March 16, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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