Elder Deadrock!

October 5, 2009

2009-10-05T13:50:00.000-07:00

Hey everybody! This is doctor Nick!

WOW!!! General conference is the BEST!!! I love it when the prophet gets up and just lays the smack down on all these Chileans, JUST LOVE PEOPLE!!! Haha no i´m sure it isn´t just Chileans that can increase their ability to love, it applies to all of us but i´m just a little biased right now being in chile and all, seeing how little the people reach out and converse one with another, its kinda sad but that’s what we´re here to change!!! I had a really sweet experience actually that I wrote to my president about and i´ll attach it, here it is:

This last week I had a really powerful spiritual experience. One of my converts, Eduardo La Torre has been a really strong convert until this last week when he saw an anti-mormon video about the Book of Mormon. He lost practically all of his faith and was left with only a shell of what his testimony once was. As we talked with him I remembered that General Conference was coming up. I had always heard of missionaries and other members testify of how when we go to General Conference with a question and a prayer that we can answer that question the Lord provides the response that we need to strengthen our testimonies. Having remembered that I was prompted by the spirit to make the same promise to Eduardo, I told him that if he was to go to all the sessions of General Conference, praying that he could regain his testimony of the Book of Mormon that he would hear something that would astound him. The answer to my prayers ( I was also praying that he would receive an answer) came on Sunday afternoon when Elder Jeffrey R. Holland dropped a bombshell on all those with doubts about the Book of Mormon! President, my testimony was also strengthened as I listened to this Apostle of God testify of the truth of the Book of Mormon and I could not help tear up, knowing that the answer I received also will help another to stay firm in the church and be a believer of the Word of God. I love this church, I love my older brother Jesus Christ and I know that miracles exist. I know that God loves each and every one of us and listens to our prayers!

Yeah that was a really sweet experience, unfortunately I won´t be seeing Eduardo or anyone else for that matter from the Vicuña Mackenna anytime soon. Seeing as how i´ve been moved out. I´ve been sent to one of the most ghetto sectors in all of this mission. Its called El Molino. Don´t think the fun stops there though, i´m white washing the area, and also training, and also a Zone leader. HOLY COW!!! As the two latin elders that I just left living with would say, “Oh my gosh!” (turns out I say that a lot and they caught on to saying it) so yeah, this change is going to be a blast, I really am not prepared for any of the 3 new challenges that are coming my way this change but I know one thing and that is that I NEED YOUR HELP AND PRAYERS!!! I will continue to pray like crazy but please feel free to help me out in this cause for Justice and righteousness ;)

Alright I love you all, i´ve gotta run but remember that I love you all and are praying for all of you!

With love and care,

Drewby

September 28, 2009

2009-09-28T15:14:00.000-07:00

Hello all,

How are things going? Life is really really good here in the Vicuña Mackenna, unfortunately i feel like it is coming to an end this week. Its a little sad, especially because i don´t want to part with the people here nor elder hualca but i feel a change a coming so here we go!

Is everybody super super excited for conference this week? I am SO EXCITED!!! I love general conference! Its such an awesome weekend, all we do is just get spiritually nourished. Even though they always say things instantly kill me because i´m a dirty sinner i love it! Its a ¨dang i´ve gotta do better¨ lashing that i recieve! Hope that everybody can recieve an answer to a prayer or a question this week! I know that i will and i don´t even have a question yet, i just know thats how intune the apostles are with what i need, i don´t even know it, but they do!

Yesterday capped an extraordinary weekend, well, to be honest the week was just like any other, but Sunday was something else! We had the baptism of Sebastian Munizaga which was really cool but the baptism that was really special, one i´ll never forget was that of Jillian Jara. She is a girl who since the age of three has been battling a tumor in her nervous system. For that she has had a problem with the development of her entire body, she has had to undergo 16 surgeries and still has many to go in her life. She can completely recover from it but the surgeries have really taken a toll on her growth. This last week she asked if the missionaries would baptize her. Of course we were more than happy to perform the saving ordinace for her but we didn´t know how much of a challenge it would be. It was a bit of a challenge but 100 percent worth it after all was said and done. She is still in the recuperating process from her last surgery and so she is without the use of her legs so we lowered her down into the baptismal font in a chair. The water was unbelieveably cold and she started to whimper as we lowerd her into the water so we didn´t know if we were going to be able to do it, every time we tried to put her a little further in the water she started to cry a little bit. It was heart breaking to see. The mother eventually told us to just do it, just dunk her and so elder hualca said the prayer and we tried to inmerse her in the water but her whole body couldn´t be inmersed due to the fact that she was in the chair. Failed attempt one... they told me that one of us needed to be knelt on the side of her, in the freezing cold water so i knelt down and we tried to do it again holding her legs down and she was still crying a bit, failed attempt two. At this point elder hualca told me it wasn´t possible but i wasn´t going to have any of that. I pulled her out of the chair, held her in my arms as i knelt in the water and had to brush her cheek to get her to stop crying and then i told her that we had to go under the water one last time because it was what Jesus wanted us to do. So elder hualca said the prayer holding her hand, i had her in my arms, plugged her nose with my free hand and she was immersed completely! It was a touching experience and just writing it down makes me tear up. I love children! After we completed it i carried her out in my arms and slipped going up the stairs but i was able to catch my balance, it was an experience to remember!!!

That caps the week, this morning i was reading in this september´s liahona (ensign for those outside of the promised land) and i read in this talk from elder Oaks, what a KILLER!!! Its about the purpose of a missionary and it killed me! I don´t need to help the ward´s where i´m at! Forget that, i just need to baptize! Thats all i need to do! So wish me luck, pray for me that i can get this purpose etched into my daily life, because i´ve been praying for it as of late but i could use all of your help! Pray that i´ll have the vision to baptize! Alright i love you all, keep in touch and keep on smiling!

Love elder livingstone

August 24, 2009

2009-08-24T21:52:00.000-07:00

Family!

Whats up? How are we all doing? Things here in Vicuña Mackenna are moving along just great and it looks as if i´m going to be here another six weeks with Elder Hualca as my companion again! Good news first right?! We had changes today and nothing changed accept for Elder Hutchins leaving, which was a huge bummer because we were really starting to become good friends and whats more we were making some cool plans for ¨cousins before girls¨ times when we both get back to the old stomping grounds of BYU but all those plans will have to wait in pause for a couple of year/months... So that was a big bummer to loose the hutch dog but the other Elder that just moved into our house is way awesome too. His name is Elder Wyatt and he is from North Carolina! His parents live in Utah now but he claims Nor Carolina as his home, turns out that he is a health FREAK! So we´ll be going running almost every morning which will be a really good thing to continue doing. Oh another bit of bad news, apparantly President hasn´t realized how crappy i am of a missionary yet because he called me last night to tell me that this change i will be a district leader. Not something i am looking forward to. Fortunately enough my district is LEGIT with the Zone Leaders and another companionship of quality missionaries so i´m not stressin it too much. I´m actually looking forward to being taught by all of these great missionaries over the next six weeks. Hopefully by then President will have realized the mistake he made in making me a district leader and i will go back to being junior comp or something! Haha that´d be awesome!

This last week has been another really good one, we´ve really tried to put a focus on inviting people to church this past week. Not that we weren´t before but now we are just inviting EVERYONE to church, in lessons, in contacts, random people in the street right before church starts, at all times, we have got to get the people in the church because they can´t be baptized if they are not in church so thats one HUGE hurdle that if we can overcome will help us complete with the promise that Elder Oaks made us, ¨baptisms weekly¨. So this past week we did a really good job of inviting everyone to church and even had someone who we´ve never taught in church too, it was really cool actually. We´ve known this guy for a while now, he runs the internet café where we do all of our emailing, so he´s here right now actually. His name is Johan and he´s a stud, he´s 20 years old, from Peru and had only been to a church once before in his life but he said he loved it and wants to come back next week! ANOTHER GOAL FROM GRIFFINDOR!!! The next step is to obviously teach him which we´ll see if we can set up a time right here in a second but if you kept him in your prayers it would be MUCH appreciated. We also had a couple of eternal investigators in church, Jose, who is found in the picture attatched, the 40 year old lookin guy. He´s an awesome man, he considers Elder Hualca and I children of his and wants to be baptized really badly but currently cannot because his ¨girlfriend¨ (marcela, also pictured) is already married and not divorced, I can´t remember if i´ve ever mentioned this but that is a huge problem here in Chile and it kills me! Before it was completely impossible to get divorced, thankfully in the past 5 or 6 years they´ve changed that but it still has a very negative connotation and many of the people think that its still impossible so it is really hard to help people to do it! UGH!! Anyways, he will get baptized if it´s the last thing i do! I love that guy! Hmm... Bastian and Sandra also made it to church for the first time this week, bastian is a crazy little kid that is our neighbor, he lives across the street from us and he is just a character, he is really funny, 11 years old and was buddies with some of the missionaries that were here before but they never taught him the lessons. He wants to be baptized but doesn´t really understand what it entails... in sacrament meeting he was kinda goofing around and didn´t really take it all that seriously, again he is 11, i was a huge dork at that age too and i turned out alright ;) anyways, i think they liked it, they had to leave right after sacrament meeting and i didn´t really get the feeling that they were too hot on it but we´ll just have to wait and see, we will be passing by their house sometime this week so we´ll talk to them, see how they felt, resolve some doubts, you know do missionary work in general!

I´ve got a question for all my wonderful sisters and mother, how in the heck do you deal with your kids in church? There are some children here that are TERRORS, i think that it has something to deal with the chilean mothering techniques but i´m not sure.. anyways i´m just wondering if anyone and or everyone could tell me their techniques in helping their kids stay calm and quiet in church. There is one little guy in particular who is a BEAST that he just screams and screams and screams and runs around with his naked barbie named Britney Spears. Its quite commical at times but at other times i just want to drop kick him becuase everyone is turning around and scouling at this mother, whom happens to be a less active that we are trying to reactivate so its just really an inconvenient sitation that i´d like to help her out. So any suggestions would be gladly accepted at this point.

Hm.. running out of things to tell ya´ll. I love reading all of your letters! They are awesome! Keep them coming and if you haven´t written in a while there is still time to repent! Alright gotta run take care, i love you all very much!

August 17, 2009

2009-08-24T21:30:00.000-07:00

Whats up family?

This week was a pretty darn good one, really the days are like minutes now, the time is FLYING!! I can´t believe how fast the first 1/3 of my mission has gone by, I don´t want it to end, that’s for sure but one day it´ll have to, and that´ll be a sad day, in the very very far future!

This last week was a good one because we were able to do some good work and find some new people to add to our near empty teaching pool. Unfortunately none of them went to church due to the huge rain storm we had this past weekend! It was awesome! Here it rains like cats and dogs! Honestly it started raining on Friday at about 6 and then didn´t stop raining until Sunday at about 2 or 3 in the morning! I loved it! Going out to work in a good pair of boots a rain jacket and a good umbrella is awesome! I was wading through puddles/rivers that were a good foot and half deep! What a blast!!! Like I said before though, it pretty much killed our attendance on Sunday we had about 80 people in church, 2 investigators, andrea munizaga (eternal investigator because she wants her boyfriend to baptize her and will not accept our baptismal invitations) and jose- the father of jean(whom was baptized yesterday with his sister). So they were in church which was good, the baptism was also really good. I love to help complete families, I can´t stress that enough! I love it! Helping families take one more step to becoming eternal is amazing! Their story is something extraordinary for me, I think I told the story earlier of when elder inzunza and I were walking down the street and we had the impression to pull out or map and double check where we were going even though we felt like we knew the way, and then we met the inactive lady who had been searching for the missionaries for months because her daughter wanted to be baptized. Yeah, that is this family, the duagher danyella is the reason for which we had this baptism yesterday of Jean and the reason why the entire family is being reactivated. So yesterday was her 8^th birthday, and she asked me to be the one to baptize her, it was an amazing experience! She is just this pure little amazing girl, who wants to follow Christ and for her desires, her entire family is becoming active again, I have no doubt in my mind that children are WAY closer to God and the spirit than we are!

I´m really grateful for the opportunity that I have to be here in themission field, I know that it is a blessing to be here, i´m very blessed to even be on a mission and I know that it is thanks to a lot of prayers and fasting on the part of all of you, thank you so much for your humble pleading to our Heavenly Father in my behalf, I will never be able to thank all of you enough for helping me to prepare and correct my life so that I could be here! You all are amazing, the best brothers and sisters and mom and dad and grandmother on the planet! I love you! Please continue on in the faith! God loves us so he sent his son!

Elder Livingstone

August 10, 2009

2009-08-24T20:53:00.000-07:00

You´ve got mail…

And it´s from me...

This week went by way too fast, I feel like I was sitting here two minutes ago, and I have about two minutes worth of work to show for it too.. shoot.. SIKE! I really do feel like I was just here but that´s just how out of whack my perception of time has become... Benny C, big number 54, once told me that the mission can be summed up in the following three numbers, 2, 40 and 10. 2 because its two years, OBVIOUSLY.. 40 being that if an elder works hard and does the work right, he should mature 40 years in church service, and the 10 is that we grow, or digress, however you want to look at it, in innocence.. haha i don´t know if all of those numbers are right, to be honest i live with a couple of goofs and feel like i haven´t matured all that much or gotten any more innocence but i still have a LONG time to serve, so there is still hope ;) Another thing that Benny C told me was that in the mision there are 3 types of days, p-day, other day, and Sunday.. hahahahaha its so lame but so true, all of the other days in the week have begun to mesh for me and i can never tell what day it is.. BLAHH....

The cool experience for the week happened when i was studying the scriptures, in Alma 48 verse 7: ¨ Now it came to pass that while Amalickiah had thus been obtaining power by fraud and deceit, Moroni, on the other hand, had been ^apreparing the minds of the people to be faithful unto the Lord their God.¨ obviously he was also preparing the people to war with Amalickiah as well but the scriptures make a special point to mention this first, that our minds need to be spiritually prepared, BEFORE afflictions. That part stuck out a lot to me because it helped me to understand the principle of ¨choose now¨ choose now whom you will serve, choose now that you wont smoke, choose now that you won´t ever, EVER miss a sacrament meeting which happens to be the only opportunity to clean yourself spiritually offered here on the earth. The decisions are easy once we really think about it. God only wants us to keep a couple of commandments and if we do that we guarantee ourselves eternities of happiness. BOOYA!! Life is so dang simple!!! Haha i´m probably the only one who can say that right now because i don´t have much choice in my life, my tie and suit, thats about the only choice i have right now but i love it! I LOVE LIFE!!! So, that being said, the importance of our decisions not only has effect here but echoes throughout the eternities, so do the decisions of your children, thats why YOU need to help them make the decisions right now, RIGHT THIS INSTANT to always obey God and ¨to be faithful¨ in every circumstance. Soapbox, dismounted.

This week was really good, we had a couple of really good lessons, a good find, his name is Julio and he really understood the principles we explained. He is a huge boost and blessing, I love finding news and its even better when they are like him, he asked us to call him to set up another appointment and he said he was going to invite his family to invite the next time we pass because if its all true, he wants his family to have the happiness too!!!! WOOT WOOT!!! We also found a couple of other people thanks to member references, THESE ARE THE BEST!!! Note to family, talk to your friends about God and ask them what they believe and then tell them the importance to you of being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ, i.e. ¨thanks to the church i know where i came from, why i´m here in this earth, where i´m going after this life and i know WHO I Am, i know that i have a divine heritage from my Father, who is God. I know all of this thanks to the grace of God that he has restored his Church, with his power again on the face of the earth.¨ that is what being a member of the church means to me and that is what a bunch of people could benefit from hearing because a lot of people don´t know what it means to be a memeber of their church and your testimony of these things will knock them off their feet! And after all that is said and done you can say, look, i have these two friends who are representatives from my church and they would love to come by and share a message with you that WILL help your family to have more peace and joy in this life, when will you come over to my house to meet my friends? Or better yet, just tell them, ¨hey come over to my house this Monday night, my friends will be over then and we can talk.¨ DONE DEAL!!! Alright that is my missionary tip for the week. I love you all like crazy, i hope that everybody is doing well, tito thanks for the insight on Nefi, you are completely right, the Lord has the plans laid, we can´t see the future but he can, for that we just need to play every situation with the spirit and trust that God will provide for us what we need to do... alright love you all like Peter Parker loves Mary Jane.. he he.. that came out funny..

Alright i gotta go, give the missionaries and keep on keeping on, i love YOU!!!!

August 3, 2009

2009-08-03T22:42:00.000-07:00

What it does?

How are we doing family? I´m doing quite well thank you very much! Things are a great here in the mission, this past week we had a conference and President granted us a lot of freedoms that we previously didn´t have. For instance on our day of preparation we now study in the morning but don´t have to go to a zone class type thing. We clean in the morning, and he lengthened the day by an hour seeing as how our time schedule is different than most of the other missions. So it is nice now to have the same amount of time as every other mission in the world. We also can eat fast food, or eat out in general and another great thing is that we can visit musuems, zoos and other cultural sites which is AWESOME because we couldn´t do any of that before. It is really good, i feel like a free man now! WOOHOO!!!

Highlight of the week... BAPTISM!!! We were blessed again this week to have another baptism, this is a habit that i could really get used to, unfortunately we don´t have anyone lined up for this week so it looks like we wont be continuing the trend but we´ll try our darndest to find someone that we can baptize! Anyways back to the point, this week was the baptism of Javiera, she is this little 9 year old fireball who is the daughter of a less active who has just reactivated herself, meaning she is no longer less active, anyhow, back to Javiera. She is nine years old and hilarious, i am so greatful that she was able to be baptized this week, every time that we pass by to teach her or visit with her she has the sweetest spirit and teaching her i really do know that the Kingdom of God is made up of little children because they are pure in spirit and heart. She is always so happy to talk about God and how she wants to obey him because she knows that it makes Him sad when she disobeys, etc.. after the baptismal interview (conducted by Elder Steven Hutchins, side note, turns out that his grandfather is first cousins with Grandma Livingstone, grandma, did you know that?) anyways after conducting the interview we had a little scripture and sung(sang?) a hymn and the mom was just bawling the whole time and Javiera was sitting there just beaming, IT WAS AWESOME!!!! Elder Hutchins and i left the house with the sweetest spirit and the both of us had the same question in our minds, WHY DON¨T MORE PEOPLE WANT TO OBEY GOD??? We both saw the blessings invoked by living a life worthy of the spirit of Christ and it was awesome, we wondered, why is that people don´t want that happiness? The jury is still out on that subject but it was a very special experience that charged my spiritual batteries. The baptism was a really good spiritual experience as well, when isn´t a baptism a good experience but that one experience is what has really touched my mind and i´m going to use that as motivation for this week to invite others to come unto Christ.

Thanks Tyler for encouraging the family to pray for me, i appreciate every prayer that is offered in my behalf, i really am honored and touched deeply and want you all to know that i continue to pray for all of you. Alright i gotta run but i love you like crazy, i hope that all are doing well and remember that this life is short but the eternities aren´t, they last forever so do what it takes to make the good, little decisions here so you can have the eternal happiness in the life to come. I LOVE YOU ALL!!!!

Drewby

July 20, 2009

2009-07-20T14:51:00.000-07:00

Fam Damily,

Now that the reunion is over you can all go back to living life like normal, accept the fact that mom and dad are HOME!!! Ah that’s still got me trippin a little bit. Oh well they are gonna keep on keeping on.

This last week has got to have been one of the most stressful weeks of my entire life. I´m fairly concerned that God is trying to test my patience and devotion to him due to the fact that last change I was with a fairly noobie and this change i´m with a real freshy. One thing is for certain, I DON´T KNOW WHAT I´M DOING! Well that’s a lie, I do know what i´m doing i´m just finding it really stressful trying to lead on the battle against satan being the actual leader against the war here in the ward of Vicuña Mackenna. I´m definitely trying to do my best, I think I might be stressing way too much over little details but I just want to show my kid how live the mission, to really live it, have it be your life, and to follow every rule with exactness. He actually hasn´t even unpacked his bag yet because there hasn´t been ¨free-time¨ yet.. HAHAHA no that’s how it was with me when I got here but it might be taken a little far to the extreme. I was given council by a couple of return missionaries in our ward and also by the assistants that I just need to turn him loose and realize that the first couple of lessons are just going to Suck, period. So I think I will take those councils, also any that you have given me, or would like to give and apply them this upcoming week and we´ll see how it turns out down the road right?

To give you a little background on him, he is a stud, his name is Elder Hualca, yes, his first name actually is elder, that’s how hardcore his parents are! No just kidding, i´m just bluffing for the fact that I haven´t asked yet what his first name is… wow i´m a piece… haha so yeah, he´s from Guayaquil, 22 years old, has a girlfriend, a really good guy, he likes to say ¨ok¨ a lot and is general a really, really good guy. I like him a lot. He is really enthusiastic and likes to talk to people a lot about the weather here, his house, and food. He´s a bit bigger than me, in girth, but I still have him beat in height!

Lets see… we got clearance this past week to baptize our buddy Eduardo in this ward, he just has to get confirmed in his ward, I know pretty apostate right? I don´t know how it all shook out but they said we could do it, I think its cuz his parents are really anti having any reps from the church in their house so he´s gotta do all the lessons and stuff with us and likes to go to church here with his girlfriend so we´re stoked! The plan is to baptize him this week but that might change as his girlfriend´s little sister wants to be baptized as well but theres a situation involved there that might delay it.. shoot. Other investigators, Oscar. He has almost fallen completely off the face of the planet. That’s really bummin me out but we´ll be passing by his house this Tuesday so if you could have a little prayer in your heart this Tuesday that he´ll accept i´d really appreciate it! Jenny just had surgery, shes out for a couple of weeks, javiera gets back from her ¨vacay¨ this week so we will be teaching her a couple of times in between now and the next time and the plan for her is the 2^nd of august! Woot woot! We also just started with this family of less actives that invited us over to teach their daughter the lessons because she wants to be baptized. The family thought that we were coming over to teach her but we sneak attacked them and have been teaching the dad and the older brother to get them baptized as well and its working! The brother asked us to be baptized yesterday and the whole family was in church yesterday so surely but slowly we´re working toward the goal of baptisms weekly!!!

Spiritual moment of the week goes to teaching Eduardo and Stefani the law of chastity! Powerful stuff! The tears were ready to bust out of my eyelids when I bore to them the testimony I have in me of this eternal law. It was amazing! I was testifying of how i´ve seen the difference of joy in my group of friends of those who have lived the law and those who haven´t, the difference of eternal happiness is black and white. I love the gospel and the ability that everybody has here in the earth to live it. There is no one, no where that is not worthy of repentance!!!

Alright kiddies i´ve gotta get outta here to show my compy the way to live righteously! I love you all like crazy and hope that the you have all the blessings that God has provided for you. Live in a manner that God can´t not bless you!

LOVES AND HUGS TO ALL!!!

drewby doo

July 13, 2009

2009-07-20T13:52:00.000-07:00

What it is what it is?

How is the most amazing family on the planet doing? i know that part of that family(me) is down here enjoying life, very very much. but i´m about to get a nice shock here soon, as in tomorrow. today we had changes and i kissed my first kid away(Elder Inzunza) only to find that i will have another. this time though its a real, real kid. as in i´m getting a freshy tomorrow. his name is Elder Hualca and i´ve heard that he is from Peru... so thats the story of my life right now. i´m really freaked out to say the least. i´m not prepared for this at all. i know that much. i know that its going to be a uphill battle the whole change that i´m never going to feel like i´ve won but i´ll work my tail off until the end. I honestly feel really really unprepared right now, like i did six weeks ago when i found out that my comp only had one change. yeah that fear times by about 1000000000000000000000000... the one thing that i´m not worried about is that he will be able to speak spanish. that will be a really good thing, actually that will take about 20 percent of the pressure off of my hands but still, i´m not ready to have someone look and see everything that i do and learn from me. i´m still learning for heavens sakes.. AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

ok, well hopefully i can take my mind off of that for a bit and explain how the past week went, it was really good actually we had some quality lessons with members, we didn´t find anyone really new to work with but we were able to continue teaching all of our previous investigators which was a blessing. Oscar again was not able to make it to church and we found out his difficulty, he is a former professional soccer player for a team here in chile and plays soccer every sunday morning!!! dang soccer!! it always takes the best investigators! so were gonna really work with him this week and teach him the importance of the sabbath day and how he needs to observe it.. Jenny an investigator that we found when elder Inzunza and i had to get haircuts a couple of weeks ago, came to church and really liked it, unfortunately she will be undergoing surgery this wednesday so her coming to church anytime in the near future is kinda out of the question. and our other really strong investigator, actually the best investigator i´ve ever had is named Eduardo and he is the boyfriend of a less active member in the ward. unfortunately for us he is going to have to be handed over to a different set of missionaries because he doesn´t even live in our stake!! SHOOT!! but what can ya do? the important thing is that he is baptized right? i´m a little worried that if he is baptized there he is still going to come to our ward but we´ll just have to see, and teach him right and then leave it up to him to make the decision.

we had a few experiences this week that really helped me to see that this work is God´s and all that i am is just a puppet to do the work... elder Inzunza and i were making our way to a lesson when we found that we didn´t know the exact way to get to the lesson. we thought for a second about turning down this road named libertad but then changed our mind and decided to consult our map that we had. when consulting we came to the conclusion that we needed to continue down the main road that we were on and turn later. continuing down the road that we wouldn´t have taken origionally all of the sudden we heard the yells of a woman yelling ¨elderes!¨ it was a less active member that we had no idea she even existed and she asked us to come over to her house and teach her and her daughter and all of her family becuase they were unactive and she wanted to be reactivated and she wanted her daughter to be baptized as well. it was an amazing experience, she told us that she had been looking for the missionaries for the past couple of months but could never find them.. it was an experience where after i just thought ¨what if we had continued down the path and not listened to the spirit that told us to stop and look at the map, how long would she have continued looking for the missionaries?¨ its small little means like that that show me that God is doing this work, He can/will not be frustrated, His ways are perfect and he will have his will done whether we like it or not, its really only our decision to decide if we are going to be the functional tools in His hands or not. what is the purpose of a pen? to write, what if the pen is not writing/not completing its purpose? you throw it away right? WRITE!!! do all you can to be a functioning instrument in the hands of the Lord and i know that if you do it, He will bless you! more than you can imagine. I love Mosiah 2, i think its 17-25 or something like that. it lays the law down! if we complete with the commandments we are immediately blessed, and therefore in debt again, so what do we have to boast? nothing! alright, now that i´m done ranting and raving, i just want you all to know that i love you. i really do, you are all amazing examples to me that i can never forget, keep on keeping on and have a smile on your face, your all together for heavens sakes!!!

Loves and hugs and kisses,

Elder LIVINGSTONE

July 6, 2009

2009-07-20T13:45:00.000-07:00

hey family how is life?

Things are good down here in the skinny. There has been a lot changed with new president already, some things for the better, somethings i´m not so sure about but thats not really for me to decide. Its presidents job to recieve revelation for this mission, not me! All i gotta do is get behind him and say YES SIR! and if i do that i´m sure that everything will turn out the way it is supposed to!

We had a a baptism this last week! WOOHOO it was so awesome! Elder Inzunza baptized them both and we (when i say we i mean God) completed a family! It was really something else to be able to see a family be able to see a family embrace after their baptism! I loved it and want to do it more! For that we´re gonna start working A TON with part member families! Hello! Why didn´t i think of that earlier! Oh well, anyhow she gave a killer testimony after her baptism and she has an awesome testimony of the power of prayer and repentance which is way good! It was such an amazing experience to see them so happy! I loved it! We also have some other pics of the whole family before the baptism but i don´t have them and will have to send them next week but honestly, the gospel is here to bless families! I know that! Its something i testify of everyday, i say something like this ¨in my family we are a family of 10, 8 kids and its not easy to be tranquilo with that many kids but with the gospel, everything is possible.¨ you guys are in my testimony every day! Eat it up!

Well i´ve been just a little trunky this week thinkin about everyone being together, iknow that isn´t until this week but i guess i was preparing myself for the trunkiness or something ;) no i know you all are gonna take some killer pics and send them my way so i can feel like i´m there too. No worries!
Elder Inzunza and i are starting to try out a couple of programs to help this ward because it has a little unity problem, that being said does anyone have any good ideas of programs and or activities that their ward has done, or they tried in their mission that helped their wards to unify themselves? I will take any suggestions right about now! ¨shiny happy people holding hands!¨ what an appropriate song to be playing in the internet café right now, thats what i want for this ward and i´m pretty sure this is God sending me a message that one of you has an answer to my problem!

Oh we met our new president this week, that was awesome! He told me that Grandma had talked to him and that his parents were working with Grandma to find the connection between us. How is that going grandma? That was pretty cool to have an instant connection with him. Also heidi and jay he is a former lawer, big time, maybe he knows judge griffiths and can hook me up? Hahahahahahahaha just kidding. Anyhow he is a really good man, i really respect him a lot, he seems like he has had a ton of success in his life and is prepared to take us to the next level. Infact he said that on several occasions. So i´m pretty excited to see what he has in store for us. Another thing that he told us is that he was set apart by Elder Scott(sound familiar) anyhow he said that when Elder Scott set him apart that he(Elder Scott) told him (pres Laycock) that he was inheriting the most obedient mission in the whole world.. that was a compliment that i don´t know if he says that to all the mission presidents, if he does oh well, but really it cool to hear from president because this mission is really really good. I love this mission. Sometimes its kinda lame because i feel like there are a bunch of pharases(is that how you spell those crazy ruly jews back in Jesus´ time?) anyway i feel like there a bunch of scribes and the type in this mission but really its all out of love. We know that when we keep the commandments of God we are blessed and so its good to have a little reminder every here and there. I thought it was neat to recieve a compliment like that from an Apostle. Anyways, not to get proud or anything, it just was cool…

Investigators… we have a couple who are really good, prepared people that we feel extremely blessed to be working with. First of all there is Javiera, a 9 year old daughter of a less active who is currently reactivating herself. Unfortunately she is leaving on vacation this Thursday until the 24 of july but she has a baptismal date for the 26th so we´re all set there. She wanted to do it Thursday morning but we don´t have time to teach her all the stuff before then and have the interview so we gotta wait! Thats how much she wants to get baptized! She´s awesome!

Also there is oscar, jenny, fransisco, jessica, eduardo, the other francisco and his daughter francisca and a couple others that we are teaching but i don´t have time to get into details with them and some of them aren´t really progressing much so i won´t talk about them right now but next week if they are getting ready for baptism i´ll let you know, but if you could pray for them that would be awesome!

Alright i gotta bounce, just so everyone knows we repeated the pledge of alegiance, the star spangled banner, america the beautiful and my country ´tis of thee on the fourth and i thought about all of you at the smoots cookin some dawgs, running, watching fireworks, the parade and i got a little trunky but not for too long because i know i´ll get to enjoy them again with ya´ll! alright i gotta bounce, love you all bunches and bunches and bunches, keep up the good work, keep a smile on and share the gospel with someone. Joseph Smith said that¨there are many who don´t find the truth only because they don´t know where to find it..¨ its our duty to help them find it! When i say we i mean you too!

Love you bunches,

Elder Livingstone

June 29, 2009

2009-07-20T13:40:00.000-07:00

Familia!

Como estáis? Sois mis hermanos queridos y os amo! Nice, this week was a really good one, we worked a ton with the members and had a mess of lessons with members which is always a good thing. Unfortunately our ¨sure baptism¨ fell through but we´ve got a date set with them and the water this week so they´ll be saved enough, their names are Gabriela and Francisco Periera. The really good thing that we did with them this week is that we made the mother promise that she would teach her son every night a little bit of doctrine, he has a learning disabilities so it was becoming a little difficult teaching him because we didn´t understand how he learned best and all that yada yada so we are now having her teach the doctrine to him. GOAL!! Two birds with one stone, now she´s going to have a stronger testimony of the things because she is teaching them and he will learn them better because he has someone who knows him teaching him in a way that he can understand! We were super jazzed when we went by one day and he understood the word of wisdom and the law of chastity, yeah I really didn´t feel like explaining that to an 11 year old… haha its all good! One thing that this has really impressed upon me though is the importance of parenting. Really no one knows your children like you, that being said that means teaching your children the doctrine is of the utmost importance right? I´m really grateful now more than ever for the way mom and dad taught all of us, I wasn´t before but that’s because I didn´t ever really realize… the best way to do it, or the best place to do it is in the family night! That’s something that really lacks down here too, its too bad but hardly anyone has family nights, for that elder INZUNZA and I have decided that were making a program to fix that. What we´re going to do is make groups of families that live near each other, about 5 families to every group and one of them will be less active that the other 4 active families have to support and fellowship. The idea is that every week in these groups they have a family night, a big one as a group that is, and that the place in which they have it, who teaches the family night, who brings the game and snack, all of that changes every week. So what will happen is that these 5 families will get to enjoy the benefits of having a family night every week but only having to prepare it once a month! Legit right? I´m super excited for it for a bunch of reasons, 1 hardly anyone has their family nights here, 2 the fellowship between the members SUCKS and is even worse with recent converts and less actives so when we bring investigators to church and baptize them they don´t stay because the fellowshipping lacks here. So with this program we´re going to get some sweet fellowshipping going on!

This week we saw a bunch of blessings, firstly an investigator who has not wanted to get baptized for a couple months because she wants her boyfriend to confirm her decided that she can´t wait anymore (we left mosiah 3 with her, that chapter is a killer). We have a killer investigator named Oscar that is progressing a ton(except he didn´t go to church L ). We´re going to have these baptisms this week (the 4^th of July), there are a few other blessings that I can think of, we got to go to the temple this week, I don´t have swine flu, I haven´t been super trunky even though everyone is going to be getting together soon, I am starting to really understand Spanish… yeah the blessings are far too many to count but i just want to thank all of you for praying for me. I can feel the blessings, i´m not lying I really can.

There is not a whole lot to report on this week to all ya´lls. I love you like crazy that’s for sure, if anyone wanted to take a ton of pictures this upcoming week and then print them and send them to me along with some reeses and a sweet tie that would be cool… haha I love you all like crazy! I´m a little bummed that President Moran is leaving but every good thing has got to come to an end, I mean MICHAEL DIED this week, what?!?! Haha its all good, he now can be baptized without prejudice of his fans. I got a question though, what will he look like in his perfected form? Michael from the thriller movie? I just hope he has his jerry curls and is black again… alright, i´m just rambling now, everybody enjoy these next couple weeks, go see transformers without me but don´t tell me ANYTHING!! Alright I gotta head, love you all, take care and have your family nights!!!

attatched are some pics of berlins( a delish donut like treat)

my face after eating said berlin

and a shot from our house in the morning, i really do like this city, its got some really gorgeous parts to it.

alright love youall, take care

elder livingstone

June 22, 2009

2009-06-22T11:29:00.000-07:00

Hello my loved ones,

SWINE FLU!!! Pysch! Got you all worried didn´t I? Sorry, I just had to get that out of my system because down here it is very taboo to talk about ¨the disease that will take over the world¨ or so the chileans think.. To explain myself let it be known that 3-4 chileans have died because of the swine flu and for that almost every chilean has this undescribable fear of the illness. Its quite silly actually, I don´t know why everyone is so concerned about it. Less people have died from this than the amount of people who die from drunk driving in 10 minutes or so. Whats the hang up people? Oh well, you all already know that and know that it´s silly, or do you?

This week has been pretty good, well not really, it was pretty bad from the works stand point. Tuesday we had our devotional with Elder Dickson, newsflash, the man has one arm! Regardless he gave us a very deep devotional about how the roots need to grow faster than the branches, something i´ve heard before from Dad but it´s always good to hear quality doctrine again. The part that really was good during the devotional was delivered by Lawrence Corbridge, that man is a spiritual GIANT!!! He is one of the 70´s that lives in my previous sector and he gave us a quality rundown of a discourse(is that what a paper is called?) that we now are going to use as a lesson with the less active members of our wards. It´s a really huge problem down here in Chile. To the point that yesterday we had 6 elders in elders quorum 2 whom have the ¨name badge¨(AKA me and elder Inzunza) and when they passed around the list to mark off if you are ¨present¨ in elders quorum it was 4 stinking pages long... OH MY GOODNESS!!! Yeah so that kinda got me really down about the whole activity rate here in Chile, returning to where i got off on this crazy tangent, we now have a document called ¨perseverad¨ or persevere the which we will be using to drive the point home to the less actives that we all have hope and it comes through the atonement of Jesus Christ and there is no other way. ¨Any other way is foolish¨ as E. Corbridge put it (see his talk in the November 2008 edition of the Ensign) so that was a good charge on the spiritual battery. The next thing of importance that happened this week is that on Thursday I woke up sick, which was no fun but we worked anyhow, Friday we had our last zone conference with Pres which was even less fun because he´s the man. The part that I really took away from his words was how we know if we truly love someone. It was really powerful because he explained to us that love is wanting to be together with someone for the eternities. Obvious that part is my young ones, but the other part was what made me think, If we want to be together with them for the eternities how do we accomplish that? Taking the sacrament weekly, going to the temple, etc... what does all that mean? KEEPING THE COMMANDMENTS.. every single one of them. It was a huge lightbulb moment because I remembered all the times when mom and dad had nagged me to do this or to do that or had made me promise to stop dating someone who shall go un-named and I remembered that in those moments i didn´t feel like they were trying to help me. I felt like they were just nagging me to nag me or what not but I came to the realization that they really were exhorting me to keep the commandments out of Love, pure, pure love and nothing else. This lead me to think that really if I love someone, my comp, my buddies, my family of course, anyone who I think I love I need to help them to keep the commandments so that I can be with them forever. This is ¨family business¨ as Señor West put it. This is forever and not just a game, I need to take it more seriously, that being said i want to extend the invitation (haha i´m a good missionary and not gonna let you off the hook without a commitment) to really love your loved ones and help them in anyway you can to keep the commandments, start out small, not killing for instance. Should be easy for the rest of you, me however... PSYCH again! But seriously, every moment we have here in this earth is to do the Father´s will, do what Christ would do if He was in our shoes. In that we will find the happiness that lasts. The happiness that has no end. This past week i can´t tell you how excited i was when i opened a letter from Jayson and see Kobe with the trophy, i was stoked! But ask me how long it lasted... a day? Maybe two? Lies.. it lasted longer than that, in fact i´m still happy about it but i know that someday, in a couple of years, maybe 80 í´ll forget that they won the championship. But i can tell you that the atonement has no end, there is no end to Celestial Glory.

Alrighty i´m outta time i´ve seen many blessings this week, for instance i was way sick the whole week and Saturday night i even hit a fever of 101.2 at which time i almost thought i had that swine flu but with blessings, prayers on your part and mine and a little bit of faith i´ve been able to see miracles. I love the mission, i´m bummed i haven´t baptized in a while, this next week promises to have some for the which i´m happy but i´m even more happy that the family is doing good, that everyone is going to have a ball of a time these upcoming weeks together. I expect some killer pics, maybe some sent through the mail too? That would be cool, also if anyone feels the need to send me some reeses i wouldnt complain about that either. Recipes i´m hungry for some homeade food but i gotta cook it so send some easy recipes my way cuz i´m a little bit on the lamer side of the cooking business, meaning i can´t do much, ask Jayson, he remembers ¨what drew can cook¨... alright gotta run, i love you all. Keep in touch and STAY CELESTIAL!!!

Elder Livingstone

p.s. kirk or ty or kev or amy do you understand what that sign said in the pictures that i sent last week? i thought not, thats cuz chilean spanish is RIDICULOUS!!! it says -- drunk, you don´t save anyone!

June 15, 2009

2009-06-17T19:40:00.000-07:00

My dearest family!

How are the things going for all of the Livingstone clan and the amazing brothers and sisters in law that I have? I hope that all is well with everyone and that every brother and brother-in-law that I have has a very very special fathers day this upcoming week! you all are amazing! Especially i hope that dad has a very special fathers day, i know he´ll be working hard so he probably won´t even get to enjoy it that much but i have no doubt that he will be well taken care of in just a few weeks here...

Primarily i want to thank all of you for all of your emails and support. Í´m so excited every week to go to the internet and read about all of your lives. You might think that they are boring and not worth writing down but i promise you your stories are great, they are quality, funny, heart warming things to read, so keep ´em comin´!

This week was a pretty good one for the work here in ¨Vic Mac¨. My area is boomin with lessons, i love having lessons to go to all day. Sometimes we get a little down because there is not a lot of time to knock but i can´t complain about having tons of lessons to teach! It´s what this work is all about! So i guess i should tell ya a little bit about who i´m teaching then... The best family that we have right now is the Pereira family, he is a member, their oldest daughter too but the wife and the two youngest children are not. Gabriela is the name of the mother and Francisco is the name of the son who is an age of eligability to be baptized. They were going to be baptized this week, unfortunately he got chicken pox this week and was therefore not able to get into the water and the mom wanted to wait and do it together with him. So unfortunately their baptizm will have to wait until next Sunday (2 weeks from now) because their father is going out of town this week meaning he won´t be there to baptize them... One problem we´ve experienced with them is that he is iliterate and it is really hard for him to understand. It has forced us to really liquify our teachings and make them really simple which is way good for us but at the same time, really hard. I never thought i would say that it is hard to simplify spanish, me being a spanish wiz ya know, anyways its really helped me a lot because simple powerful teaching is the best, teach simple and powerfully with the spirit so they can´t deny it is my new motto!

We also have some other investigators, one named Andrea who is a difficult situation because she has a boyfriend who she wants to baptize her but he doesn´t have the melquisedek (spell check anyone?) priesthood and he doesn´t like the missionaries either. I guess he talks behind all the missionaries backs (us and the missionaries in his own ward too) that we don´t teach with the spirit and that we are bad people, i think we´ve come to the conclusion that he is the one who doesn´t have the spirit as he doesn´t attend church regulary and there is a long list of other things that aren´t exactly lining up.. this is not to say he can´t repent, lets remember who is talking here, but it just stinks being on the other side of the fence, knowing what is going through their heads and i know that they think they´re right, i was there for heaven´s sakes! Regardless that is something we are trying to overcome, unfortunately we haven´t come up with any ways other than to just tell her straight to her face that her boyfriend is wrong and she is waiting in vain...

We have other investigators but mainly we are working alot with less actives right now, its so hard to see people like this, former bishops, former elders quorum presidents that want almost nothing to do with the church. In one case their is a former bishop who is mad at the church and/or God because his mother died.. it is such a bummer to see priesthood holders who have gotten mad at the world over something that at one point they probably gave counsel to someone about. I´ve heard of some elders who tracted a former mission president who is now inactive. I don´t think thats possible but i can promise you if i were to ever find someone like that i would smack them. Why is it that we are so blinded by our own personal pursuits at times in our lives? why is it that we do foolish things like that sometimes. Agh... stepping off the soapbox...

Other than lazy less actives things are really good here. It rained pretty hard yesterday which was good, it has started to get a little cold lately which is no fun. Its a humid cold here which is the worst! I´ll wear a couple of layers of coats etc.. and its still cold! Bah humbug! Haha beyond that life is great, elder Inzunza is the man, unfortunately he gets a little trunky sometimes, most days i mean, but other than that were doin really good, its always in the morning when were studying that he/I get trunky which puts a damper on the day but fortunately 1130 rolls around and we go out to work and i forget all about you suckers at home! Haha just kidding, i don´t forget about you all but i do love to get out and do the work! There is nothing like some good old missionary work to fill the hearts holes!

Well i was really excited because Elder Oaks is in town and word on the street was that he was going to talk to us. We were going to hear from him tomorrow morning but turns out he´s gonna be busy ¨laying down the law¨ elsewhere so instead we´ll hear from a 70 Elder Dickson, i believe is his name so im lookin forward to that! I´ll take copious notes and send them next week! alright, runnin out a time, love you all, take care and keep the faith!

Love elder Livingstone

June 8, 2009

2009-06-17T19:39:00.000-07:00

FAMILY!!!

Hello, how goes life? Things are just splendid here in Chile. Turns out being senior comp is not all that fun because its a ton of responsibility but what can ya do? It´s the calling that I have for this change so i´ll just do the best I can and move along next change.

The really awesome part is that my companion is amazing. Elder Inzunza is a great great great missionary. I really respect him a lot for a whole gaggle of reasons. First of all he is the first member of his family, and the only current member. Reason number two being he has a girlfriend of 6 years that he left to come and serve and she has a child that is 8 years old, the both he has converted... Reason number three is that he is 25 years old. This guy is amazing! he´s got such a strong testimony and really is here for the right reason. Oh and I almost forgot, he is a cancer survivor... ha, oops almost forgot that small little detail, really i´m just floored with how amazing of a missionary he is, he is kickin my lazy butt around and we´re doing some great work here, I love him, I can already tell that he´s gonna be a life long friend, it just stinks that he is from here and will never live up in the States so i can see him that often... thats a good little summary of my comp, I believe i sent a pic of me and him last week so that´ll have to do for now.

This last week was a great week, we have lessons coming out of our ears, which i love. because it really helps me to learn spanish and i´m finding that having a latin comp also helps that but the teaching lessons part i really love. unfortunately we didn´t have anyone ready to be baptized this week but we´re gonna work dang hard this week for the investigators that we have to help them prepare. two of them are from a part member family, the mother and the son, the father recently has been reactivating himself due to his own ¨come to Jesus moment¨ as Jay likes to call it, regardless we have a baptizmal date set for them for this sunday but we´re still waiting to see if the father will be ready to do the baptizm. we suggested it to him last week and he is talking with the bishop tomorrow to propose the idea so please if you can, offer a special prayer for Hermano Pereira and his family. They are great people, he is a painter, he has some beautfil paintings but its more of a hobby for him than professional business so he doesn´t take it too serisously but they still come out beautiful!

The experience of the week this week has to be what happened on saturday. alright to give you a little background I have to let you know that i have dejavu every once in a while, like every 2 months or so. what it comes from is my dreams, what happens is every once in a while i´ll have a dream during the night and it will be very very real, it will be so real that i´ll feel like i´ve already lived that moment in my life and it is just a memory, then i´ll wake up and realize that hasn´t ever happened in my life. the cool part is that i´m just foolin myself because that thing will come to pass sometime in the next couple months. alright, now that the table is set and you understand a little more, last month i had one of these dreams where i saw this wierd looking white guy that was speaking spanish to me and we were sitting down on a couch and he was showing me some colorful map that i didn´t understand. THE EXACT SAME THING HAPPENED ON SATURDAY!! turns out this wierd looking guy is our ward mission leader and that he was showing me some outdated map of the stakes here in santiago. It was cool though because i remember seeing all sorts of stuff in the foreground during my dream like these stuffed animals and a BUNCH of illegally obtained movies.. anyhow i´ve come to the conclusion that dejavu is to warn me of something that is coming in the future because later that day, after we had spent some time at his house we left and went to another sector in the mission for a planned zone activity, and the time worked out exactly perfectly that when we were in the other sector we experienced one of the coolest/scary things i´ve seen in my life. my comp and i were walking down the street in the broad daylight when a man passed us on his motorcycle, he was going pretty fast but all of the sudden we heard the screech of his tires and looked ahead not 20 feet to see two men in the middle of the road with a 9mm pointed at the man on the motorcycle! it was pretty dang crazy. what happened was they yelled at him and told him to get off his bike which he didn´t like. in response to his displeasure in giving up his bike the man with the 9mm decided to pistol whip him in the forhead (pistol whip meaning he held the pistol in his hand and then hit him in the head with the butt of the pistol) which caused the man to start bleeding and comply with what the asailants wanted. the unarmed man took the bike and the one with the pistol started waving it around telling all of us that we didn´t see anything. elder Inzunza and i had already taken the next street and were on our way to the other side of the sector. it was a pretty crazy experience that i won´t be forgetting anytime soon. a lot of prayers of thanks have been offered since then! the crazy part is that within 10 minutes we were back knocking doors again, which lead me to think the following, ¨you know you are a missionary when you´re life is threatened and within 10 minutes life is back to normal.¨

haha well i gotta get outta here before i am struck down for going over my time limit, i love you all like crazy and hope that life is treating you well. enjoy the summer because it is starting to get pretty darn cold here!

LOVEYS!!

Elder Livingstone

June 1, 2009

2009-06-17T19:36:00.000-07:00

Hello loveys,

It would appear as if yours truly is now located in a new location with a new companion. The awesome part is that I now find myself with a latin companion. Elder Inzunza is from Concepcion Chile. That is just down the road from here about 3 hours or so by airplane. I´m really excited to work with him because he is going to really teach me to speak spanish! woot woot! the hard part is that i´m in a new sector (thankfully its a little bit smaller) but also the hard part is i´m going to have to shoulder a lot of the responsibility now. Partly because i´m now the senor comp and partly because he has only a small amount of time in the mission. meaning this is his second change. i´m not ready for this at all. i´m actually really overwhelmed right now becuase this is the first time that i´m really going to have to be on the ball, always and lead the lessons. PLEASE PRAY FOR ME. I don´t know why i´ve been placed with this responsibility because i´m not ready for it but I will do what i´ve been called to do to the best of my ability. excuse me if this email seems a little scatter brained, its because i´m feelin a little stressed right now but i´ll do my best to explain some of the past week so you know what has gone on in my life.

This last week was pretty good, we had a number of lessons with members and we actually found a couple new investigators through members. I can´t stress enough the importance of the members in the work(thats you guys!) It is imperative! without the members we have nothing because they help us in every facet of the work, especially finding investigators! one thing that i hope each of you tries to do this week is talk to a friend about one principle of the gospel, it seems difficult but honestly when you think about how happy we are because we have this gospel, it is natural to want to share it with a friend so they can have that joy too. anyways long story short we found some awesome brazilian investigators due to one of the members in our ward and i´m pretty sure that elder Jennings and his new comp are going to teach them this week, tonight even! well it might be hard for him seeing as how they are the new AP´s but i´m sure they´ll get over there sometime soon.

it was a tough last week with elder Jennings because he´s such a good elder and i knew that since we got along so well we weren´t going to be together again, i don´t know why that is the way that it is, i´ve just heard that from various different sources.anyhow we tried to make the best of our time and teach our investigators, tried to keep working hard because we know that is where true happiness lies, helping the others to come unto Christ.

shoot, i haven´t written anything but my time is already up and i gotta get to work. i love you all and pray for you like crazy. keep smiles on your faces, mom and dad will be home soon enough ;)

love loves
elder livingstone

May 25, 2009

2009-06-17T19:35:00.000-07:00

Greetings loved ones!

How is life in the good ole United States of FREEDOM!! Life down here in Chile is really good, I could not even dream of complaining!

This last week we had an awesome experience, stake conference. It was really amazing because we had presiding at the conference Elder Carlos Amado of the Seventy (nothing new, he presides at sacrament meeting every week, we also have Elder Lawrence Corbridge of the Seventy in our ward too, look up his talk from two or three conferences ago, its killer.) Anyways the treat was that President Morán asked us to be at every meeting of the conference to help our ward leaders out and we also were there to help present a ¨ward council¨ according to a talk that Elder Tom Perry wrote to all the mission presidents a while back. It outlines an efective ward council meeting and how the missionaries can help every auxilary retain its members and help strengthen its quorom members, its a killer plan, i suggest that all read it, unfortunately i only have it in spanish but i can still send it out if some of the spanish readers would like to take a look at it, just give me a hollar. Anyhow Elder Amado made a couple of things crystal clear to us all in the Priesthood session, primarily he asked us all what was more important, our families or the church. A few answered in the affirmative for the families before he threw the hammer down on them and asked them what ordinances their families have done to bring them salvation. The obvious answer is that the family can´t help us to complete any saving ordinances but he went on the explain how they are both equally important, the family can not exist forever without the saving ordinances the church provides and without the family the church wouldn´t serve a purpose. It was interesting. The theme of stake conference was that and also that we need to find and help the lost sheep, he said that the single mothers that are praying for their loved ones to see the light have no answer to their prayers without us, the faithful members of the church. It was super powerful, especially for me because he asked me to read the quote that President Monson told him that he needed to share with the stake which goes as follows:

If you don´t intend to do it,

You wont do it.

If you don´t do it,

Why are you here?

We also had a sweet conference earlier this week with the missionary who baptized our President of the mission when he was a young kid. it was cool but it made me realice how precious and short life can be. I think he is 55ish and he already has cancer and doesn´t have a long time to live. Its scary that honestly their are things like that in the world that can just creep up on us and take our loved ones away in the blink of an eye. Don´t let it happen to any of you, i love you far too much!!!

Alrighty i´m runnin out of time but i love you all like crazy and miss you too! Put a smile on and invite someone to listen to the missionaries!

May 18, 2009

2009-05-18T15:29:00.001-07:00

Hello!

Hey how is everybody doing in the greatest family in the world? I read all of the emails and am very greatful to have recieved all of them! Its so great to see the progress of our family, even though I only am aloud to see it in weekly increments it is super exciting to look every week and hear that a baby is walking, sleeping through the night, talking through skype and all that good stuff! Keep the awesome emails coming, I LOVE TO READ THEM!!!

Life, missionary life rather, down here in the southern hemisphere is going really well.. The work moves forward every week and ever week we have a new experience to look back on and reflect on how the church is growing down here. One thing that was kinda scary for me, but i guess its not all that new here in Chile was that our chapel was broken into sometime between Thursday night and Saturday morning. The way the church is set up is on one side of the building there are two bishops offices and a ¨bodega¨ in between the two. I think a bodega means a store room, or i´m not sure, it has the computers and its where they do all the tithing counting on Sunday, which i guess means that it is the ward clerks office? I´m not sure, anyhow what happened was that someone broke into the church, how they did it, i don´t know because all the windows and doors have huge metal fencing on the outside that is welded on there pretty well. Anyhow someone was able to break in and then they must have thought that the office would still have some money in it because they broke the windows out of one of the bishops office doors and then realized they couldn´t unlock the door from the inside so they proceeded to rip off the door handle and eventually axed out the entire door handle mechanism to get into the bishops office. That was what they did on the other bishops office. What they did on our bishops side was open the door (our bishop knows the future so he knew the robbers would come, therefore he didn´t lock his door ;) ) but then they tried to get into the bodega by beating through the reinforced wall of his office, that didn´t work so they tried to break through the roof of the office and drop down into the bodega, again they came to a sore realization when they found that the entire office is surrounded by reinforced concrete. So they gave up and ran away, not being able to steal any computers or money but leaving the church completely trashed! It was really sad actually, i thought about it after and really, who is desperate enough to rob a church? That is like asking to be struck down with lightning on the spot, any church, not just specifically ours (even though ours is the only true one, therefore it is the worst to rob us) but honestly, who tries to rob a church? But i guess this isn´t the worst that has happened, in the super ghetto ward of our mission, ¨chiloe¨ they built a new chapel and people robbed everything from it. They literally took everything, they completely dismantled the chapel, all the roof, the dry wall on the walls, all that is left of that church is the frame of it, they even stole the fence, my comp said that he was walking through the feria one day ( the feria is like the huge garage sale that goes on in the poorer part sectors of santiago) and he even saw the huge rock plaque that said ¨la iglesia de Jesucristo de los santos de los ultimos dias¨. That is called robery!!! By the way does robery have one b or two? Anyways so that was the scary story of the week.

The cool story of the week is that we had a killer lesson with Milena this week and she came to church! She loved it and is going to be baptized! The only thing is that she has to wait for a while to get hired at the military school before she changes her religion. The thing is that she isn´t even done with school and wont be for a while so she could be waiting a really long time. We are pretty sure however though that she is going to change her mind becuase she has told us a couple of times that that might be the case so we will have to continue to pray that she can do something to make that happen. She has told us quite a few times now that she knows the church is true. She asked us at the end of our last lesson if we could give her a booklet or something that had the rules of the church in it so she could start to live them... does such a book exist? haha the best thing we could think of was giving her a for strenghth of the youth pamphlet which is what we will be doing tonight so keep us in your prayers!

We have a couple of other investigators that we are working on and we hope for success in getting together with them this upcoming week because our appointments with them fell through this week but we have reset them for this week so we should be able to teach them and help them progress this week! Keep us and them in your prayers!

Well i´m about out of time, i just got a call from two crazy people in africa wanting to talk to me so i gotta end the email here but i love you and hope that everything is going well! Have a good week and next week i´ll write a little bit about a family BEEH which is our thing that we are trying to implement here in this mission so the familys can get involved in the work as well! Alright i love you all! Keep a smile on!

Elder livingstone

May 4, 2009

2009-05-04T09:54:00.001-07:00

Hola Familia,

First and foremost, yes, we are going to the cabin. I know right? I´m so STOKED too! I´ll see all of you up there, will someone please remember to bring syrup because i am going to make the best popover that any of you have EVER TASTED!!! Haha just kidding, i´ll be here down in Chile when everyone is there having fun. Shoot, that makes me a little bit trunky but it´s alright, i love opening 15 emails all entitled ¨are we going to drew´s favorite place on earth¨ haha suckers, having to live the real hard life, riding four wheelers, waking up at 10 o´clock, dang that sounds pretty tough.. haha just kidding again, i wouldn´t trade anything in the world to leave where i´m at right now, i can´t lie, i have the best life out of EVERYONE right now so go ahead, enjoy the cabin, it´s got nothing on the mission!!!

I just want to share an experience that I had this last week, its about goal setting and the importance thereof. Earlier in the mission I had the outlook that, it didn´t really matter what goals I set, I was going to go out and work hard whether we had reached our goal or not. Therefore i never really took the whole goal setting time of our planning all that seriously, for me it was kind of just like going through the motions. It didn´t help that we had set mission goals to find 20 new investigators to teach every week, 15 lessons with members every week and 15 other lessons every week. Just to give you some background on those goals they have been set by an apostle, i think it was Elder Holland, not quite sure, regardless the goals are quite lofty, just so you have an idea, the most lessons i´ve ever taught with a member in a week was 7, and the most new investigators i´ve found in a week was 8. those two respective weeks were the BEST OF MY LIFE! Seriously though, the goals are really up there. So Elder Jennings and i were talking about how i wanted to actually accomplish the goals that we set so we shouldn´t put the mission goals ( behind this there is a whole different story, its not apostate, i promise) anyways i wanted to set lower goals so we could accomplish them and not feel like i was just going through the process of putting numbers down and Elder Jennings, being the wise sage that he is, helped me to understand why the mission goals are there. What happened is that he asked me how many people I wanted to find this week, not how many i thought we would find, or how many was logical, but how many i wanted to find. I took out my agenda and began to flip through the pages of the next week, i began to look at each day and determine, based on what we have planned, how many New investigators i thought we could find each day. I wrote down how many i thought we could find today, 1, and then continued on to Tuesday, 3, and i preceded to think for each day, putting the number of new investigators in my agenda on the corresponding day. When i went through and counted how many i had put for the week to my astonishment i had counted 20 new investigators. After i realized this i realized that if we found 20 new investigators in a week that meant that we had to have taught 20 new investigators, meaning 20 lessons, we had planned for around 10 lessons with members so we literally with faith and breaking down each day into an individual day found that the goals are possible. In retrospect this story isn´t all that amazing but when i step back and look at it i learned a really big lesson. That when i actually listen to the council of my leaders, and apply what they have taught me with faith that they know exactly what they´re talking about. Also i found that by taking every day, one at a time we really can accomplish big things. By small and simple means the Lord brings about his great works and i just hope that i can continue to be an instrument in his hands and doing that which needed of me.

So the cool story of the week that i have to share with everyone happened Friday night when we were headed down to an appointment in the south end of our sector on the micro. It was super full which wasn´t all that fun but thats just how it is sometimes. Anyways, we were going along stopping here and there to pick up passangers and let others off just like normal but at one stop there was a man who tried to get on for free(the rule of ¨permiso¨ as it is called here in Chile, basically means that if you say permiso you can do whatever you want, ride the bus for free, use your companions shampoo, milk, whatever you want, its just a word that the lazy, not self relient people have invented to steal from us self sufficient people. In a sentance, I HATE THIS RULE, probably becuase i´m too embarrased to use it because i hate using that which isn´t mine, regardless, i don´t like) anyhow so this gentlemen tries to use the permiso rule on the bus and the bus driver wasn´t going to have any of that, he told him ¨no¨ and the guy was a little shocked but got off the bus anyways. Little did the bus driver know that he had ¨amigos¨ already on the bus who had his back covered, they shouted out that someone wanted to get off the bus still so that the bus driver would open up the back door so the one man could get on the bus for free in the back. The bus driver noticed, stopped the bus and yelled at him for doing it saying ¨you just make the public transportation system look stupid and you are not respecting any of these people who actually paid to ride, etc¨it was a good little speach, secretly in my mind i was like ¨yeah, take that dude.¨ anyways he let him ride for the time that he needed because the bus driver had to get goin´. Here´s where the story gets awesome, when the dirty freeloader got off the bus, like a true knucklehead he came up to the front of the bus to taunt the driver, knocked on the windows and was yelling at him calling him all sorts of obscene things and then started to walk off. The bus driver however was not done yet, he returned to favor telling him a thing or two about his mother and some other stuff that i didn´t understand nor need to understand... this made the freeloader pretty ticked so he came to confront the driver of the bus, he yelled some more through the window of the bus, he jumped up in the window and started to hit the bus driver and he even hawked(can i get a spell check on that word?) a loogey on the bus driver, i can´t imagine what was going through his head. Anyways after all this he started to bang on the front window of the bus again with his fists, NOT SMART! The bus driver hit the gas to scare him off but he didn´t take the hint, so he started hitting the window again, gas again, hitting the window again, and this time the bus driver really hit the gas and the guy realized the bus was moving a lot more than the previous times so he tried to run to the side of the bus but he didn´t make it!!! Hahaha fortunately the bus driver had hit the brakes so he didn´t run him over but seeing the look on that guys face as he went underneath the bus was priceless! Really scary too, my heart stopped because i thought for sure he was getting run over but thankfully he didn´t! He popped right up and started at it again, tryin to get in the window of the bus but the driver really hit the gas and he jumped off because he didn´t want to hang on the outside of a bus going 40 miles an hour but what i learned from this experience is that i need to always be SUPER nice to the bus drivers here in Santiago because they are crazy! Before i thought they just drived crazy but i was dead wrong, they are truely CRAZY!!!

Hey i just thought about this, it might be cool if everyone had my address so they can look up where i´m living and what my sector is like, my address is 5600 los militares (something like that, they are green appt buildings next to this huge grocery story called ¨santa isabel¨) anyhow our sector goes from the street Fransico Bilboa at the south end up the hill in the north and the western end of our sector is a street called ¨avenue hollanda¨ to the eastern part, a road called ¨manquehue¨ there are some other parts of it but it is HUGE!!! Anyways i just thought that maybe someone might like to look at where i´m living, but were planning on moving this week so that will change. We´re moving to an apartment in the street ¨felix de amesti¨. Cool stuff, have fun looking it up!

Well i´m outta time, i spent all the time writting this letter so hopefully it is a little bit more interesting and helpful for everyone to get a picture of what its like down here! We had some great appointments with investigators this week, one girl who is really developing a strong testimony is named Melina Jaksic, please pray for her that her dad will let her get baptized and also her job, she is studying to be a profesor at the Escuela Militar which is a catholic school so she doesn´t know if she will be aloud to do it but we are praying like crazy that she can! She is already converted, she is setting time aside in her school schedule next semester so that she can go to church and all the activities so she is set but yeah, pray for her please. Thank you all so much for the support, letters, prayers and pictures. I love you all and unfortunately i only get to talk with mom and dad this upcoming week but I know they´ll be back soon and can relay some stuff to all ya´ll. I love you like crazy and pray for each of you! Remember it!

Love

Elder Livingstone

April 27, 2009

2009-04-27T16:29:00.001-07:00

throw your hands in the ayyyer and wave them like you just dont cayyyer!

hey family!!!

things are lookin really good here from el golf these days. my new comp, elder Jennings, is a stud and he knows EVERYTHING! i am going to learn so much from his small little buddah like figure this change that i am just super super content right now! he´s already helping me to really teach more effectively and i´m way happy about that. just a quick review of the week i guess..

monday we got here to el golf with all his stuff. bought our groceries and stuff, went to a FHE with a bunch of recent converts which was quite amazing because they brought a friend so we ended up having a lesson with members which is KEY!! unfortunately we´ve been super busy the rest of the week so we haven´t gotten into contact with her again yet but were calling her tomorrow so that will be really good.

tuesday we had lunch with a member and she brought a friend to eat with her so again we had a killer lesson with a member! mom and dad know how important that is because it is one of the ¨key indicators¨ of what we report every night but yeah, it was way awesome, we´ve got a return appointment to teach her again this upcoming thursday and so were quite pleased with that as well, we then went to another lesson with a less active member and her non member husband, can you say ¨lesson with member¨ again! woot woot! that is music to a missionaries ears. anyways after that we went to this guy who weve taught a few times before but we were unsure if we were going to continue teaching him anymore. this is only because he is a little bit crazy. what it is is that he has just had A LOT of experience with other religions, hinduism, budhism, catholisism and the whole lot, he normally wears a white comodo when we teach him and he´s just really different is what i´m trying to get at. every time we go we don´t know what to expect, anyways this last time we were talking about forgiveness and how everyone needs it and he understood the concept of asking forgiveness really well. gosh i don´t know how to explain this without it being really weird so i´m just gonna throw it out there cuz it happened. he had been preparing for like 2 weeks to serve us in a way that he thought was the most appropriate... what ended up happening was that he washed our feet with his own bare hands and was praying to God for forgiveness during the whole thing. i can´t explain the feelings that i had through an email. on the one hand i thought, what the heck is going on here, lets bounce.. and on the other hand the way he was asking God to be forgiven of his sins through service to the Lord´s servants touched me to the core of my being. i realized how humble this man really was, and at the same time how unhumble i am and how much more i need to be willing to serve others. this guy took things a little too literally in my opinion, but in the same sentance i have to say how humbling and eye opening it was to me. it was a really wierd experience and i can promise that it will never happen again because its got to be against some mission rule or something but it was a really heart wrenching experience. the cool part of the story is that we´re going back tomorrow to teach that only through CHRIST can we be truly forgiven but yeah, i dunno, take the story for what you will but it was pretty amazing from my point of view.

well yeah, wednesday through sunday were really good too. we had some investigators at church so that is always nice and actually a real sign of progress but unfortunately i do not have the time to go through all those days right now...

um... yeah, i feel like i haven´t really said anything that will help you guys or any cool spiritual insights cuz this week was really busy and we only studied like 2 times cuz we had a lot of stuff to do but i hope that this little partof my week can help someone gain a bigger perspective on life, somehow. i dunno, i´m really sorry to everyone who reads these emails, i suck at writting general emails to a group of people, hence, my letters are always super boring but yeah, i hope taht everyone is doing really good, i´m lookin forward to talkin to peoples this next sunday, i don´t know who i´m aloud to call yet but hopefully all of you cuz i feel like i could actually explain some of the mission a little better that way over the phone. hey, heres an idea. how about everyone emails me one question of what they´d like to hear about on a daily basis and then i can write emails that are interesting to everyone! then i´m not just writing to write! i think thats a grand idea. also i´m gonna start to look for cool spiritual insights to share every week ok? alrighty, sorry for the weak sauce letter and i promise that with our new format next week we will be able to take over the world (insert evil cackle here) hahahahahahahahaha! alright take care, i love you all!

elder livingstone

April 20, 2009

2009-04-20T14:50:00.001-07:00

Fam Damily!

Whats new in the hood? Things are looking pretty good here in El Golf. Turns our i will be livin here another change but on the brightside i´ve got a new comp! An ex zoneleader at that! Woohoo! Were gonna turn this place inside out! No but the hope is that were gonna be able to work a lot harder than we had last change becuase we had a lot of sad weeks with really horrible numbers. Not that numbers are everything, they´re not, but there is something to be said about 10-15 lessions a week versus 6... i dunno. From what i hear my last area is suffering pretty bad too though so i´ve come to the conclusion that while i wish i could blame it on this sector, i can´t. I need to step up the line with all the charismo and smile that i have and just work and hope for the best. All i can do is offer what i have and let the Lord do the rest.

President shared with us today in our changes conference a cool way to look at the miracle of the fishes and the loaves of bread. Maybe this is how everybody looks at it and i´m just slow to catch the train but he had us look from the perspective of the boy who brought the bread and fish to the Savior. There was 5000 people there when the small boy broughta small meager amount of fish and bread, he brought all that he had which obviously wasn´t enough to even feed the Savior and his disciples but he offered it anyways to Him and we all know what happened. The Saviour took the meager offer that he made and gave him back baskets full of bread and fish on top of the 5000 whom he fed. It gives me a lot of hope to be able to look at this story and realize that i can´t give a lot. There is not a lot that i can actually give, really the only thing that we have in this life that we can give is our will, and even that isn´t really ours but it is the only true thing that the Lord can never take away from us. And for that it is the only thing that we can truly give him. But i´ve made the decision that i don´t want to live ¨my life¨ i want to go where he wants me to go and do what he wants me to do so that is my goal for this change. To honestly forget my will and be enveloped in the work.

Well i suppose i could tell you all a little bit about my new comp, i just got him, his name is elder Jennings, he´s from utah, he´s short and he´s funny. Thats all i realy know right now! I just met him recently, meaning 2 hours ago. So yeah other than that life is good. I´m really looking forward to being able to talk to some of ya hopefully. I don´t know how that is all going to shake down, i´ll have to talk to my comp about that and let ya´ll know next week k? Cool beans.

A little about the work this past week. We found 2 new investigators! Woohoo! They are both females, one is around 20 and the other is around 40 and she has 3 kids! I´m super excited about her cuz she has a cousin that she hasn´t talked to in a while but is a member so were gonna help her get in contact with him, his son just got back from a mission so that is way aweseom! The only problem is that they live in florida so i don´t think that is gonna help much but she is just super ready to accept the Gospel so im excited for her! Melina, the girl who is about 20, contacted us, she´s pretty cool too the only prob is that she wants us to come teach her with her dad who is an ex professor at notre dame so that could be a bit of a problem.. not too much for the Spirit to handle though so i am not worried! That wraps up the work for the past week. We did a bunch of service and singing and stuff so that was cool but those are the only two people we found melina and loreta.

Not much else is goin down here. I do pray for each of you individually to have missionary experiences and i hope you´re having them! its super easy! Just bear your testimony of Jesus Christ and tell them they can have a better relationship with God through sincere prayer. They can also come to know that God loves them and has shown his love by calling a prophet in OUR times to guide us and help us in this difficult world. They can know all of this through prayer and tell them to do it!

Well i´m about outta time but i jsut wanted to say i love you all and hope that you are doing well! Your names are on the prayerlist of the temple here in Santiago!!!

Love

Elder Livingstone

and sorry if its hard to understand my emails. i don´t really think clearly so when i sit down and just typing out what happened this past week and some ideas that randomly pop into my head it can´t be really understandable either! sorry!!!!

a few pictures

2009-04-14T16:08:00.000-07:00

(this is Elder Ben Christensen, Drew's quasi-brother who was serving in the North mission)

April 13, 2009

2009-04-14T16:00:00.001-07:00

i don´t have a bunch of time this week like normal. heres what i sent to mom and dad! THANK YOU EVERYONE FOR YOUR LETTERS!!! i printed off 13 pages of reading matterial. let me tell you that was the best bathroom reading matterial ever. WAY better than any coldwater creek/ readers digest that this world has ever seen! please, please i beg you with all my heart to keep up that good work! i loved to hear all the missionary experiences that everybody had this week, kirk way to talk about the meaning of life with that guy, that is one of our things that we try to do in the mission, is ask people the questions of the soul and then testify testify testify like you said. that is all we can do, get people thinking and then testify with the spirit and then its up to them to deny the spirit or not. i wrote a short story below about that very thing, kinda sad, come to think about it i dón´t think i wrote anything really exciting from this week. it really was a good week! just a bummer letter i guess... sorry for that. something i´m super excited about is that we´re going to the temple this week!!! WOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOO i´ve been praying for that for the past couple of weeks cuz i miss it a ton and lo and behold! an answer to my prayers! Prayer is the key!!! alright gotta jet, love you all!

elder little brother livingstone

I really have begun to love the mission, not that i didn´t before but i am going to miss this place a lot when i have to leave. I´m sure that i won´t leave without a fight!!! This week has been another tough one. We really struggle to find people to teach in this sector. Part of the problem is that the people don´t really care to listen to us, the other part is that we aren´t doing enough to help them reckognize that they need this message in their life. I´ve written this phrase on the front of my planner so that i always see it ¨Love each and every one of them (chileans). Don´t let anyone walk away without feeling the love of Christ because that is the true power of conversion¨. Its a good goal for me to have but sometimes i get a little down on myself. Its tough to be Christ like when people laugh at your spanish or just sit there and yell obsenities at you for no good reason. This past week we were flipped off and i remember the talk that elder holland gave to the mission presidents( we got a copy from pres. Moran) he said ¨remember when you are rejeceted cast out, spit upon, made a hiss and a by word that you are standing shoulder to shoulder with the greatest life this earth has ever seen.¨ that quote cuts to my core every single time i read it. Wow. I loved his talk in conference, he´s such a smart man. So i felt a little bit of what he was talking about when those events happened this week. For one of the first times i really felt hated when these teenagers were throwing rocks at us. It wasn´t scary at all, i just realized how ignorant that Satan has made the world.

Last night we had another one of those moments where you realize how numb satan makes people. We were knocking and I made the question of the soul ¨have you ever wondered what Christ expects of you in this life?¨the guy came out and was really cool, we were talking about his time of easter and how we need to focus on Christ more and then his mom came out and was super lame. She was just shaking her finger saying were´roman catholics and not going to change a thing. It was really unfortunate to be driven off by an old lady who didn´t even listen to a word we have to say. WE PREACH OF CHRIST LADY!!! Do you read the bible!!! ¨By their fruits you shall know them¨ i´m not gonna say we did it perfectly but i know if that lady lived by what the bible teaches, love and charity and not turning away a single soul she would have realized and for that matter the whole world would realize that our message is true and that God has so much more for them than what they can provide for themselves in this world. Wow that was a weird tangent we just went on...

Cool story, its a little belated cuz it happened two weeks ago but two weeks ago i was eating these cookies that i had kept in my bag for a while. I bought the cookies like a month ago but didn´t open them until 3 weeks ago so i thought for sure they were gonna be good still. I ate one of the cookies without even looking at it and then as i was pulling the second one out of the bag guess what i saw!!! If you guessed worms you´re RIGHT!!! Hahaha yeah so i´m pretty sure i´m feeding a family of worms in my stomach right now and i´m almost positive that that is the case seeing as how my trips to the restroom have become more frequent with less time inbetween each one! So yeah, i don´t know what i´m gonna do. The doc has been outta town for a while but he got back this past weekend cuz he was having surgery himself. He´s a funny guy, there are tons of stories that go throughout the mission of his infamously dirty mouth, my comp claims to have heard him drop the S word but i don´t know if i believe it. Anyhow i´m prob gonna go see him sometime this week to get ¨bombed¨ as other missionaries have called the series of pills that kill off worms in your stomach... thats my fun story for this week!

Well time is running short, i´d better get outta here so that i can keep in line with the rules! I love you bunches and remember that always!!

Elder livingstone

March 30, 2008

2009-04-14T15:00:00.000-07:00

HOLY COW!!!

Has it really been another week? This is crazy how fast the time flies. On one hand its awesome, on the other hand I realize I only have 19+ months left… yowsers! Sounds like a lot of time but when I started out with 24(that’s how long 2 years is right? Just kidding I know!!) anyways I see that I don´t have a whole lifetime to spend here and that makes me sad. Its crazy how the mission is, my emotions are through the roof awesome on top of the world one minute and then within like 5 minutes I experience the lowest of lows. Its like alma the younger felt when he was in his comma.. I love it cuz then I go right back up on the high end within minutes or hours but its just weird how it happens… like the story last week of how the baptism wasn’t going to happen but then it did. We had the same circus this week. Alejandra told us that she wasn´t going to be able to come to her confirmation this week in sacrament meeting. Yeah, that was the low part, she wasn´t going to be able to make it cuz her and her husband are on the outs at this moment. Meaning that he is living with his parents.. kinda sad but she knows that the church can help her find a better person that isn´t such a slob. Anyhow he wanted her to come to the park on Sunday so he could see their child and she had told him yes but luckily we were able to go over on Saturday to convince her not to do it but she had already made the decision to not do it. She told us that she wanted to have the Holy Ghost with her so she didn´t want to go to the park on Sunday! That was the high part!! I love it when people make good decisions on their own, obviously it is influenced by the spirit but I love it when they start to WANT to make the right decisions on their own. Not because we tell them that’s what God wants but when they can feel, in their own lives that that is what God wants. That’s when you know that they are really making the changes necessary in their lives! WOOOHOOO!!!

Things are going well here outside of that. It was a really slow week. We had the weekend/day of the day of Joven Combatiante. I think that means the day of youth combat or something.. anyways it was kinda lame because we had to go in early the whole week cuz there was riots and stuff!! EXCITING!! We heard people screaming in the streets and everything! Unfortunately we were not able to see any real violence or anything but I guess i´ll just have to wait until next year to see that stuff if i´m back in the ghetto at that time!!! Here´s to hoping! Haha yeah I don´t know why they have that day. Its kinda stupid, it’s a national holiday were they police don´t really stop any violence and they just let young people riot.. i´m still really confused, if anyone could Wikipedia it and get back to me i´d appreciate it cuz they tried to explain it to me many times this week(members) but I never really understood.. it could’ve been that I don´t understand Spanish still or it cuold´ve been… hm… yep i´m pretty sure its cuz I still don´t understand spansih!!haha just kidding, but seriously, everybody that’s not from chile say that the Chileans speak like garbage so thats why i´m still struggling, I guess the problem is that they speak really fast and they drop a lot of S´s at the end of words and some N´s so all the words just kinda mix together. Its hard to explain and even harder to understand so basically please just pray for me! Haha! Well I gotta jet but I hope that everyone is doing fine, I love to get letters from everyone! This week I got letters from Tito&gang, K+S+S, Mom and dad, Shan and Grandma.. if your name isn’t on that list feel bad. But don’t worry, there is hope, its called repentance and you can feel better by writing me!!!! Haha just kidding hugs kisses and everybody stop saying how excited they are for July!! Making me stinkin TRUNKY!!!

LOVES LOVES!!!

elder livingstone

March 23, 2009

2009-04-14T14:04:00.000-07:00

Hola hola buenes dias!

Hey ya´ll how is life treatin ya? Life is good down here in the south of America. I´ve got a question for tyler, Heidi, jayson, brent, Kevin, nancy and all others who served at some point of there mission in a metropolitan part of their mission.. HOW DID YOU DO IT? Haha no i´m just playin, I really love it here in el golf. Its still a little tough cuz the people are kinda hard hearted and we can´t really make an effect contact through a speaker phone but were workin hard and doin all that we can to keep up the good work so that’s all that matters right? Lift where you stand is the saying.. so yeah, we´re lifting where we stand and we´re also super excited for the next time that we get to hear from that amazing German. Can you believe that conference is already here again! YES!!!! I´m kinda bummed I wont get to listen to it from the leather couches and comfort of the cabin but I guess all good things are worth waiting for right? Onto the real business.

It was really good to hear from everyone who wrote this past week. Mom and dad, Kevin amy, Heidi jayson, tyler nancy, and the rest thank you for your letters of support and update. Seriously I love to hear about the family and their ongoings, I wish I could be there to share the good times but I can´t at this moment so reading about them is the best that I can do.. in other words thank you for the letters and the rest of you, your slackers. But I still love you… hahaha I love the missionary mantle!

A little bit about my week. We had a pretty good week. Elder evans and I are really starting to get along. It took some days of just getting to work which was kinda tough. Especially since his girl friend dear johned him this week. What a jerk!! Haha and the worst part is that its to one of his good friends! But we both knew that the best way to get over a sick heart was some hard work so that is what we did! The sad part is that there is not a lot of new investigators to show for our hard work but on the plus side we did have a baptism! The great part is that it almost fell through. K that’s not the great part. The great part is that we can see that the hard work and prayer paid off this week. Alejandra was having some struggles with her husband, but we were there to comfort her and try to help her to overcome these things through the power of the spirit. We gave her a proclamation on the family which really helped and I think the fact that we sincerely were praying for her every minute of every day made the difference too. We truly saw the Lords hand in this work when we got a call Sunday morning that she wasn´t going to come to church or to her baptism. We prayed prayed prayed our hearts out that the conflicts with her husband would resolve themselves and lo and behold. We got a call an hour later (in Sunday school) that she was going to be able to make it! Hooray for the SPIRIT!!! So yeah, alls well that ends well. Unfortunately she thinks that she is going to be divorcing her husband in the next five months but on the plus side its because he is a really bad example for their child and so its in their best interest. .. and so that’s my super sweet story of the week. I´ve come the realization that I am horrible at telling stories and even worse at describing them through emails so yeah.. i´m sorry to all who read this and think that i´m just a big idiot who has no English skills but newsflash, you´re right!!

March 16, 2009

2009-04-14T13:05:00.000-07:00

Hola amigos y amigas y familia!

Como estamos? I´m doing really well here after an initial week of tough work. It turned out to be a pretty good week after all but i´m not gonna lie. i was hating life after the first 12 hours in this sector. I have come to realize that the Lord is testing me in this sector. I´ve never been so homesick in my life.i´m not sure what the whole cause of it has been. Elder Evans and I had a rough couple of days where it seemed like we couldn´t agree on anything but in the end I just decided that I was going to follow his direction and do what it was that he wanted me to do. I gotta admit I don´t feel like i´ve learned a lot of Spanish or anything in this week but at least we are in unity right!?! Haha no its not really all that bad. To be honest its just this sector. Its freaken HUGE!! And I dunno, just might be huge for this mission but the second day I was here we decided we were gonna knock this street in the south end of our sector (we live in the middle) and it took us a freaken hour to walk there! It took us 20 minutes to walk from one end to the other in Sotero so that was a huge shock but I have gotten over it and have come to the realization that the work is going to be a lot slower in this area for a number of reasons.. 1 the people are hard hearted. 2 it’s a huge sector. When we set up an appt and it falls through the next day it’s a waste of the whole day cuz it takes us an hour to walk there and find out that it was a false address or something. 3 we freaken stop at every crosswalk and wait for the green walking man. Yeah, its just funny now but it was way annoying the first like 10 times when he told me he was uncomfortable crossing the crosswalk. Now I just laugh! Haha so yeah, on the plus side of life! We do have an investigator with a bap date for this week! Her name is Alejandra and she is super rad! She goes to church faithfully and yesterday she brought a friend with her too which was super cool! Anyways her struggles are the word of wisdom so please, PRAY! Yeah we´ve got faitht hat she can overcome these problems so hopefully our faith will be manifest next Sunday! Anyways i´m outta time I gotta bounce but I love you all and thank you for your support in everything! Elder evans and I are fine now so don’t stress that! We just couldn´t find out anything in common until like 2 days ago so now were cool and can PREACH TO THE PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!

Love ya alls,

Elder livingstone

March 9, 2009

2009-04-14T12:59:00.000-07:00

Whats up my family?

Things are good here in Chile Santiago este! I just got changed which is kinda lame cuz Elder Renshaw and I had just set out this killer plan to get the ward back on its feet but I guess he will just have to carry it out without me. I know he can do it and I also know that this is the Lords will that I am here right now. My new area is called las Condis. Yeah, I went from the southern end of the mission all the way up north. It took all of 45 minutes on a subway, which I think i´ve failed to mention up to this point, their metro system. Yeah it kills everything we have back in the USA. That thing is super clean, in more ways than one. It’s a super smooth ride, like butter, also its actually really clean. Like seriously where the heck am I right now? I thought I was going to south America? This place is stinkin baller. For reals I went from the ¨poor¨ part of Chile (not poor at all) just a little gangster, and now i´m in the flippin rich part of the country. My new comp, Elder Evans from Sac-town(sacramento, yeah, i´ve had two nor-cal comps now, kinda weird… or is it???) yeah so my new comp told me that this place was really quico. Meaning rich. Meaning the Hollywood of Chile. Yeah I didn´t believe him but he wasn´t lying. Its kinda a bummer because I was really looking forward to the baptisms and stuff that we had lined up(ana, because she fell through this past week) but now I get to deal with stinking filthy rich people. Can´t lie i´m kinda in a funk when I found out this information. But on the plus side, they have people who actually attend in their ward. Which means they have on average 100 peeps there. Not much compared to the strong wards back in the states but it kills Sotero Del Río. We had 40 people at church yesterday.. regardless i´m rattling on right now just saying worthless information.. lets start a new paragraph, shall we?

Ana- we worked our tails off and threw down a fecha(baptism date) on her this last Sunday, she accepted, told us she had some problems like tea and stuff, nothing too serious but the point is we got her to commit. Little did we know that Satan works really hard against us. K we knew that but we just were hoping he was takin a nap or something. He wasn´t. later on Sunday night she met with all her neighbors and family and they proceeded to shoot down the faith that we had built in her to the point that she is thinking that she is not ready again. What a joke. She´s been taking lessons since June. She always says that she ¨falts¨something. Yeah they only thing she falts is a tunica and a pila baptismal!!!! Bah.. anyways we set up a bunch of stuff for her this past week cuz she had a bunch more time cuz her kids started school etc. . but she bailed on going to the temple twice.. dutch! Anyways we got her to the FHE with the family in our ward that is super rad and we had a good spiritual lesson on faith, including cups, dirt, beans and water. Does anyone know what chapter we read? Bet you can guess!! It was really good and we invited her to attend church (for the 5^th time mind you) but she had to support her husband who ran a race or something lame like that yesterday. So end of story, she didn´t go, but that’s not the end of the story I guess cuz she´s gonna get baptized next week or the week after but that’s my experience with her. She´s cool and i´m glad to say that I was able to play a part in her being taught and stuff, 2 points God´s team, 0 for satan!

Yeah, so that’s that, we taught Felipe again on Thursday, we also had lunch with his whole family and taught them on Saturday which was really cool too but unfortunately the whole family was not able to attend this Sunday when he was confirmed a member of the church. Which was awesome by the way! I love it when people get converted, baptized and confirmed! Another point for our team!!! So yeah, his dad who has always been apposed to missionaries and churchs and such went to church on Sunday to see him get confirmed which was a big step. He even told us it was, he said i´m catholic and I´ve never let my wife´s JW´s(Jehovahs witness) friends even in the house to talk with her. Let alone let them teach him, which is exactly what we did! Quality! I love this work! I´m so glad i´m in it. Yeah, so anyways he´s a ¨devout catholic¨ in other words, he likes to claim the religion but never go. I love the catholics! Their base of members are great… seriously, if you want to be a lazy religious person in life, just claim to be catholic! They require nothing!!! And on the plus side you get to worship Cathorine or wherever their name comes from. All I knows is that they´re good people in general but their church is wrong. Wow, weird tangent I just got on.. I don´t know where i´m going with that..

Melanie, she finally got a job which means she had to make her first difficult choice in a long time and she chose… poorly.. she didn´t go to church this last week but she still was pretty dang spiritual when we met with her this week. So i´m not too worried about it. She told us she is going to make a compromise with her work so she can go to church at least 2 a month or something.. i´m just hoping she keeps her promise.

Yeah, I don´t really know what else to say so I will describe how it is here in my new area, called ¨le Golf¨ which translates to ¨the Golf¨ in English… turns out that in this sector we have chile´s largest golf course!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! BLAH!!!!!!!! I CAN¨T PLAY AND AM THEREFORE GRIEVED MUCHISMO!!!!!!!!!!! Yeah, so basically when I found this out from my comp I was really ticked. On the plus side we can play tennis… I don´t know if that’s good or not. I know i´m no good at tennis so yeah, I got that workin for me. Anyways i´m gonna find a way to play, it will probably be when all ya´ll come to pick me up in 21 months but hey, I have to wait so you do too! Haha so basically what this all means is that its really rich here and that’s gonna be tough but my comp did tell me that they do have an investigator who is progressing very well so that’s tight, i´m stoked on that. Woot woot! Possums… yeah, a little more about the area, its got a ton of freaken sky-scrapers and stuff! BUENO! My comp says that most of the contacts that we make here don´t live in our area. Crap. And that most of the time we get invited into houses by the nannys, whom we cannot teach. Crap. So yeah, he says its really tough but that’s what people said about Sotero as well so i´m just not gonna pay any attention to that and work hard!

My comp. elder evans from sactown, he´s seems like a baller. Legit. He played basketball all in high school and so that is quality. Thankfully he doesn´t like the Kings. That could´ve been bad but yeah, he´s a tall white American(united statsian) like myself so we´ll do work here in Hollywood! Haha yeah, so he´s nineteen, has 8 months in the mission so were gonna ball like that! Two greenys speakin some excellent broken Spanish! PARTY ON WAYNE, PARTY ON GARTH! I don´t know much about him. I just met him and I get the feeling that he doesn´t speak much, like in general. He´s kinda reserved I mean so we´ll see how this goes cuz i´m not exactly the reserved type.. regardless this is gonna be good cuz I know that it is where the Lord wants both he and I so i´m excited! San Demos High School Football Rocks!

i´m outta time, i love you all and hope that life is treating you well!

love your little brother in chile,

elder livingstone

March 2, 2009

2009-04-14T12:57:00.000-07:00

Family!

Hola how are we all doing? Things are great here in the South end of the world. Still hot, still dirty, and where i want to be and wouldn´t rather be anywhere else! Haha life is good, i´m really beginning to love life down here. There honestly is no where on the face of the earth i´d rather be right now than right here, right now, doing this work! I´m so glad to hear that life is good for everyone else back in the good ole united states and i´m glad that mom and dad are doing well in the craziest of continents, africa!

Kirk and family, i´m not gonna lie i cried when i heard about max. That definitly put a huge damper on the beginning of my week but i´m pretty sure that if the celestial kingdom is what we think it will be then our best buddies will be there too. And by the way felicitaciones on the baptism that you had this week! Way to go Josh buddy! Your on your way to eternal life! CONGRATTTTTS!

Yeah, heid´s thanks for sharing that story with everyone else. GROSS yet very entertaining... haha so i guess i won´t know til next week but did anyone in the family get an email from a ¨nelda aravena`? yeah, she is the bomb hma that is in our ward and if we want to baptize someone we just set up a family home evening with her and the investigator and it´s pretty much guaranteed! Ha no, its not that easy but yeah, her family is ballin and i´m glad that we´ve got good members like her.

Well things have been kinda crazy the past week. We´ve been workin real hard all week to get our investigators to progress.

Felipe – SE BAUTIZÒ AYER!!! Yes, this guy is amazing, he´s only 17 but he already wants to be a misionary! We´ve been working with him for less than 20 days now but he´s already stoked on the church. He loves the ward, the people, the feeling that he feels when he´s there, the only problem we´ve got is that he needs to have a deeper testimony of Christ i think. I dunno. He´s pretty solid but when he bore his testimony after his baptizm thats all he really talked about was the ward and stuff. On the plus side his whole famly showed up to the baptizm. We´ve been teaching his sister for a week now, her name is fernanda and before we even started teaching her she asked if she could get married in the temple with her boyfriend! Can you say elect! Yeah it was a pretty cool experience. Anyways his whole family came to the baptizm which is awesome cuz they are pretty catholic but we were able to talk to them at the baptizm and followed up with teaching them yesterday afternoon a killer first lesson! Yeah i´m super stoked right now which means i´m probably in for a humbling experience real soon but i´m just gonna keep a smile on and keep workin hard!

Ana- We were still hitting a brick wall with ana, the lady who has all the doubts but i think we finally overcame them last night! Booya! I invited her to get baptized and she said yes! Little did we know that she drinks tea like every day. Yeah that kinda sucks but we commited her to not drink it at all today until we can get back to her tonight and lay the smack down, aka word of wisdom.. yeah, so lifes good, her and her 3 kids should be gettin baptized this week. PLEASE PRAY! Yeah, so we bought her some stuff that she can drink to try and overcome her addiction to tea. So that was a huge highlight of yesterday, missionaries have been teaching her since june of last year so this is a HUGE thing! We are seriously way stoked on this!

Well family i really want to share more but i´m straight up outta time, this kinda stinks that i never have any time to write ya´ll. They give us an hour to write, one letter to the presidente every week which takes a bit of time, then i print out all the letters from ya´ll and read them and then i have just a bit of time left to send an email out so yeah, here it is! I love you all. Thank you all for your support and love, i hope that life is treating all of you well and that things are going well.

Much love, well wishes and prayers sent in your direction,

Elder livingstone

February 23, 2009

2009-02-23T13:16:00.000-08:00

Family family family!

Hola hope that all things are going well for all of you. I got some updates from some of you. I´ve come to the conclusion that I love you guys a lot, miss you a ton and wish I could be with you but if it hadn´t been for all of you and your helping prepare me for this it wouldn´t be possible so I have to serve with all my heart might mind and strength to honor all the sacrifices that you have made for me!

That being said i´ll give you the highlights and what not from the week. After I email ya´ll this last week we went to talk to Melanie again to make sure she was doing alright. She had given us all of her cigarettes on Sunday night and when we got there she said i´ve got soething else I need to talk to you about. It was a little scary cuz we thought that she was bummed out for some reason but it just turned out that she had been saving the best surprise for last! Ha, so yeah, she handed us the last of her weed that she was saving to have a pre-baptizm bash. Luckily she felt the spirit that she didn´t want to do It and then told us and we quickly thanked her, flushed it down the toilet and explained to her again the 5 things of the word of wisdom, which marijuana falls under… haha it was pretty hilarious. Anyways long story short, ana and her children are not ready to be baptized yet cuz she still lacks faith. It sucks really badly cuz we try to instill that faith in her but she just doesn't take it. Its ridiculous. Anyways were still working with her and would appreciate your prayers of faith!

Felipe, what a kid! We had a breakup yesterday after church cuz he´s such a nice kid that he didn´t want to enjoy the spirit of the church without his parents and family enjoying it too. It's a really hard situation to explain in 10 minutes so i´ll do my best. His dad is really catholic, that sucks. anyways his loyalty is first and formost to his family. So he asked his dad if he could be baptized and his dad said yes but he knew that if he were to do it it would make his dad unhappy so he didn´t want to do it. We sat there and he cried for a really long time and then we just explained how he can fix the problems that he has with his family by being an example to them. He didn´t understand at first. He kept saying he wanted to solve the problems in his family first but we kept explaining that he couldn´t do that without the love of Christ. It took a while to help him understand this but he finally did. He decided to ask his parents if they would take the lessons. He said that if they would he would continue to take them but if they said no, he would stop as well.. yeah that was really scary so last night, right after the lesson we decided to start a fast! It was really scary, I can´t lie, he has been prepared from before this life and to lose him over something like that would suck. Anyways not two hours later he called us and told us that his parents accepted! Were going to teach them this upcoming Saturday or Sunday so please pray for us! That was truly the lowest ive felt in a long time and then the highest i´ve felt in an even longer time when he called.

Other than that nothing all that big! Just tracting and keeping on keeping on! Life is good. Oh, yeah we had a baptism this last week! THAT WAS AMAZING!!! Melanie is crazy legit! Honestly she was super ghetto when we found her but now she has this crazy amazing testimony of repentance and how she was alone before but now knows that she has a family in Christ and in our Heavenly father! It was so awesome to hear her testimony after I baptized her cuz she was just on fire! She knows about the hard times and now she knows about the good times too. She practically commited all of our investigators at the baptism saying "if you haven't made the decision to be baptized, DO IT!" it was so rippin sweet! We love Melanie!, we´ve struggled a lot with her but the best things in life don´t come easy! How can we expect to be able to apply the atonement in our lives if we haven´t ever seen struggles or looked into the garden of Gethsemane. I´m not saying that any of us will ever feel an inkling, not even a second of pain like the Saviour did when he suffered for us but i´ve learned that from suffering comes strength. As the Lord promised, he makes our weaknesses strengths if we apply the atonement and have faith in him.

Well fam i´m straight up outta time but I love you like crazy and hope that things are well with you! I pray for you often and hope that all is well with you all. Seth your advise is always little nuggets that keep my chin up throughout the week! I love you all! Keep your respective chins up and know that there is someone down here in the dirty dirty that thinks of each of you often and cant wait tosee you all soon. P.s. I show of our fam pic all the time. The Chileans eat that stuff up. For some reason us Americans are like some novelty to them! Haha its crazy. There hilarious with all there odd quirks.

Alrighty peace, love and a hug from me to you!

Elder livingstone!

pictures from the MTC

2009-02-01T12:32:00.001-08:00

Before Elder Livingstone left for Chile, he had me download his pictures. Here they are! I'll do my best to guess captions for these pictures--

From the first night---

his new tag

and his new companion, elder bell.

the obligatory map pictures. here is his district--

i know his companion was headed to the same mission, but i can't remember about the other missionaries in his district.

elder livingstone's camera takes neat pictures.

his district and one of his teachers.

elder livingstone was zone leader, so he had lots of pictures with lots of different elders. i can't tell you who any of them are.

the mtc makes you do nerdy things.

temple once a week--

i'm guessing some where around christmas. i don't think this was his stash.

this was one of his friends from before the mtc. i can't remember his name, but the two of them worked together in midway and this guy is headed to the philippians.

new years--

bubblies--

too much bubblies--

elder livingstone left on monday, january 23 for chile. some people may or may not have snuck into see him. pictures here and here.

we hope to hear from elder livingstone tomorrow--we hear that is his p-day.

January 9, 2008

2009-01-09T17:53:00.000-08:00

hey everybody! how are ya'lls doin? things are well here in the MTC and i am super stoked to have a new Neice in the family! Phoebe is it? haha i would love it if that was her name! haha good stuff! Congratulations Amy and Scott and family! you did it! you broke the chain of 3's in our family! now its Kirk and Tricia's turn cuz i know that chap is baby hungry!

first of all, can anyone get me an email address for the following: Kendra, Kevin & Amy's family, and how about for Kirk's family.. i dunno, will you just share this with them? that would be very appreciated!

well i gotta thank all of you who have emailed, deareldered or any of the like this past week! i love to hear from all of you and it makes my life so blessed! i can't even believe how much stuff is going on out there. its like it's the real world or something... ha. thank you Kendra and Seth for the TWO packages! snap we took that queso to town and now we're workin on the Oreos.. p.s. remember that bet we made that you would look better than me when my mission is finished? are you trying to fatten me up or something cuz you are sending my fav foods and i can't stop eating them.. its disgusting and delicious all at once..

i still havent gotten my flight plans yet. i think they are delaying me because we have a cooler in my room full of mountain dew and other tantalizing liquids.. they must know i'm not worthy to go out into the field yet ;) SIKE!!! turns out that they dont take missionaries on the major holiday weeks. Thanksgiving being one of those so lucky me, the planets aligned perfectly (meaning my mission) that the date they needed to take me in to fit with transfers was that exact week. meaning that they took me in a week early, so yours truly gets to be here for 10 stinkin weeks... yeah i thought i was outta here next week, no i got 2+ weeks left here. its all good tho, i'm learning a ton of spanish so i should be complaining! so i 'm set to bounce outta here on the 26th of january. this is a date that has been set apart for me to call YOU!!! woohoo! so if you'd like to hear from your little missionary brudder, send me your phone number i'll give you a shout! i guess since we didn't get to call on x-mas they let us call from the airport! so yeah, that will be exciting!

now to the good spiritual part of my letter! this last week i have gained a testimony of FASTING. suffice it to say that the education system in Utah lacks, therefore i've never been stretched in schooling. that being said i havent had to try really hard to learn anything in my life. can you tell by my poor english grammer? anyways the MTC and spanish have been the hardest things that i've done in my life.. i've struggled for the first month and a half and i've been trying to do well but nothing has really helped. this past fast sunday i decided that it was time to fast for le don de linguas(gift of tongues).. the part that was missing tho was that i didn't really understand fasting. to me it was one of those whack things like the passover.. honestly think about it, kill a lamb and put its blood on your door= your firstborn doesnt die. starve yourself= you get the things that you are asking of God.. it was a cool thing to think about but what i lacked was the FAITH. this week i recieved the faith to actually have my prayers and fasting necessary. i don't know what it was but it finally made sense to me this past week that fasting wasnt just starving yourself.. it is an outward expression of your inward commitment... that one key principle has made everything clear since then.. its amazing. its prob dumb for me to hit on that though because i'm emailing this to a bunch of spiritual giants who probably figured this out years ago but the light finally dawned on me and i wanted to impart with you some of my substance..

well i love you all. hope that things are going well and that you all enjoy thie pics of the new baby like i do.

much love and respect for each and every one of you! i say that as honestly and as i can because you all are heros in my life! i love each and every one of you and your family.. NEVER FORGET THAT! you mean the world to me!

Elder Livingstone

January 2, 2008

2009-01-03T21:40:00.000-08:00

well fam and everybody things are going well in the MTC. thank you so much for all the gifts and etcs.. sorry i havent posted any pics lately. i'm sending my sd card to heidi this week so hopefully if she has time the pics will be posted soon. things are going well in the old MTC. i took a couple of calls in the RC this past week and sent the missionaries to each house. it was amazing, i know that it wasnt me though. i know that it was all the Lord and his spirit but nonetheless it was really cool

nothing much else is happening. the spanish is coming along quite well. its still hard for me to speak but i'm kinda waiting and excited for my spanish baptism by fire cuz i'm sure thats what the first couple of months in chile will be for me. i'm hoping for a native companion so i am forced to speak only spanish..

well i got no time. i love youall and hpe you are doing well!

elder liv ingt

December 26, 2008

2008-12-26T15:34:00.001-08:00

Thank you so much family for all the gifts! i really loved to recieve each and everyone of them from the phase ten to the play dough to the pictures from the jorgies and on and on and on! you are all amazing! all the presents were a good reminder of each of your families individually! I was able to have an amazing christmas here in the MTC. the spirit is here regardless but the whole week was just amazing. it started off on sunday when i was called to be the zone leader, cool but not all that important but it really started to get amazing on Tuesday when Ben's dad, Elder Christensen came to speak to us on the prophet Joseph Smiths life seeing as how it was his birthday, i will try to expound on that in latter letters cuz we have no time here in the MTC but we'll see what i can do.. next on wednesday (the night before christmas) elder Bednar came to speak to us, they kept it a complete secret until he walked into the room and everybody shot out of their seats, i can testify that i know he is an apostle of the Lord, An electric feeling vibed through my body and i know that it was the spirit testifying to me that he is an apostle, he has seen the Living God and that he knows it to be true which allows me to know that as well. He talked on the symbols of Christmas, trees, lights, and wiseman, it was an amazing talk that again, ill have to send out later. The christmas holiday was topped off on xmas morning when Elder Holland came to speak to us. Again i know without a shadow of a doubt that he is an apostle and that he speaks the Words of God. It is so good to be here during the holiday season, i know i only have to have one more which is kinda crazy to think about but i am really glad i got to have one in here because the church really took care of us!

Happy Holidays to all! i'm sorry my letters are so weak, when i get more time on the outside world i promise i will write everyone personal notes but just know now that i think about you all alot and love and respect each and everyone of you. keep those smiles on your faces and i know that the Lord will bless all of us if we hold true to the faith and put all of our trust in Him!!!

December 12, 2008

2008-12-12T21:43:00.001-08:00

hey post this on the blog when you get a free moment please:

Christof you are the man and keep up the good work! i know you are gonna get out here and kill it so just keep your chin up and get ready for this roller coaster cuz that is exactly what it is!

Here is some advice i can give to whomever wants to read if you are planning on a mission:

Enjoy every free moment you have, whether with someone or not because the second you get in here you are w/ someone, ALWAYS!!

also listen to music, lots of it! that is one of the things that i miss the most and it is crazy how that happens.

try to feel the spirit as much as possible! it is crazy how important that is.

also hit up preach my gospel, that book is amazing and it will change your life!

December 5, 2008

2008-12-08T20:51:00.000-08:00

i hope everyone has a great x-mas, i know mine will rock cuz we'll prob have a general authority so BOOYA!

Spanish is killin me but i think i'm beginning to understand a bit so that is nice, the spirit is what is carrying me through in that department.

30 minutes is way too short of a time to email so sorry if i told anyone i'd email them personally and they haven't gotten one yet. its tough.

the spirit in a lesson is great, honestly if you can bring that it does most the work so i don't have to do anything! amazing!

Just want all ya'll to know that i know Jesus Lives and that he is our redeemer, personally for all of us he is our redeemer, not just for mankind but he suffers individually side by side us when we are sick, hurt or sad, he goes through the same stuff at the same time and i just want you to keep that in mind... JESUS LOVES YOU!!!

November 27, 2008

2008-11-28T10:29:00.001-08:00

Hey everybody!

Things are great in the MTC, the food is kinda bleh but there's nothing I can do about that. My companion is super sweet. His name is Elder Bell and he seriously is my better half. Haha totally cliche but true.. WEll things are going well here, the spanish is non-existant still but i'm sure it will come along here soon. If i could request anything from anyone it would definitely be pictures. I need pictures!! they are a great source of strenghth or something like that. They're actually just nice to look at so if you could please send pics of me and you, or just you, or of something you thought was cool to:

Elder Livingstone
MTC Mailbox #320
2005 North 900 East
Provo, UT 84604

but if you would just like to email me you can hit me at that same address on dearelder.com, that place is great cuz we get the mail the same day and mail is comparable to gold in this place so send me some.

LOVE YA'll

--Elder Livingstone

November 24, 2008

2008-11-25T15:10:00.000-08:00

Presidente y Hermana Livingstone!

Hey! I wish you could read this in the paper and ink but I guess you'll just have to feel the same effect through an email...

Well things have really started to get moving here in the MTC I am doing very well. The food is extremely heavy and nothing like Mom's delicious home cooking but I guess I should just forget about that for 2 years huh? :)

My companions name is Elder Bell and he is from Tucson, AZ. I love Elder Bell! He is amazing. We just seemed to hit it off from the start and we just mesh so well. I love him because he inspires me to work hard because he is such a good hard worker. Wow that last sentence was quite redundant huh? Oh well!

So tell me how the Elders are doing in your mission. Tell me how your trip was Mom. I'm hoping you made it home without any complications! Tell me how things are generally in the Congo...

Mom I'm so glad we got to go through the temple and Dad I can't wait to go through with you. It will be the experience of a lifetime! Well I'd better run for now but I will get to email you on P-day next week which is Friday. I love you both!

Love your son,
Elder Livingstone

P.S. Send pictures!

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Also, Elder Livingstone said in another letter to us:

The MTC is amazing! I love it here, there are so many wonderful things going on here that it just is amazing/exciting to be here. I'm pretty sure that I'll leave the MTC 15-20 pounds heaveier but hopefully not...

Yea to answer your questions, I was made district leader. Send pictures!

dearelder.com

2008-11-21T10:55:00.000-08:00

Hello Everyone! I just wanted to put a quick plug in for dearelder.com. Elder Livingstone will have access to email his family, but still writes letters to everyone else. Dearelder.com is pretty awesome because they have SAME DAY delivery for letters to the MTC (if it is received by noon mountain time), and it's totally free. It's so simple, there is hardly a reason NOT to use dearelder.com.

All you have to do is go to dearelder.com, select "Provo MTC" from the drop down menu and click on "write a letter." It will ask for your address information, and some information for Elder Livingstone. His complete address is shown here on the top right corner of the blog, but the information you need is his mailbox number (#320), his mission (CHI-SANE) and his estimated departure date (0120).

There is a limit to how long the letter can be (7900 characters). You can type it into the box or copy it from a word document.

Get writing everyone!

November 19, 2008

2008-11-21T10:50:00.001-08:00

Heidi, Jay, Mae, Mom, Dad and whoever else;

Hey I love you guys! Haven't really been homesick yet but I also haven't touched the pillow either so I guess we'll see then huh? Can you do me a favor and just know how much I love you guys! I really want you and everyone to know how much I appreciate the love and support I have been given throughout the years.

I guess the only thing I need is to have dad give me the line of authority for my priesthood. And please send in some soda and snack food like crackers or something. Graham crackers, Cheese-its, candy, Snickers, Reeses, Blowpops from costco.

Alright, I really love ya'll, Keep up the good work, my P-day will be Friday and I will get to email then too so...SHWEET!!!

Love ya,
Elder Livingstone

P.S. SPREAD MY ADDRESS AROUND, ESPECIALLY ON THE BLOG

comments

2008-11-19T22:10:00.001-08:00

and p.s. leave some comments. missionaries love to hear from their friends and family.

and he's off...

2008-11-19T20:56:00.000-08:00

Elder Livingstone officially started his mission today, November 19, 2008. It was a fantastic morning with Elder Livingstone. We had breakfast at Magleby's Fresh before we dropped him off.

Elder Livingstone is the youngest of eight children, so his (our) family is quite large. Here is just a portion of our family. From left to right, top to bottom--Jayson, Tricia, Sara, Shannon, Jake, Amy, Elder Livingstone, Josh, Kirk, Mae, Heidi (me), and Mom (Sister Livingstone).

Yes, that is Elder Livingstone's mom in the picture. And yes, Elder Livingstone's mom is currently a missionary in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She received extra special permission to be here to take Elder Livingstone to the MTC. It was so wonderful to have her here.

Here is Elder Livingstone with his mom and his second Mom, Sister Christensen. Sister Christensen's son Ben lived with Elder Livingstone for his last two years of high school and is one of his best friends. Ben is currently serving in the Chile Santiago North Mission.

The big moment--Elder Livingstone gets his name tag. And, the dot.

Two tags. Two missionaries.

Then we went to a large chapel, heard a few instructions, watched a movie made in 1981 (it's a classic), and said goodbye. Elder Livingstone was so excited, I don't think he cried at all.

He's going to do amazing things.

Here's where to write him--

Elder Andrew Livingstone
MTC Mailbox #320
CHI-SANE 0120
2005 North 900 East
Provo, UT 84604-1793

In the future, the posts here will be written by Elder Livingstone. I hear they have email now in the MTC, so look for a post in a few days.

Until then, send Elder Livingstone a letter. Or why not, a care package (he loves homemade oreos, dr. pepper, banana cream pie, frozen snickers, and of course J Dawgs).

SLC

2008-10-28T10:41:00.000-07:00

Another huge step in the process of going on a mission was that of going through the temple. I decided to try and give my Father and Mother a gift because they couldn't be there that I would go through on my Dad's birthday, October 2nd. It was a fantastic event and I would highly recommend preparing to go through for anyone who is considering it. You will not regret all the work and time spent preparing to go through if you go with the proper spirit and right attitude. Even though I went originally through the Provo Temple, I had the chance to recently go through the Salt Lake Temple and for anyone who hasn't gone through a live session I am telling you to do it! It is amazing! I understood so much more!

The beginning..

2008-10-28T10:23:00.000-07:00

If you don't know by now, I'm going on a mission the Chile, Santiago East Mission. Now that I spoiled it here is a video of me opening my call. I am talking towards the computer because that is where most of my family is located. Cyberspace... kinda hokey but 100% true. Actually I was using skype (which happens to be a great tool) share the experience my parents who are in the Congo, and also 5 out of 7 of my siblings. Anyhow, without further buildup, my teary eyed opening of my call letter...