2 Nephi 32:3

Hey family.

This week was great, a bit slow but great over all. I feel like this transfer is preparing me for college or something. It's just non stop problem solving and figuring out logistics and what will work best in this area and organizing and looking over lists and so much more. It's been quite the hard work.

Not too much to report on of any significance this week. We got 2 solid new people that we are teaching. Milagro and Carolina who are sisters. Carolina was super solid when we first knocked on her door, but her sister was pretty hesitant though and was kinda in and out of the conversation and everything and kinda ended things when she said she had to go. So we came back for our appointment and knocked on the door and could hear milagro inside but she didn't answer. So we left and 10 minutes later Carolina called us and said that she was at the store and that we could come by in 30 minutes. So we did.  Carolina let us in, and milagro sat in on the lesson. We taught the gospel of Jesus Christ with Bible scriptures, they super enjoyed it, and super amazing milagro at the end of the lesson invited themselves to church. So we got to them both in that lesson. They wanted to know what our church was like so they had us sing one of the hymns and me and elder Powell sang all 3 verses of I am a child of God. And they were super stoked to come to church, milagro said that she would bring her husband and her friend. It was super cool. They didn't end up coming to church, they had to work but we'll get em next time.

Brother Martinez, the one who challenged me to find the hidden meaning in 2 Nephi 32, gave a talk on Sunday. And it was probably the best talk I've heard on my mission. It was general authority status. He got up there and as soon as he started speaking he brought in a wave of the spirit. He talked on temples. Which was the hidden meaning in 2 Nephi 32. So he answered the question in his talk, I'll let yall try and find it with that hint though. I didn't get it exactly right, but I got bits and pieces of it. Studying that one chapter over and over again really helped me in lessons though. I shared scriptures from that chapter to everyone we talked to. And got so good at it to the point where I can quote some of them. Namely 8-9. The Lord helped prepare those people with questions that through my study I could answer, so that was really cool. Brother Martinez this week gave me another question to answer, and I'm glad he has because he has helped my studies really mean something and help me truly feast on the words of christ and seek out the answers. This week he asked me why in Mosiah 18:30 it says the word mormon like 7 or 8 times when describing the words of mormon. Because there has to be a reason. To find out the answer I've already looked up at least 20 footnotes going from footnote to footnote. Read 3 or 4 talks. And prayed super hard for it, and I can see the outline of the answer but I just need the words and the revelation to help me fill it in. It's really helping my testimony of the scriptures and of personal revelation. I can hardly wait for next week when I present my answer and he gives me something else to study.

Elder Bertoch 

Ether 6:12

Another week is gone, just flew by yet again. It's confusing how time is working how it is. How come this never happened when I was in school, why does it have to happen when I'm out here. It doesn't make any sense. But I'm really trying to make the most of it.

This week was spent putting a lot of effort in tracking down the many less actives that we have in the Ward here. We have over 150 names and we've stopped by at least 40 of them by now. So far we haven't been able to see any of them, except for maybe 2 households. We also went through and called all of them, and 3 answered. So we have our work cut out for us here. We also don't have miles to do our work super effectively - we commute 10 miles every day to the area that all the less actives are in and then we commute 10 miles back. So we have a lot of situations to figure out here. But it is super fun to be here and we are really able to tell that this area has been super prepared for our coming here. The weird thing going on right now is that all our investigators are super catholic, like super catholic. My whole mission it's been people who tell me that they're catholic, but they don't read or go to church or anything like that. But our investigators now go to church regularly and read and pray regularly and challenge us on all doctrine about the Godhead and the trinity. We have 3 different people who are all stuck on the same problem figuring out that God and Jesus are 2 separate beings. And they all have their different logic on why. So it's gonna take a while before we teach them otherwise, but they are all really cool and are interested in learning and everything. 

Our members here are really cool as well. Everybody loves us and they are all so willing to do whatever it takes to reactivate these people. Life has been really good lately, and things just seem to keep looking up. We have a lot of appointments this next week with different people we met, and everything is really good. Greenville is still really pretty, we went to this park in downtown the other day for comp and lang study, and it had a waterfall and a cool bridge and a lot of grass and trees and flowers and it was super cool, and its weird to because it's just right in the middle of downtown. I'll send some pictures.  

That's about it for this week. Not much else happened of great importance. Someone at church challenged me to find a hidden meaning in 2 Nephi 32 and I've been reading that a lot lately, my guess for the meaning yesterday was wrong, but there is still some cool verses in there and it's becoming pretty cool what I've realized from there and how I've used the scriptures there while teaching as well. So read that chapter and see if you can find the secret there.

 

New Area - Greenville, South Carolina

This week flew by, I feel like I just emailed y'all and it's already Monday again. But a lot did happen, and so things are really flying past and days are so short now and all is happening so quickly and all that stuff. I wonder how it feels a year from now. Anyways...

Monday I can't remember much of what happened at the end of the day, oh I remember. We went to say goodbye to Jeff and we brought the Waldrops along with us. It was a good little visit.  Jeff seemed happy that we were able to come by and say goodbye to him. Then later we went to a less active members house who's husband has dementia and needed a blessing and did that, then we went to fhe with brother Livingston and sister Taylor. Then we said goodbye to them and that was that day.

Tuesday we had DC in the morning and did white wash notes after that. We then went to see Eddie Bledsoe our Baptist preacher friend. We made a lunch appointment for the following day. We then went to the library to do some stuff, said goodbye to some people - idk, it's all a blur.  I can't remember what was done. One thing that was cool is that I had a Daniel and the lions den experience, where we commited to knock on every door on a street. But one of the houses had a guard dog in the lawn with a shock collar on for the invisible fence. So we decided to go for it and right before we went up to the walkway, which just had to be like 100 ft long by the way, I looked at the dog that wanted to rip out our throats because of what we were wanting to do. And I commanded it to sit and it did and it stopped barking and just did this little head tilt thing. And I started to walk up on the walkway and got about 10 ft to the door until I was right next to the door, and then I let my pride get the best of me because I turned to my companion and said something like "wow look how good I am" and the dog immediately started to bark and get up and look very angry. Learned quite the lesson on humility and knowing when it is God's power, because I immediately repented and started to pray the hardest I ever had in my life. The dog didn't sit down again but it did walk away, and as we moved closer to the door, it would charge me only stopping a few inches from me and then walk away again. Well I wish I could tell you that when we got up to the door and knocked this guy answered and said "what my dog has killed everyone that has tried to knock on my door how did you do it" but no one answered the door, and we had to do the exact same thing over again when walking back. And then we had a cool spirit with us the rest of the night since we were able to exercise that much faith to not get killed and have a guardian angel with us. 

Wednesday was our last lt proselyting day in Newberry. We had lunch with Eddie, said goodbye to some people, went to mutual, and said goodbye to more people. And that was about it. 

Thursday was the day of transfers.  We left Newberry and made our way to the transfer building. There I saw everybody that I have known and found elder Powell.  Then I said goodbye to all 17 of the departing missionaries, and we went on our way to Greenville. Greenville is sick, it's so pretty here, there's actual hills, and there are so many Hispanics here. It's quite the promised land. We got to our apartment after getting lost quite a bit and started getting familiar with names of people that we had and all. Our calling here is pretty confusing. We cover the entire stake, but want to focus mostly on the Greenville 1st and 3rd wards as well as the simpsonville second ward. We are Spanish and English for the first couple of weeks and more when we need to help out the other elders in our area. We are supposed to focus on reactivating the members that used to make up the branch here. 

We seperated the Hispanic people from the non Hispanic people one night and there are 149 Hispanic members in the 1st ward alone. So we have quite the work cut out for us. Plus we have 2 progressing investigators of a part member family left here for us, and they are super cool, they took us out for tacos Friday night. They are pretty solid, the mom just has to get married to the member dad, but the dad is thinking of going to Mexico for a while to visit family and won't be here long enough to go through everything to get married. Saturday we went to a child baptism in our ward and met a lot of the members. The members here are really cool, a lot of them speak Spanish since they served missions in South America. We met our two strong hispanic families in the branch and they are super awesome to. Their testimonies are super strong and have offered to do all they can to help us reactivate the people on our list. We've tried to see a lot of the families on the list and have only had luck with one of them, and got a new investigator from it since it was a less active part member family. We did a bit of English work last night and drove through some really pretty parts of the country. 

Today we spent the day playing board games and such. 

Elder Bertoch

P.S.

This might be my favorite area so far and elder Powell is still super awesome. 

1. The house of the terrifying dog experience

2. Saw a cool golden eagle while driving. #mountainvistarepresent

3-6. Cool sunset with fields

7. Cool jungle forest. 

Alma 30:3-4

Hola familia,

Well transfers are in 3 days and I am leaving yet again. I'm not to sure where yet, but I think we find that out tonight, but that doesn't really matter to yall since I can't email you between then and next Monday. I do know that I am going back to Spanish though, so there's that at least.

This week was pretty eventful - we had a fun 4th of July; I had Spanish conference; I nearly died; and it rained like 50 inches this week.

On Tuesday the only things to report really was we had another lesson with Will and one with Sally. Will is pretty difficult to teach, he already knows so much and is very intelligent. But he's not really using his intelligence to his advantage, because it's hard for him to feel the spirit and doesn't pray about what we are teaching or about the book of mormon, but he does pray about a lot of other different questions that he has. So we're not too sure how to handle him, he just really needs to have some spiritual enlightenment . The lesson with Sally was really good, we read the BoM with her and she seemed a lot more excited to read it and seemed to understand why it would benefit her. So we recommitted her to reading it again.

Wednesday was 4th of July. We had a couple of parties that we went to and had some really good times and good food. First we went to a parade. And if there's someone who doesn't like the 4th of July or doesn't appreciate it, then they can come right on down to Newberry. The street that the parade was on, each house was decked out and had food set out so that people could have snacks and water as they walked or golf carted through the parade. Strangers were talking with strangers, friends with friends. It was all very cool. Part of the parade there was a firetruck that was spraying water from its hose and created a water party in the street. One of our potential investigators invited us to come sit with them and watch the parade from their sisters house. And then we met all of their family who were all very nice. Then after that we went to the potential investigators house for lunch BBQ, and that BBQ was as if it was from a movie that you would watch about a perfect family and all. They had all their family there, one of the sons of the family brought all his college friends down for it. A boyfriend of one of the daughters at one point broke out his guitar and started singing songs about Jesus. Everyone had a very thick southern accent. People wore America colored asocts. It was all very picture perfect. Plus there was some really good southern BBQ and desserts. Then after that we went home to do some studies and such, visited some people to wish them a happy 4th of July, then went on to our next party at a returning less active's home on Lake Murray. That one was very fun as well, there were a lot more members there, but there were some extended family members of the family that invited us that weren't members as well. There was some very good food there as well. And every man there had served in the military, one in the army, one in the marines, and one on nuclear submarines, so we heard all about their cool war stories too. And that was about it for that day.

Interjection: I just got word of where I'm going, I will be going to the Greenwood 1st ward in the upstate. I will be going with Elder Powell, who has been my favorite companion thus far (Charleston). So I am super excited about it. We are also going into a brand new Spanish area, and we are staring from basically scratch, which will be a challenge but will be super fun too. And I've heard that the ward there is super awesome and that the area is super fun too. So I'm super excited now and will basically be counting down the hours.

Thursday was the famous Spanish conference. Last conference we made goals of baptizing 6 people and finding 140 new investigators. Which we hit both of those goals. We baptized 10 people and found 141 new investigators. So we had fun congratulating ourselves for that. And we talked a lot about how we can continue to improve the work and such. It was fun to see everybody again and all that as well. Then after Spanish conference we had another lesson with Sally which was super good. She recognized the spirit, learned why it is important to ask for guidance in her prayers, believed the Joseph Smith story, and commited to go to church. Plus she had finally read some of the book of mormon. So it was super good.

Friday we went to help our former bishop move in the afternoon. Then we had dinner with one of the members, while there it started monsoon raining again, except it didn't let up in 30 minutes, except kept raining for about 3 hours. At the members house we had a bop it competition which I came second in. I had to hide my competitive frustration from the members. Then we shared our message and played with their kids and gave a blessing as we waited for the rain to let up as we were on bikes. Plus the father is Brazilian, so I practiced my Portuguese with him. And by practice I mean speak the 10 or 14 words that I know to him. Then we went to another appointment with an older member. Then we tried to knock a little bit in the rain.

Saturday we had gotten a call early in the morning to go fill up the baptismal font. So we did that and brought our bikes with us so we could bike around that area afterwards. The church is on a super steep and long hill, that's really fun to bike down since you get going so fast. Well my bike doesn't have any brakes. So it's a little less fun. As we were coming down the hill Elder Elmer slammed on his brakes to turn on a street. I also slammed on my brakes, but nothing happened. So I tried to turn a bit out of the way, but failed and slammed into his back tire as he was turning, and I hit the ground with the force of an elephant falling from the empire state building and slid a couple yards too. My first thought was aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!?!?!! Then I was like what part of me is broken. Then I realized that I was okay to stand up and then I hobbled around for a little bit, until the shock and adrenaline wore off and realized that I was in a lot of pain. So I sat back down and started taking inventory of my body. My whole left side hurt quite a bit. I then looked at my bike and saw that it was in pretty rough shape as well. Half of my left pedal is broken, I only have a half a pedal now. My seat is super ripped and messed up. The frame is super scratched. My body isn't broken but it is quite bruised. My shoulder has a large bruise, my elbow has a large bruise, my hand is super road rashed, my thigh has a big bruise, my knee has a big cut and bruise, and my ankle has a small bruise. My shirt was super ripped up and torn. It was quite the situation. So we biked to the nearest member, which was the ones we had dinner with the night before, and had him tend to my wounds. He poured some hydrogen peroxide on my knee and hands. Bandaged me up and we were back on our way. We saw some former investigators and potential investigators and said goodbye to them that day and that was about it.

Sunday I woke up and was very sore from the day before. We went to church and had Sally come and she said that she really enjoyed it and would love to go again. She was also invited to a pot luck thing this week, so it was all very cool. Then later we went to our ward mission leader's house for lunch and said goodbye to him and everything which was very good. Then we had studies and went over to the templins for dinner that night, which was also very fun. Ten we went to brother torres house to say goodbye to him. And that was about that day.

Today we are both spending a lot of time packing and will later say goodbye to Jeff who we were teaching when I first cme into the area.

That is about all, one scripture that has helped me out this week is in 3 Nephi 5:13: "Behold, I am a disciple of Jesus  Christ, the  Son  of God.  I have  been  called  of him  to  declare  his  word  among  his  people,  that they  might  have  everlasting  life”. It has helped me realize that I have been called to be a missionary for one purpose. To open my mouth and declare the truth about Jesus christ, so that I might bring eternal life to others. And that doesn't just stop with missionaries. We all are disciples of Jesus christ and we all have been called to help bring others to gain eternal life.

Elder Bertoch

Moving on to the monsoons

July 2, 2018:

This week not much happened. However it quickly turned from South Carodesert to South Carorainforest. It's rained just about every day. And I'm not talking about little drizzle here and there, but I feel like I'm in Thailand or Indonesia and we're just having monsoon rains. It'll only last for 30-45 minutes but it will cause panic. Every time it happens everyone thinks that a tornado is coming. Which is not rare in this part of South Carolina, we actually have a member here that built his house right on tornado alley and his house has been demolished by a tornado twice. They're both pretty cool stories though because both times the tornado destroyed everything except the 5 places where they had food storage.

This week wasn't very special. The only part really worth writing about would be the lesson that we had with Will on Tuesday and my interview with president. The lesson with Will went really well. We had come in and he apologized because he was not able to read the entire plan of salvation pamphlet that we gave him. But his definition of finish and ours was very different. He had read the thing and went to the back where there's this section: Study for Yourself or something like that. He had read almost every scripture on there and had made many many notes about it. He used the pamphlet just like the Prophet intended those pamphlets to be used. It was awesome. He flipped out whje we told him we had a living prophet. He was like, where to I find all the things that he's taught. So we directed him to his last talk on personal revelation and he was like, "YES I need this in my life." so very cool experience and probably the most solid guy we have right now.

Fridays were interviews with president. I had prepared a lot for it as I very much wanted the Newberry Spanish and English area to open this week. So I wrote down my game plan. I had a vision, goals, plans and 25 reasons why. And I told President all about it in my interview. But he said that it couldn't happen this transfer, but next transfer he will consider it. But he did tell me I'm done with the English work and I will be going full time Spanish this next transfer again, which I am very excited about.

Love yall 

Elder Bertoch 

IT IS SO HOT!

June 25, 2018

First off I'm going to rant just a little bit. IT IS SO HOT. Yesterday it was like 100 degrees and raining. It rained and it was still hot. And we were biking so that just made things worse. And let me tell ya, it's not getting any better, it just keeps getting hotter and hotter. Its supposed to just straight rain all this week, but that doesn't mean things will cool off like in normal places, nope, it's still high 90's and climbing. Every time that I ever talk with a member or something they only ever tell me that it's going to get worse too. They're all like "Oh you cant even be hot, it's not in the 100's yet" or " Why are you sweating so much? It's not even humid yet." Yesterday when it rained it steamed when it hit the ground because the ground was so hot and after it stopped raining there was just this thick layer of fog, from the steam. If you don't hear from me next week go ahead and assume that I melted.

Anyways now that that's over with, we had a really good week this week. We met with a lot of different people, had some cool miracles happen, and had a really good lesson with someone.

On Monday we had dinner with this guy who hoards food and stuff, because he is a prepper and a chef. You know those cool waffle machines that are giant and you flip it around after you pour the batter in there and it makes really light and fluffy waffles, he made us waffles with that thing. After the dinner he also gave us like half his food collection, so we will never go hungry again. After we were done at his place, we met this guy named Grady, and taught him all about the BoM and he loved it and said that we could stop by again this next week. 

Tuesday was our exchange day for this transfer, and since Elder Elmer is the district leader, we went on exchanges with the zone leaders. We had a lot of appointments set up and the day was filled up. I stayed in our area because I am cursed to do that forever I guess, I've never exchanged out of an area. And one by one our appointments fell through. Until we were left with nothing. So we went to see a less active member who is the sister of one of the recent converts in the west Colombia branch. And we stayed there for a while until she finally committed to go to church and to pray, and she did go to church which was really cool. And then we went to stop by some other different people and did some other things and that was that day.

Wednesday we exchanged back and we had a lesson with Jaime but it didn't really happen. Jaime is a very interesting man because he's read the book of mormon at least 30 times and knows that it is true. We gave him a new book of mormon about 2 weeks ago and it is already super marked up. But he wont do anything to change the way he lives, so it is very interesting. Then we had a lesson with a guy named Shamar and introduced the Book of mormon to him and got a return appointment with him as well. Then later we met the famous actor Peter Iacangelo, who when we first met him told us that he lived a very interesting life, and told us to google him. So we didn't know if he was a war criminal or on the FBI Most Wanted list or what, but it turned out really cool. If you don't know him, he was in movies like Fight Club and some other really old movies. He right now just recently fought off Luekimia for the 4th time and is pretty humble and is really searching for truth, and we are the messengers of that truth, so we've talked with him a couple of times this week and he accepted a Book of Mormon and all, so very promising there. That night we also had a really good lesson with Sally Potts, a member couple joined us and we taught a really powerful Plan of Salvation, and Sally was saying that this was just what she needed and she is very excited to learn more.

Thursday we had dinner with a part member family which was really good, the non member is so active in the church to the point where we basically treat him as a member. So we shared the Dare to Stand Alone video with them and they we're really touched by it.

Friday, not much happened.

Saturday we had a yard sale at our apartment so we helped some of our neighbors move things down to the sale place and then we helped our main neighbor man her ten tables of crap, which was where I also learned I'm a great salesman, because I sold a lot of junk, like a lot of junk. Then later that day we went down to Saluda, but not much happened there. I was able to teach a quick door stop Plan of Salvation to a hispanic lady and she seemed a moderate amount of interest from the lesson so there was that at least. 

Sunday we had stake conference which was really good, there was a huge focus on ministering and missionary work, which we were really excited about. Then we went over to the Acostas for dinner, he was the presidente of our branch in west columbia, but his sister is in our ward, so they invited us all over for dinner. Then later we met with Carrie and had a good lesson with her, she's reading the book of mormon, but she doesn't understand it very well, so we're thinking of ways to help her understand it better. Then later we met with a man named Will Davis who is a very smart man and loves history, about the bible and other ancient records that have to do anything about God or Jesus. So the Book of Mormon is very interesting to him and he loves it. He's been reading it for a little while now and he really seems like a prime person to accept the gospel and get baptized here soon. One other thing that was cool was that Jeff went to church as well, so at least we have some progress there.

That was about all this week, I'm trying to get back in the habit of writing longer emails, so go ahead and cheer me on. Love you all.

Elder Bertoch

Photo with the exchange missionary