Life in the middle of nowhere......

Hey Everyone!

I hope everything is doing well and that you had an awesome holiday. I’m doing pretty well. The last week has been pretty successful, and I feel like it’s a lot easier out here. People living in small towns are a lot kinder and friendly than people living in a huge city, and so people are generally super nice to us and there is not a ton of opposition like there was in El Paso. Elder Hernandez and I have been doing pretty good. This is the first time that I feel like a super duper old missionary. I have been in the field double the time my companion has and I’m the oldest Spanish missionary in the district. I never thought that would be the case but then again here I am. And it’s nice when we do district meeting in Spanish and everyone asks for help with words and also comments on my Spanish. But I keep the pride from getting to me ha-ha. Here in Fabens we have the biggest truck probably in the mission that is the biggest thing I have ever driven. It’s like a tank and built for off-road.

We had some cool experiences this week. We got a referral from this less active member of the church who is looking to come back. The sad part is that he is an ex-missionary and that he messed up somewhere down the line and stopped coming to church. But he is looking now to come back and be fully active. His wife is not a member and we had a lesson with her on Saturday. We taught one of the most powerful lessons of my mission there. Not only was the first vision and the testimonies of the missionaries so strong, but the returning ex-missionary bore his testimony of the church and its truth when we asked him to throughout the lesson, the spirit could be felt as a real person in the room and she was brought to tears many times. This puzzled me at first because he knew and we knew that he had not been doing the things he needed to for the past 10 years and yet the spirit was so strong. I gained a testimony of repentance and humility right there. When a man has made a real desire to humble himself and make the decision to repent and come back, he is often times at his most powerful point. I realized that I need to constantly let myself be humbled, in order to have the same power and the power I desire with my testimony. She accepted a baptism date for 3 weeks and came to church the next day. Including reading the section we gave her to read. I’m excited to continue to see her and him grow and progress and come back to the church. We also had 3 non members come to church this week which is such a great feeling. But even greater is the fact that they stayed for the baptism of 2 young girls at the end. It is said that 80% of investigators that see a baptism will be baptized. I’m hoping this is true.

Anyway, that is all this week.

Love you all,

Elder Daniel G Stewart 

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Missionary Postcards

Pictures August 2012

Getting the bullet.....

Missionary postcards

Hey Everyone,

How are you all doing? Good I hope, even though school has started. Haha. I’m doing ok. We had transfers this week and I found out that I was getting the 6 week bullet. This means I only got 1 transfer in the best Spanish ward in the mission. Not only that, the area I was in got closed and merged in with the other set of Elders. All of our investigators, all my hard work on fixing the place and the area was just given to them. And my companion Elder Hurst was sent to the 3rd area in the ward even though he has had 3 transfers there already. I’m down here in the farthest area from ALB. In the middle of nowhere Texas in a town called Fabens. On Google it says that Fabens has a population of 8,000+ but that’s a lie. There honestly cannot be more than a thousand. The town takes 5 mins to drive all the way through. But this is what I thought my mission would really be like. Just roughing it on dirt roads and dying of heat haha. But oh well.

On Monday I got to go see my recent converts Raul and Alicia Castillo, who are still on track for the temple and doing fine. It was nice to see the surprise on their faces when I just showed up on their door step after 6 months. I also saw my favorites the Jorquera family from my first area. And hang out with them for a little while.  I was waiting for transfers. Anyway, my new companion is Elder Hernandez, from San Bernardino, Cali. He is Half Mexican half Tongan and speaks little Spanish. He has been out for 7 months now and spent all that time here in Fabens. He loves it, so I guess there is some hope for me. The Branch here is literally just 2 giant families that are all related. My new address is PO BOX 2754 Fabens TX 79838.  The apartment is a lot smaller than my last one and I’m back to a swamp cooler. Its rough I know. Anyone that went to a 3rd world country can just skip this part though. Haha.

Not much more to talk about though.

Love you,

Elder Stewart

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