a brief visit and then she gave us some Tamales to go :) 

Miracle 4: 

OUR BRANCH IS BECOMING A WARD!!!! It's super crazy Y'all this branch has been teetering on the edge of becoming a ward for sooooooooo long. It is gonna be really good for the work because there will be a change of leadership up top. Our current branch presidency is kinda burnt out and have some beef with a lot of the members so there is a bit of a toxic environment right now. Anyways, they announced that on the 29th they will form the Kennewick Spanish Ward. This will be the second ward in our mission so it was super big news. 

Anyways, I feel like this email is super long haha. If you made it this far congrats. 

Los amo, estén bien! 

Fotos: 

1. Elder Jones happy as a clam on his birthday when it snowed

2. We wrapped BoM's for a thing we are doing soon. Some people wanted to do mugshot faces apparently but only 1/2 the people knew haha 

Creepy People - Mission Week 57

Well this week was definitely one for the books haha where do I start.....well I guess I'll start with the less funny stuff.

Yesterday E. Jones got super sick again. He still has a massive headache 24hrs later. We stayed in and I studied a lot and watched every video I have downloaded haha. It's looking like today might be similar so Pray that I can keep away cabin fever. 

Earlier in the week we had a few audits and stuff to do so we drove to Connell (again) and they were actually there this time. We stopped at the burger place there and they had this burger where it was 1/2 a burger & 1/2 a ham sandwich. Honestly not too bad! 

On Wednesday we helped a family in our branch move and it was pretty sad to see them go. They got baptized & married in this branch and the reason they are going back to Mexico is cuz the husband has a terminal illness and so he wants to die in his home country :( Sad stuff but they were pretty excited to see family and things like that. 

Thursday was a craaazy day! Now we're getting into the interesting stuff. We had MLC which was really good and we talked about a lot of issues in the mission that I have noticed for a while. We ended on a pretty good note that we need to step it up. Our mission has been promised by multiple apostles that we can double our baptisms and I know it's totally possible! 

After MLC a sister named Sister Wills came up to us and told us about some weird stuff that had been happening with a person they were teaching. She was chatting with another companionship about her area and about some guy named "Robert" that was super golden. The other sisters were like "Wow that's crazy the sisters we live with are also teaching a super golden guy named Robert". So, after MLC we called them with Sister Wills to see what was going on since she thought he might be a troller or something. (Sidenote: that's kinda our job is dealing with people that try to mess with missionaries online. For example one time someone made a fake account of Sister Rasmussen and started to add all the missionaries) 

Anyways, we call them up and they compared Robert and it was totally the same dude! Same phone number, looked the same, had the same "story". Then, while we were doing that E. Perry our mission Recorder overheard the convo and was like, "wait I just forwarded a referral to Pasco of someone named Robert." Soooo long story short this guy was being taught by 3 different Companionships of Sister Missionaries and had told them all different stories. He told one companionship he didn't know what the BoM was and then another he said he had a testimony of the Church. 2 of the areas he had previously had a baptismal date. Super crazy stuff. We later found out that some Elders had contact with him for like a day then he stopped talking to them once he found out they were Elders. President Rasmussen had us text him and tell him to knock it off. Anyways, all that surprise stuff made our afternoon super busy and I totally forgot I had planned to call my Mom for her birthday!! Happy late Birthday Mom! Love you! 

On Saturday we had an exchange so I was with E. Carr for the day. It was a rough day of knocking doors and no one answering haha. Seriously it was a Saturday too and normally people are a little more lively but it was like a ghost town. We did talk to this crazy lady though which was... Fun...? I don't even know. She definitely had some mental stuff going on cuz she told us all this weird stuff about how God was supposed to come in the flesh but instead he put 1000 Jesus Christ's on the earth to trick us. She said that she was one of them and her mom was the virgin Mary. And she said she found all of that out when she was in the Mental institution. Honestly, she was super nice though. Cada loco con su tema I guess Anyways, sorry this email is kinda all over the place. 

I don't think I have any pictures sorry, I hope ya'll are doing well and that you have a solid Thanksgiving. I was just texting the member that is feeding us and she is super excited to cook us a real American spread of food :) 

Los quiero, que les vayan bien 

- Elder Thompson 

Mission Week 56

Buenos Días familia y amigos, me alegro de que pueda escribir este correo hoy y decirles un poco de mi semana.

This week was kinda slow, there were some frustrating things that happened but it wasn't a terrible week. Earlier in the week we had some plans to travel around the mission to look at some missionary phones but after driving an hour we found out that they canceled the meeting and didn't tell us... Pretty much wasted our entire afternoon. 

On Tuesday we had a cool training from the mission president about Light the World!! It's gonna be super awesome, the Church has made a lot of amazing plans to get people excited about Christ this December. I can't remember if I mentioned "The Christ Child" earlier but it is a 18 minute long video that comes out on the 24th. It is definitely the best video I have ever seen!! Super good stuff. Right now you can go to lighttheworld.org and sign up for the texts! It will send you a text every day in December of things you can do to light the world. 

We also had a super awesome lesson with Alfonso, we found him last week and we visited him one more time this last Tuesday. He opened up to us and told us about his family and how much he loves them. He said he had a special connection with his Dad and how he misses him a lot so we asked him "How would you feel if you could see your Dad again?" He said that would be amazing and so we invited him to read the BoM to find out some answers. We haven't been able to catch him since then but we have high hopes. 

Friday we got invited to a members house and also a recently returned Elder was there too! We ate a ton of good stuff and it ended up being really good. The member told us later that it really helped this RM because he had come home early for health reasons and was having a really rough time about it but she said it cheered him up a bit. 

Saturday morning was really good we actually were able to contact a lot of people. We met like 3 new people that hopefully we can start teaching soon. We have recently been dropped by nearly everyone in our teaching pool... Tom and Grace kinda "soft dropped" us for a few weeks too. They said their schedule is just getting crazy so we aren't going to have lessons for like 2 weeks or something...Super sad, but we are trying to keep going with high faith. 

That was pretty much it for this week, nothing too exciting but overall not too bad. I'm still loving being a missionary and I'm glad I can have this time to serve the Lord. I hope ya'll are well! 

Los quiero! 

Elder Thompson 

Fotos

1. Comida Pic: Entomatada

2. A picture I never sent with us and Valentina (Back when it was warm haha) 

3. All the Kennewick Spanish Elders, Hna Valdivia, and Elder Eastham 

Mission Week 55 - A trainee in the house

Buenas tardes a todos! 

Esta semana fue genial!

We had transfers this week so we did the classic train the new missionaries thing. This group is a super awesome one! Definitely a good future for the mission. On Tuesday we took out elder Williams from Snowflake Arizona and sadly everything we had planned fell through. Buuut we visited our branch mission leader so he would at least be able to talk to a native speaker jaja. 

On Wednesday we were supposed to meet up with the new senior missionaries that were going to replace us but they didn't show up so we were kinda frustrated at first. We found out the next day that they aren't actually going to do be able to serve so the whole thing got called off. Soooo our transfer is normal now haha we were expecting it to be way weird but now it's not. We met E. Carr and he is being trained by E. Escandon which is super cool because I haven't been around a new missionary since I was trained. He is pretty sweet, from Provo UT and he has acted for Hale Center Theater for a few years. I'm pretty sure I saw him in newsies right before I left. 

Thursday night we contacted some people about getting some new computers for the mission office and so we went and got 5 computers. It was super funny cuz we were just tangled in cords and stuff like that and everyone in the office was commenting on how 'techy' we looked. It was good though, we spend a good amount of time wiping them and getting them set up for the office missionaries.

Friday and Saturday we got to work a lot which was cool. We met two new people to teach named Alfonso and Silvia and they asked a lot of the textbook ''questions of the soul''. We have another lesson with them tonght and we are super exited for that. 

We also had a lesson with Tom and Grace and they, as usual, fed us some super good food. During the week Tom sent us some articles that he had read and they were just straight anti (it was like super low quality anti tho it was all easy stuff) so we spent a long chunch of our lesson talking about that. Buuut it was overall pretty good and we committed them to read and pray every day since they only had been doing it occasionally. 

Today we had a cool miracle, a super awesome member, Sister Garcia from the Park Hills English ward here, paid for our groceries! I was about to drop like 60 bucks too and so it was a super bendición. 

Anyways thats pretty much it!! Los quiero, gracias por sus oraciones y  apoyo. Se que la iglesia de Jesucristo de los Santos de los Últimos días es el reino de dios en la tierra. Mi testimonio ha sido fortalecido bastante en la misión. Yo sé que dios nos ama y nos conoce perfectamente. Agradezco la oportunidad ser Misionero y representar Jesucristo. 

- Elder Thompson

Fotos:

1. Some stickers I designed for the mission. (Mission logo & Wow missionaries is a training we have revived that president wanted turned into a little emblem)

2. Goofy Walmart picture

3. Mission T-shirts

4. "The Pattern" poster. It's another training we got on how to be a successful missionary and president wanted a poster to go in every missionary apartment.

5. Our mini computer lab at the office