Feeling good.....

Hola Friends and Family,

How is everyone doing? I hope you all had a good week. Mine was pretty good, a lot better than last week that is. Well it’s pretty hot over here still. But it’s cooling down little by little. I’ve begun to put on the pounds again due to the car share we have here. We have the car half the week and they have the car the other half. But what’s happening is that on the days we have the car we go out to all the farther appointments we have and when we are on bikes we go to all the close ones so that we don’t have to bike too far. So that’s how I started to put on the weight.

Anyway I had 2 quick experiences that I wanted to share about this week in particular. Well, we were looking for new people to teach and we had already done the knocking we were going to do on Friday without much success.  After seeing a less active we were going on the way to dinner at 5 o’clock when we got a phone call that the dinner had been changed to 6 o’clock.  So we decided to just go back to the street to go knock.  On the way back to the street I looked down a particular street and without thinking, turned.  So we started to knock the street and we found this family that let us right in. She is a single mom of 2 and is taking care of her very sick mother. Her eldest son was diagnosed with cancer about a year ago and since then she has been pretty heart broken and couldn’t find out why God allows bad things to happen to kids. Even though her son was above the age of 8 I shared chapter 8 heading in Moroni.  She started to cry and said that she goes and helps out in a child’s hospital and sees little kids every day die of some disease and just has hated God for it. But we invited her to read the chapter and pray about it and that we would come back next week. She will do it and I’m excited to see her next week.

The other experience is a member in the ward has a granddaughter who is about to have a baby who's arteries to her heart are mixed up; she is not a member of the church. And this little old lady is so cute. She told her that if the Elders gave her a blessing and if she had the faith; her baby would come out healed. So we had a member there, who has really strong faith, and we helped him with the blessing and he blessed her with the healing of her baby. And I know that it will come out fine. It was the same feeling I got when I received an answer that this church is true. I can’t wait to hear the doctor's reactions when they see that there is nothing wrong.

Anyway I love you all.

-Elder Stewart

Hueco Tanks

Hueco Tanks

Hey Everyone,

    

Sorry I missed you all yesterday, all the Montana Vista Elders and some of the youth from the ward took a trip to Hueco Tanks for p-day. It is a place that I feel actually looks like what I think a desert should look like. We climbed mountains, jumped over rocks and walked through cacti. Sometimes we even did some rock climbing, and even though it was a little dangerous, we all made it back without injury, just super tiredness. We also played basketball afterward so last night and this morning was super killer.

Well other than that, things are going alright here in Montana vista, we are kind of lacking in people to see and its hard do get up the drive to go knock doors in 110 degree weather every day. We could do better than we are now though.  My companion is not very driven like the last 2 were and so it’s hard to stay focused and not letting myself slip back into that phase. Not to mention we see the other 2 sets of elders in the ward almost every day and we tend to get sucked into doing something or hanging out with them. So to be short the work is not going at a 100% but I’m determined to change things around and hopefully look hard this week for some people to teach. I’ll let you know how that goes.

I left my library card at home so I’m sorry to the people that emailed me and didn’t get a response because of lack of time. But I love you all

-Elder Stewart

The week of blessings....

Dear Family and Friends,

I hope everyone is doing well and that you had a good weekend and nice Sabbath day! I had a pretty awesome week here in El Paso. We have some investigators progressing, found some news and really have been improving in my Spanish. I can’t say I’m having the best of times with Elder Hurst. We get along alright and all, but its turning into being exactly like another transfer with a companion I had, named Elder Humphreys. Meaning that he kind of just sits backs and follows me around but won’t accept help with anything because he is "Older" than me and the "Senior Companion" for the first time. He really does not except help with his Spanish even though he complains a lot of the time about how bad he is at it. I just don’t know exactly how to help him out.... oh well.

Well I had the opportunity to give 3 blessings this week which was a growth for my testimony. One was to a little girl, who had an infection on her mosquito bite that wasn’t healing. The mother asked me to give her a blessing and just like always, you don’t remember everything or anything you said, but on Sunday the bite was completely healed and the infection gone. Later that week, we got in contact with this family that we have been trying to see for the last 3 weeks named the Pierrend family who were baptized 2 years ago and just awesome members. Well the younger daughter was going through a super tough time at school with her volleyball team. She was trying to go for varsity volleyball this year but because of her coach playing favorites and making tryouts unfair, she ended up on the JV team for a 3rd year in a row as a Junior. She talked to her coach and had pretty much decided to quit and change the sport that she loves. I, having a lot of experience with sports, was able to give her some good advice. And before we left she asked for a blessing and Hurst asked me to do it. So again I’m not sure what it was I said, but the next day we where over there again and she had gotten an answer for what she needed to do. Her mom, sister, and her all got there P-blessings out after we left the night before to read them. Apparently the things I said in the blessing were nearly word for word of what it says in her patriarchal blessing and that both the blessings where an answer to her. Turns out she is going to stay on the team so that she can help and uplift all the younger players. It was a pretty awesome experience that was a huge testimony builder. Well the sister of the girl I gave the blessing too really like how I gave advice and gave us a referral for one of her friends. So we met with him one time and I got to know him a little. We set up a time that we can come back to teach him. And I get a call the next day saying the he wanted a blessing before his final test that he is taking today to get his degree. He had no idea what a blessing was or what to expect, but we gave him the blessing, and he recognized the presence of the Holy Ghost. He told us to come back tonight so that we can answer his questions and teach him the lessons. I’m super excited for that.

Well other than that I just wanted to say that after reading Landen's letter home, I felt like he was playing up how dangerous things where over there! Now I know I’m not in Brazil but cool things happen here too! I just didn’t want to worry people. But now that I’m in a new apartment it doesn’t seem too bad. Weeeellll back in my other apartment, we lived in the ghetto of the ghetto. There were 5 cars stolen in the 3 months I was there from the parking lot. There were prostitutes every night on the bottom level of the complex as well a 5 or 6 apartments where gang members had their meetings, not including the 5 drug dealers. Not trying to show anyone up or anything, but one day there was a fight 5 mins after getting into our apartment and someone was stabbed and killed. The Lord blessed us though because we didn’t see or hear anything. Apparently there were 10 police cars and an ambulance and 13 people got arrested, everyone in the apartment complex heard and was outside the apartment, but we heard absolutely nothing. Strange right? Well that’s about how ghetto as it got.

Anyway, Love you all

Elder Stewart

20th Birthday...

Dear friends and family,
   
I hope everyone is well and that they enjoyed the weekend and partied hard on Sunday night for my birthday by doing "Sabbath Day" things haha. Sorry I was unable to write yesterday. One of the sets of Elders in our ward was moving apartments and they needed to be out by today of a house that members rented out to the missionaries a few years ago. A word of advice to all of you, do not rent your house out to the church for missionaries to stay in while you are gone. Unless you request only sister missionaries, because the missionaries assigned to that house for the last 8 months completely wrecked it. Holes in the wall, melted curtains, and bad smells everywhere. So many damages have happened to that house and now the family is coming back to live in it. I feel really bad for the family so we went over there and spent p-day helping them move into their new apartment and clean up the place a little.
   
So... my birthday. I’m not going to say it was my best birthday I’ve ever had, or the second, or third. It was probably they 20th best. But it’s because no one really knows me in my new area. The worst part about it is only 3 missionaries remembered it. I even stood up at the pulpit on Sunday and put that it was my birthday in the talk and I had 2 super old ladies tell me happy birthday out of the 300 people present. Oh well. I guess birthdays are not really that important in the end. I am really grateful to The Cazier family and Grandma and Grandpa Stewart for sending me packages. Also to anyone else who sent one but it came back. It was my fault. I accidentally forgot to tell my dad that it was apartment #509. The only reason that Erin and Grandma Stewart's packages got here is because they sent it through US mail and the mailman knows us. So they got lucky.
   
My talk went pretty good. I got to talk last even though I was the youngest missionary to speak, and we were supposed to talk for 10 mins each but the 2nd missionary took like 3 so I got to speak for 17 mins which was pretty nice. I’ve gotten to that point where I can’t write a talk under 15 mins anymore. I feel like I did really well with the Spanish and got many compliments on it. I’m getting better and better every day. I felt like I might have thrown down a little too hard at the end there. The topic was how to do missionary work through your example. I read the story of Ammon and Lamoni, shared the scripture in Timothy 4:12 about being an example to members as well, and to end it all off I shared the story in Alma 17 or somewhere around there where Alma is talking to his son Corianton and says that because of the example he set for the Zoramites and how he committed a sin and he says. "And when they saw your conduct, they did not want to believe in my words" or something like that in English and just said that we all need to watch how we act and what we do because people are always watching and the saddest thing is when someone we find will not listen to us because of a member of the church and something they did. I think they got something out of it.
   
Other than that things are moving. We found some new investigators this week and are on the path to getting people we can teach regularly. Elder Hurst and I are getting along really well. Hope you all have a great week.

Love Elder Stewart