Teaching the Torres Family

So this week we were focused a whole bunch on the Torres family again. I'm really wanting them to get completely back in the church. So we were over there just about every day re-teaching everything this time with Lizhet involved, because it became pretty apparent that she had forgotten everything about the gospel. So we re-taught a bunch of things and we told her that we won't baptize Jimena unless she commits to be fully reactivated. One of the things we got them commited to do is family home evening, they even bought board games and everything. So we're going over there tonight to make sure everything goes smoothly and effectively for their very first FHE. 

As for the miracle that occurred, Lizhet, her brother, and her husband, plus their kids, all made it to church yesterday. And for the first time in 8 years they stayed all 3 hours. It took a lot of convincing after sacrament meeting, and I even had to wake her up in 3rd hour, but the important thing is that she did it, and she liked it. But even more important is that her husband liked it, and decided that it could be a good substitute for the Catholic church. So hopefully he'll agree to hearing the lessons soon as well. Or hopefully the baptism of Jimena and Edward will inspire him enough. But it'll be super cool if that whole family could be converted and baptized.

We are also meeting with a former investigator this week who was super close to baptism, but stopped taking the lessons, because it felt like she was no longer progressing as she was waiting for her passport to get married.  But she's got it, can now get married, and can get baptized pretty soon after that. So that'll be cool if she's really actually pretty serious about coming back to church and seeing us and stuff. The cool thing is that members have still fellowshiped her even after she stopped the lessons and everything. So it should be pretty easy to do. That's about it, we went to Columbia today to take photos, so I'll send those when I get em. That is all. 

Loves 

Elder Bertoch

Finding the Lost

I believe the Torres’ is Lizhet’s family from prior e-mails.  Not a very long e-mail, but I really liked the story about the less active family they found.

This week was mostly focused on helping the Torres' out and teaching Jimena and Edward. Jimena has gone through most of the lessons by now, but hermana torres wants Edward to get baptized with her and it's harder to tell when he will be ready, so we don't have a date for the baptism yet. Many many things have been going on with that family right now, so we are really able to see the effects of Satan and his whole not wanting them to be baptized and reactivated, but hermana torres is super pumped about getting back in the church, and for the first time I have seen a true desire from her to get back on the path, which is super awesome. 

Something else cool that happened this week is we found a less active family that had disappeared off the map for a long while, we decided to go to where they used to live and ask the person there if they knew where they were now, and they did. They gave us the address and we went down there. It was super cool because she let us pass in and she told us that just the day before she was talking with her husband that she had a feeling that the missionaries would come by the following day. And that's exactly what happened, so it was pretty cool, I blessed their house and they said they would start going to church again. 

That's about all the memorable things that happened this week. I got to know elder Clifford more, he's super cool, from South Jordan Utah, plays basketball 19 years old and Idk what else yall want to know.

Elder Bertoch 

Back in West Columbia

Jackson is back in West Columbia.  He doesn’t mention much about his new companion, but it sounds like he is enjoying seeing old friends.


So this week was transfers.  They mixed it up a bit and we don't figure out if we are being transferred 2 days before we are. So on Tuesday I learned that I would indeed be transferred, and so would Elder Mar, they were whitewashing our area again. So that day we had ddm where we said goodbye to everybody, the other elders in the district were also being whitewashed, and one sister was going home. So there were a lot of goodbyes to say and then we left. Then we went by to see some members, but we weren't able to see anyone that we tried to, even sister Escobar who was supposed to feed us that night canceled on us, so we went out and had a final companionship dinner at a hamburger place called Pawleys, then we went home and slept.

Wednesday was our packing and cleaning day. We did that up until we went to see the Dominguez’ to say goodbye to them. They held us there for a while, long enough to the point where we missed English class.  We came for the last 5 minutes to bear testimony and say goodbye to all the students.

Thursday we woke up and started heading down to the transfer building. I am now back in west columbia with elder Clifford, and it is pretty great here. Elder Mar is up in Spartanburg. We then got in our area and the very first thing we did was call up lizhet and Shelly and went over there to say hi. We were there for quite some time catching up and all. I've also have had the flu since Sunday. So we went home and I took a nap up until soccer night, then we played soccer, which made my flu worse.  I know I'm not very smart.

Friday we started teaching lizhets daughter since she turned 8 in January, and we're hoping that it'll help Lizhet go to church and hopefully she'll bring her nonmember husband as well. She said that she'll go to church on Sunday and that she would bring everybody as well, so we were really praying that that would happen. We also visited the Carreto's just to stop by and say hi. We also had English class but no one showed up.

Saturday we went to the international festival to try and find people for English class and to try and talk to a bunch of people. That was fun and we talked to some cool people. And we ate some really good food. We then went back to teach lizhets daughter and then we settled in to the apartment a bit more and then I rested to try and get over this cold. 

Sunday we had church which was super awesome seeing everybody again, with better Spanish so I can actually talk to them. Plus Shelly and lizhet and all of them came to church. It was lizhets first time going since Shelly's confirmation and before that it was about 3 years. After church we had a super storm where it rained the hardest it has ever rained ever, and there were even many tornado warnings. It blew out the power in our apartment so we couldn't make dinner, so we asked lizhet if she could make dinner for us.  We went there and we found out that her brother also would like to take the lessons, so we got a lot going for us just in her family. And that was about all for this week.

Elder Bertoch

A Little Spanish Practice

Jackson has written the first half in Spanish so I used google translate and include the English translation. 

Hola familia!  Esta semana fue un poco aburriendo, pero todo está bien.  Yo soy aburrido con escribiendo los emails, para hacer más divertido para mi, yo estoy escribiendo en español. Ojalá ustedes pueden entenderlo. 

Lunes después nuestro rr con nuestras bicicletas, tuvimos un servicio con una de las hermanas en la rama, para movrar algunos cosas de su el patio interior a la fuera de su casa, y también para quitar sus hojas. Después eso no puedo recordar que pasó. 

Martes tuvimos DDM en la mañana, y después eso hacíamos muchos estudios en la tarde, hasta recibimos una llamada de la oficina del misión, y ella nos dijo que necesitamos quitar todas las cosas del el otro apartamento que nadie vive en. Entonces fue muchos cosas en este apartamento, y trabajábamos por mucho tiempo, hasta necesitemos ir a la casa de hermana Escobar para cenar. Tuvimos una cena muy rico allí y un pensamiento espiritual "muy inspirado" entonces fue un éxito! Después la cena terminemos la obra con el apartamento, y ya que somos perezosos quisimos para hacer el viaje en un viaje, entonces quedamos muchas cosas en nuestro carro, y nosotros sólo hicimos un viaje!

Hello family! This week was a bit boring, but everything is fine. I'm bored with writing emails, to make more fun for me, I'm writing in Spanish. I hope you can understand it. Monday after our trip with our bicycles, we had a service with one of the sisters in the branch, to move some things from their inner courtyard to the outside of their house, and also to remove their leaves. After that I can not remember what happened. Tuesday we had DDM in the morning, and after that we did many studies in the afternoon, we even received a call from the mission office, and she told us that we need to remove all the things from the other apartment that nobody lives in. Then there were many things in this apartment, and we worked for a long time, until we needed to go to the house of Sr. Escobar for dinner. We had a very rich dinner there and a spiritual thought "very inspired" then it was a success! After dinner we finish the work with the apartment, and since we are lazy we wanted to make the trip in one trip, then we left many things in our car, and we only made one trip!

Back to English, I'm bored of the Spanish, takes to long. Wednesday I can't remember really what happened, nothing to important I guess. 

Thursday we had a bunch of appointments cancel and we knocked for a while to get some more appointments that hopefully won't cancel. 

Friday we did a lot more of finding and some other stuff not to important. We also had a lesson with our recent convert on the priesthood and blessings.

Saturday not much happened we went out knocking a lot again.

Sunday was a really good morning. Church was super awesome, we taught Sunday school, had a really good priesthood session, and had one of the best fast and testimony meeting that I've ever been at.  Then my companion was really sick after church so he slept all the rest of the day.

Today we are doing a zone pday playing volleyball and such. 

A "Moving" Week

Hola familia! Sorry I'm getting this out so late, but today has been a busy day as you will later find out, but since I don't have a lot of time I am going to keep it pretty short. 

The highlight of Tuesday was interviews with President which went well, and long. President gives himself twelve minutes for each interview, but quickly doubles or triples the amount of time allotted, my interview was about 45 minutes. Then after that we had another review with our District Leader, new mission policy to have those now from time to time.

Wednesday we had a lot of service all day, we helped finish the guy's yard that we had done the week before, moving all of the pine straw out of the backyard and into the front yard, that took a good amount of time, but we were rewarded with lunch, so it was all worth it. Plus we had English class where we had 3 people show up. 

Thursday we had a meeting with the hermanas to figure out our training in Spanish conference, which was about online proselyting, nobody with us had any knowledge about what to do or how to use it. So we came up with some pretty broad questions, and figured we were good since every other training had online proselyting in it at some point. 

Friday was the big day of Spanish conference and the state wide fiesta. We had the Spanish conference at 11:30, it went really well.  We set some good goals like to collectively get 300 new investigators before July 12. Then we had the party which was a lot of fun, I got to see everyone that I have been away from for a while. Shellie and lizhet came, so that was a lot of fun, and I really only spent time with them talking and catching up with them. We planned a vacation after the mission, they're taking me and some of their other favorite missionaries to Mexico, back from where her husband is from, nayarit and San Luis and his best friend is an adventure guide, so we get to do all these excursions for only 5 pesos. That's about 50 cents if you were wondering. So I got something to look forward to now, if they're actually serious about it. So that day was a lot of fun.

Saturday we woke up in the wee hours of the morning to drive to Sumter and help our member move up to Columbia. We moved all his stuff, all without a dolley, and let me tell you, fridges are heavy. We got done moving him and then went home, only to see that someone was moving into our apartment building, so we offered our help and moved all of their stuff into their apartment. They had the world's heaviest mattress by the way. Then later we watched conference, and went knocking after conference where we got a return appointment with someone, so it was good. 

Sunday was Easter and general conference, we went to the church to watch it and then had an Easter feast made by some members for us, and then we watched the last half of conference and that was that. 

Today we helped move someone again with the other elders this morning from 9 to 11:30. Then we went home grabbed our bikes. Not sure what he is explaining next.  I think he was in a rush and left out a pertinent piece of information.  Hopefully it wasn’t anything they’d get in trouble for:  And sent it to Columbia. We parked on the outskirts of downtown, and with the bike elders as our guides we started to bike. We went down to a park, where we sent it off some stairs and such, then we went to the broad river, then we went to campus, then we went up a parking garage to take some photos on top of there, then we went to Wendy's to get lemonade and frostys, then we went to see the capital, then all the old churches, then we went back to campus, found a taller parking garage, sent it up that and took more pictures up there, then we went to find some jumps that we could send it off. Then we went all the way back to the car. It was a total of 15 miles in 88 degree weather. We are now so dead. That is all.

Elder Bertoch