October 5, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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