My last letter to my mission president before he leaves!

So we are getting a new mission President by the end of the week and the one we have now asked us to email him the best thing we learned on our mission so here it is. Our area is doing great too. We found 2 new investigators this week and put them both on date for July. Hopefully they can keep their date and get baptized. We are doing really good but the heat is killer! Haha love you all!

I think the best thing that I ever learned on my mission was the day I learned I needed to love the Lord. I was out about 2 months and was having a ton of success and seeing a ton of people. I was super tired and fell asleep all the time. I would fall asleep during studies, in the car, at lunch, etc. I wasn't used to this kind of work. I didn't expect missionary work to be so hard. It drained me physically, spiritually and mentally. It was kicking my butt and Elder Meza just wanted to keep on pushing harder. We were on one of our last lessons we had planned for the night and we arrived at the house. When we got there I was complaining and asked Elder Meza if we could just go home. I already knew what he was going to say so I tried to rephrase the question. I said or just not see so many people. Maybe we could slow down. He just looked over at me and said "Who do you love more, yourself or the Lord?" Then jumped out of the truck to go into the lesson. It hit me so hard and I don't even remember what we talked about in the lesson. All I could focus on was who I really did love more. From that day on I think was when I really became the missionary I was trying so hard to become. I put all of my "needs" behind me and worked for the Lord. I soon found out how selfish I was. I thought of myself all the time. I wanted people to look at me and what I was going through. Very rarely I looked outward and helped out others before myself. I love the Lord and everything He has done for me. It's all I can do to try and repay Him as much as I can. This is one of the biggest things I've learn on my mission and I'm so glad I did! 

Soup-a-hot

It was so hot this week. You could literally put soup in your car and it would cook. It was 122 yesterday from 3 until 6 and its 110 when we go to bed at 10:30... It's too hot for people to live down here. Well anyway this week was super good. We went to the temple this week because President and Sister Sweeney are leaving in 2 weeks! It's so sad. I love them so much! It was super good to be able to go to the temple though. I love going to the house of the Lord. So this week we went to a bunch of less actives houses and taught them but at each of these house I felt he spirit so strong in each of these house. It made me so happy to see them trying to work back to activity and the temple. Something that stuck out to me a lot this week was the gospel truly works for everyone. There isn't one soul on his earth that the gospel doesn't work for. The are people that are excommunicated, lost hold of the iron rod, became bitter, or even just hit rock bottom. The cool thing is some are rich some are poor. Some have everything you could ever dream for, but want something so much more. The gospel brings so much peace and happiness into our lives. The gospel is real and there is no doubt about it. We are all on different gears of spirituality and growing at different paces. Heavenly Father doesn't care where you are at in life. He doesn't care how far down in a rut you are. He just wants to see all of his children coming back to him. Even if it's a slow process, it works. I love to see people turning towards Christ knowing it can change their lives. The gospel works and I have a STRONG testimony of it. You can always lean on the Lord. Love you all. Take care and hold to the iron rod.

Check out the temperature on our dash!  122 degrees

Finally got one of these corn sticks.  I've wanted one my whole life haha

This is only part of the mission, he had to break it up so we could all fit in the temple session. 

Valley Yo!

Hey everyone! This week was super good. We had ZTM (where we train the zone) we had to give like 3 trainings because they switched the schedule on us the night before and we didn't want anyone complaining that we gave them a training the night before. We had like half the mission at this MLC because we are getting a new mission president and they want a lot of leaders. So we had a lot of people we could of given trainings to but it switched the night before so that was super stressful. Anyways then then 2 days later we had transfers and I thought I was going to stay in my area and stay there until my last comp went home. He only had one more transfer. But I got the news Thursday night at 8:30 and had to be packed and ready to leave by morning. It was super sad. President even told me he wanted me up there for 2 more transfers. But here I am... down in the valley... It's supposed to be record breaking heat next week. Like 117-120 Saturday and Sunday, in June! It literally feels like a hot blow dryer. The work down here is crazy though. Everything down here is crazy. Every time you take off from a stop light it feel like nascar. And if you don't speed up fast enough everyone honks at you and some flip you off. It's pretty stressful. There are a ton of people to talk to down here though! You can LITERALLY preach the gospel everywhere. That's the only thing I like down here. Oh I forgot to tell you where I am. I'm just north of Central Phoenix. There are apartment complexes down here that are called the slaughter house. If that's not freaky I don't know what is. It's pretty much like a prison complex. You walk in and there are only 4 places to get out once you're in. Little hall ways that are like 20 yards long and all four sides. It's just a giant square with huge walls around every side. You really have to gain strength from the Lord everyday down here. Lots of faith that you will be taken care of. In the heat mostly, because it's killing me. Wish me luck that I don't melt this week. I think it's super cool that faith is the first principle of the gospel. Faith in Jesus Christ. If you don't have faith then you can't grow in any other aspect of the gospel. You have to base your faith in Jesus Christ off of everything. Oh yeah, my comp is Elder Mangus. He is super awesome. We get a long super well and he wrestled too. He is from Billings Montanta. Wish me luck! 

Elder Lange

114 Degrees

Hey everyone this week was pretty crazy. We started off with a pretty normal week. We did a lot of contacting people we needed to get in touch with (less actives, referrals, etc.) it was super good. We are going to start slowly getting back some members to church that the ward has been trying to contact over a year now. Somethings are just falling into place. We are just meeting people that we haven't been able to contact and finding people that want to have us back over to their house. I'm not saying these people are golden or anything but they are fine with us coming back over and talking to us. We tried getting as much work as we could in during the week because we went down to the valley Friday. We drove down there Thursday and had MLC the next day. It was pretty fun. It was a special MLC so President invited people he thought would benefit from being there not just Zone Leaders and Sister Training Leaders. We had 91 missionaries in the meeting. We had assigned seats and all of the Mission Leadership Council sat on the front row while I was the only one sitting on the second row... I thought it was kind of weird but I got to sit by Elder Shaw so that was fun. It was good to see him again. He is training so we got a four generation picture. Elder Meza, Me, Elder Shaw and then Elder Gubler. That was pretty cool to see because most of the time at least one missionary goes home before they can get to the fourth generation. Anyways, the meeting went super well and now the hard part is just taking it back to our zone and training them on it. It's always super hard because I'm nowhere close to where President is as a teacher. But it should go pretty well if we plan well enough. So we got out of the meeting and went out side and it was so hot! I was dying and then figured out why. It was 114! You can literally get blisters touching the wrong things. We got back up to the mountains and it was still 90. Arizona is heating up real fast. We got back up at around 10 so we just went back to the house. The next day we had this triathlon in Show Low and all the missionaries in our zone helped do water stations. It was so crazy. Some people will literally just take like 5 cups and dump it on them and keep running with out even looking back. Then other will yell at you asking if you have Gatorade and bananas and things. They just run by and get everything they need and keeping on going. It was so intense. We stay and help with that for about 7 hours. They were all super grateful for our help. I just it at least plants a seed in them. They all you can really pray for in some people. Some people we meet are super rude and yell at you to get off their property and all you have to do is kindly wave and say "sounds good thanks, have a good day". With some people all you can really do is just hope with your good attitude and your kindness it rubs off on them and they might think to them selves, you know those guys aren't that bad after all. Just because they aren't ready today doesn't mean they won't be ready in the future. It's like a grape vineyard. As farmers go through, they only pick the ripe grapes and leave the other ones there to ripen. If they aren't ready today they sure will be sometime down the road. Just finding the ripe grapes is the trick. Well love you all! Sorry I don't have an interesting story this week. Love you all! Stay on the straight and narrow! 

Four generation picture which is me with my trainer and the elder I trained and the elder he is training. Right to left: Elder Gubler, Elder Shaw, Elder Lange and Elder Meza  

Arizona Cactus 

They added me to a bike area...just kidding haha