February 23rd, 2014

Dear Mom and Family,

We are having some crazy changes in the mission right now. I am now in a trio with Elder Chavez and Elder Mendez. There are so many missionaries ending the mission right now that our president has had to do some changes of companions. One missionary in our district ended his mission so that had to take out Elder Sanchez, one of the Mexicans that was in our ward, and now he is with the Elder that lost his companion and we stayed in a trio in our area trying to juggle this huge area now. Basically we have been doing divisions every single day here with the members. We are lucky to have 2 members here that basically dedicate their lives to missionary work so they are always ready to do divisions with us. I am always impressed with one member named Andres Cruz. He has about 35 years old and he seriously dedicated his whole live to missionary work. His mom is sick so he lives with her and kinda takes care of her, but other than that he is always with the missionaries. He is known in all the mission, because he basically has met every missionary before. He organizes activities for us every single Monday and he always has great ideas to organize good activities. I was thinking that would be cool if every member could dedicate as much time as Andres to missionary work, but of course most people have families and work and are a lot busier. He always has references for us and helps us out a TON! 

Anyway, we have been doing divisions so that one missionary goes with a member and the other 2 go to the other part of the area. I am now district leader of only 5 missionaries, so that is a little bit easier at least. The only challenging part of being in a trio is that I have to try and motivate the 3 of us to work. The elder that joins us has been dificult and likes to whine about a lot of things so that has been a challenge too. The success in our area has slowed down quite a bit, but we are in the searching process right now. We have been trying to organize a ton of activities even though we haven`t had a lot of success yet. We will see how the activities go this week, but it sure is hard for people to invite their neighbors to an activity. 

This past week we also had a mission conference. We are helping 2 investigators get married, so we went to our mission conference selling stuff to help obtain the money for them. We had a girl in our ward help us make some little desserts and we sold the desserts to the whole mission! There were 59 missionaries attending the conference, so we actually sold the desserts to the mission and it came out the mission funds for our lunch! We were super excited that everything worked out and that we could raise all the money for this wedding. We are now waiting for the papers of these investigators to get here then we only need to take them to the notaria (not sure in english like a lawyers office?) where they are going to sign their papers and set the exact day to get married. They are named Ramon and Gloria and they are an older couple already in their 70`s. They are so funny because they are always fighting like an old couple, but they like the church a lot and I think they will be our baptisms in March. 

In our mission conference, we learned a lot about Faith. Pres. Prince showed us some interesting things. He said that he talked to a past mission Pres. of our mission, the one that had the most success in all the history, and asked him for some tips. The advice that this Pres. gave is that we need to be working a lot more efficiently. In his time they baptized about 4 people every month, per companionship. He says the secret is that they were teaching about 30 lessons every week, and they were setting about 3 new baptismal dates every week. To us, these stats are through the roof, but we learned in our conference that we need to be teaching shorter lessons to be able to hit these goals. We did about 2 hours of practices in the conference, so everyone had their fair share of teaching lessons that day! 

Well that is basically what happened this week. I will try to send some pictures here is a second. Grandma Bauman has been in my prayers a lot this week, and I will keep praying for her. I think about everyone every day, and I hope you guys have a great week! 

Love,

Elder Armstrong