Zone Conference with Elder Paul V. Johnson...

Hey Friends and Family,

How was everyone's week and how are you all doing? I hope you know I love you very much. We had a good week this week and a lot of good things are happening here in Fabens and the Zone. We are still working towards our year goal for the mission and at the start of November we were about 150 off. We have been working hard as a zone to do our part in reaching this goal. I not sure we can do it if the world is going to end in 1 month ha ha. The weather here is pretty cold now, somewhere in the 40's all the time, and so it’s suit season. I actually think I have gotten used to wearing a suit all the time now and actually like it.

We had a zone conference this week that was really good.  Elder Paul V. Johnson came and gave us a few trainings. He is a really awesome teacher and is over all the church teaching programs. We talked a lot about different ways of learning. You can have Facts that you learn by memorizing, Experience by going and doing it, and Examples, meaning seeing it be done or watching. These things are ways we learn and how we teach in the world, but it takes something different to learn spiritual things. Someone cannot learn spiritual truths by using worldly ways of learning, but only through the spirit. We learned that you cannot force someone to learn things spiritually, but only through their actions (faith) and keeping all the commandments can someone learn these spiritual truths. So basically when we are teaching, we should not teach them all the lessons if they are not reading, praying and going to church because it’s only through those things that we can learn the truths of the spirit. It has actually helped us a lot in our teaching. We also had training from President and Sister Miller about teaching as the Savior did. They went over a bunch of examples of how to teaching like the Savior did. I think there is a really good video on lds.org about it. Anyone who wants to be a better teacher should go look it up and watch it.

Well overall we had a good week and the Lord is going to bless us with some success next month. We have Paulette who went to church this week who was going to be baptized a year ago, but right before she was going to be baptized her mom found out and told her a lot of things about the Mormons and forbid her to be baptized. Paulette then had to move to Colorado to live with her mom for a year and then she came back and gave us a call. We have been going over quite a lot and she has a baptism date. We asked her if she still thought the date was right and she said, "Listen, I know this church is true, and I am going to be baptized on that date, and nobody can tell me otherwise." She then came to church on Sunday with her youngest son. At church, the ward mission leader informed me 5 minutes before class started that he could not teach the principals class this week and so I had to. I’m so grateful for all the preparation that the Lord has given me to be able to just go in and teach a class in Spanish on a topic that I just found out I was teaching. After a quick prayer the class was on its way and I was able just to recall scriptures to memory as if I had written them myself. (This is particularly impressive to me because of the ADD that I have that makes me forget facts and things pretty easily.) Towards the end of the class I gave everyone in the room a chance to bear their testimony on the savior. And all the recent converts and even Paulette bore their testimony. The Spirit was super strong and awesome. I decided to try that because one of the points in the "Teach as Christ taught" example from zone conference was that we teach a principle and then invite the people we teach to bear testimony on the principal so that they can feel the spirit through them.

Well I hope that everyone has a good week,

Love you,
Elder Stewart

A Good Solid Week.....

Dear Friends and Family,

I hope everyone is doing well and that they are staying out of the cold. It was 28 degrees this morning and was so hard to wake up on time. Things are well here in Fabens, and I can say we had a good solid week. We had some pretty good experiences this week while looking for more people to teach. This area has a lot of potential, and we have so many connections with possible investigators that we cannot seem to control all of them at once. So we really have the more important ones in focus and the other ones we can only visit maybe once a week.

The Lord is helping us a lot in this area. The goal for the mission is 600 baptisms by the end of this year. We have two more months left and we are short around 150.  So each zone needs to get about 8 a month. At first I was certain that it wasn’t really possible, but I thought I would give it my best shot anyway. I have seen in the last two weeks, the Lord opening up doors in our area that have not been opened for a long time. One of these experiences was with an investigator who a year ago lived in this area, who was taught all the lessons and was interviewed and right before she was baptized she had to move to Colorado cause her mother got really sick. The missionaries in the area told her that they would send the missionaries, but for some reason they never got there. Well she just got back a few weeks ago and as soon as she found our number she called us. This call was in the middle of planning, right when we were wondering how we were going to find some new investigators. It’s great that she didn’t get lost in the year between the last lesson and now. She and her husband will soon be preparing for baptism.

Another blessing from the Lord happened last night. It was about 8 o’clock and I wasn’t sure who to visit, but I felt like going by and visiting this less active member family who has a daughter of 11 years but was never baptized. The missionaries in the past have said that they have tried and that the family doesn’t want to come back and no one in the ward has any idea why they don’t want to. So we got there and we sat down with the father and after in little bit of chatting we asked if we could talk to the daughter. She came out and we decided to teach a first lesson. We taught to her needs instead of teaching all the points and basically just taught about the Holy Ghost, Joseph Smith and Baptism. When we talked about the Holy Ghost I turned and asked the father when a time he felt the Holy Ghost was and what did it feel like. He told a story were his mother was about to pass away and so his dad gave her a blessing. After the blessing she healed rapidly and lived many years longer. It was then where he began to cry and said that it was in that moment, that he knew without a doubt this church is true. We found out that the reason they have not been coming to church is because the wife lost her testimony. We set a date for the young girl to be baptized and will be talking with the mother next week to try to help her gain a testimony back.

I had a cool experience this week with the Morales family where we dropped by their house and the daughter and son-in-law was there. The son-in-law is not a member and the daughter had been less active for over a year. To give some background information, the mom had lost her eyesight about a year ago from not controlling her diabetes very well. She’s not completely blind, but let’s just says she can’t really see our faces and she can’t read books. Anyway she was not feeling very well and so I offered to give her a blessing, she accepted. In the blessing I remember saying stuff about how she was felling and then something about how her sight would be healed if she tried to read the Book of Mormon every day, even though she can’t see the letters very clearly. Well a week later I found out that she has been trying to read the best she can every day, and on Friday she went in for a checkup and was planning on setting a time for another eye surgery because after the first one, it only got worse. They were surprised to tell her that she wasn’t going to need it because for some reason her eyesight was healing at a faster rate than was expected even after the first surgery? I have a feeling that the daughter will soon be coming back and that we will have another person to teach. Its moments like these that make my testimony grow of how powerful the Book of Mormon is and how the priesthood is real.

Well that is all for this week. I love you all.

Elder Daniel Stewart

El Dia de las Brujas…

Hey Everyone,

How are you all doing? I hope you week went well and everyone had a safe Halloween. Things over here are doing really well. We are still working hard and the training is coming along.  This week we are focusing on the plan of salvation and practicing it together. We had a zone meeting last week and there are a lot of things happening in the field of missionary work. Sister Miller's brother-in-law is now the new MTC President and she says that there were 8000 new calls going out the weeks following Conference and over half of them are young women. And that the MTC is freaking out because they have nowhere to put them. We got news that the max amount of missionaries for our mission went up from 170 to 250 missionaries and that starting next year they will be opening up 41 new areas in the mission. They are saying there will be 2 sets or more missionaries in every single ward or branch in the mission. He said that a lot of us will be trainers probably several times. I just think of all that greenie fire coming in.

Well I don’t know too much about the election but the change in the missionary ages points to me that God plans to have Romney win. I would bet all the money Romney has that somewhere in his patriarchal blessing it says something about a presidential call and that he is not just doing it because he wants to. If he gets elected I have a feeling that he will have a lot of success making friendships with other countries, especially the ones that we do not currently have missionaries in. That is just my thoughts, not any doctrine, but I also have been noticing some parallels in the Book of Mormon. Reading through Mormon this week we see that even though the people where wicked, God put Mormon at the head of the armies, even though he had already resigned from the position once. This was right before the end of the Nephites, within 30 years of them being wiped out. But I won’t spoil it for you. Read through Mormon and you will see for yourselves.

Well this week has been kind of slow. We had Halloween and we had a party with the district because we are not able to go out past 6 o’clock. We are teaching this new family called the Ruiz family. We found them knocking doors and the story is pretty funny. It was Elder Keddington's turn to knock and he knocked on this door and out came their 20 year old daughter who had just signed a modeling contract for 4 years. And he froze before he could even get out a greeting. After a minute or so I took over trying my hardest not to laugh and she said that we could come back. So the next night we went over and sat down with the whole family of 6. We watching finding faith in Christ and didn’t say anything about the restoration yet. But I did tell them that we had a lesson to teach them and they said we could come back. The next time we went back I was with our district leader on exchanges and just completely knocked them out with the spirit. A few days later we found out that the mother was so affect by the story of Joseph Smith that during her lunch break at work she made the mistake of looking him up on Google, wanting to know about his life. I knew something was up when they didn’t call us back to confirm the appointment. So we went over there anyway. Even though she had read some horrible stuff on Joseph Smith we saved the lesson and that family and committed them to read and pray.

Well that is all basically for this week.

-Elder Stewart

Getting out of the ruts...

Hola Friends and Family,

How is everyone doing? Hope everyone is doing well and is active at church and visiting the temple as often as possible. I have heard that there are some pretty crazy things going on in the world right now and I want you all to know that I pray for you and that the support and letters you send me really do help. I had a pretty good week this week. Not a ton of things happened as in progression of our investigators, but I feel like I made another step this week on my own progression.

The President asked me this week to teach something to the young men ages 15-18 that were getting ready to serve missions. I had about 7 boys, 3 of them that where sure about going on a mission. We had a really good discussion and I actually learned a lot from the Holy Ghost myself. The fact of the matter is that we are going through, right now, the time period right before the coming of Jesus Christ. There are prophecies made in the Bible right now that talk about how the Church of God will be persecuted for a time before Christ shall return and if what some of the members here are telling me is true, The Church of Christ is getting torn down all over the media. Now I’m not here to talk about the theories of the end of the world, but I learned and talked to the youth yesterday about what it is going to cost nowadays to make it to the Celestial Kingdom. One of the points that came to my head while talking is that in our days You Need to Go on a Mission. You need to go, why do you think the ages were lowered? It’s because the testimony that someone attains on their mission is what it’s going to take to stay loyal throughout your life. So to all the parents who are raising kids, and to all the youth (Young Men and Young Women) SERVE A MISSION or do anything you can to get your kids there. I hope that my sisters will serve missions.

I talked to them about some of the reasons why they don’t want to go. They said that either 1. They didn’t know enough about the church or the Book of Mormon. Or 2, They don’t know if they can do it or if "It is for them." If there is anything that I can tell the youth right now is Do Not Let Satan put those things in your head. If you don’t know enough and you don’t start learning now, you will NEVER know enough to survive the last days. The other two to me are ridiculous, Jesus Christ promises you protection, power, knowledge of what to do, where to go, and what to say. Ill you have to be able to do is be obedient. At the "It is not for me is the biggest lie that Satan has ever told you. If you want to live with God, Jesus Christ, and your family forever, then the mission "IS FOR YOU."

I don’t say this as to try to make people feel bad for not wanting to serve a mission, but I do this because I really do care about you. I love it here, the people I have met, the things I have learned, and the Testimony that I have gained. I love my mission. I know that Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world and the Son of God, that he died for us, and that he lives! I know that the Book of Mormon is true, and therefore the Church of Jesus Christ is on the earth again. 

I love you all. Haz lo Justo!

Elder Daniel Stewart 

Another Good week here in Texas....

Hey Everyone,

I hope everyone is doing well and enjoying the fall weather. Things are going really well here and the weather is just beautiful. This week it was between 70-85 degrees. We had a pretty good week this week where we spent most of our time trying to find new investigators and get some referrals from the members. Since we have baptized almost all of our current investigators, we have needed to start looking for more. Marsha was given the Holy Ghost this week which alleviated my fears of her not receiving it and falling off the path. I was super happy and relieved that it went through.

This week we had President and Sister Miller come all the way down here to Fabens, for interviews. They do interviews in the apartments during October and it was nice to have them in ours. They said it was very clean and that the Spirit could be felt there. Part of the reason we keep it so clean is due the cockroaches that we have that freak me out. We have a lot of them and have been battling to kill them all the past two weeks. I caught some bigger ones and keep them in this jar. I know, it’s nasty, oh well.

Well my companion has made some big steps this week. He for his first time had menudo (I had to make him eat it) and Chi Charon which is pig skins that idk if I told you about. He absolutely hated it. I don’t think I have laughed that hard in a while when I first saw his face with the first bite of cow stomach/ intestine. Training a greenie brings back so many memories, and also makes me realize how different I am now. How much I know and how my interests have changed.

One of the things we focused on this week is revelation through the Holy Ghost. We had a district meeting this week on helping our investigators receive their answer through the Holy Ghost and how to recognize an answer given to them. We had one lesson in particular with an investigator named Lily. We had been trying to get her to read the Book of Mormon and she has said that she just hasn’t had the time to read it or they have been really tired lately, or that they forgot. But when people say that it is because they don't fully understand how to use it or what it can do for their lives. So we sat down with her and talked about how important receiving an answer would be for her life. We read Moroni 10:3-5. And then all of a sudden she says "I wanted to ask you, what is the Holy Ghost." that’s when it hit me that most of the time we just assume that they know who the Holy Ghost is. Growing up in the church we were always taught what it is and what his job is. We then started asking if she knows or has ever felt what the Holy Ghost feels like. We then were able to pinpoint a moment in the past where she did; she was so excited and is very excited to look for that same answer when she reads the Book of Mormon. I felt like it was a huge turning point him her conversion.

Anyway that is all for this week,

Love you,

-Elder Stewart