Championship Foosball Companionship

This week was super awesome with Elder Nezarez!! He has been a really fun companion who has also pushed me harder and has taught me a lot in just a week.  We have been going out to run every morning (since I can´t get fat my last couple of months!) and it has been great.  We run about 3-4 km (about 2 miles) around a track at a park by our house.  The first day we timed it and got the whole lap in 15 minutes, but we decided that by the end of the cycle we need to be running it in 12 minutes.  We are also going to run a 5K one day since my family all showed me up last week.  I have also found out that we are a pretty aewsome foosball companionship.  We are visiting a less active family that has foosball and they always love playing with us but can never beat Nevarez and I haha.  We have also been playing a game with a dog at our house (Camila) where we try to kick a little ball back and forth without her grabbing it.  It is actually pretty fun haha, our record right now is 35, but we have a goal to get 100 by the end of the cycle.  So we have been working harder than ever, but having a lot of fun while we do it too.

This week we were greatly blessed in the Lord´s work.  We ended up finding a new family of 4 yesterday (The Soria Familu) who are family members of our upstairs neighbors.  The Mom (Paty) and the two kids (Jorge and Felipe) are just awesome and I love them so much.  They literally live right in front of the church which will be nice, and whenever we teach they always have the best questions and are super interested.  I made it my goal to baptize at least 7 more people before I go home and if I could just bring this family to Christ I would be more that grateful and happy for all of the tons of success I have had in my mission.  I also had the opportunity to do a baptismal interview this week which are always cool experiences, and our zone is doing great.  Elder Nevarez and I are reading 10 pages every day from Doctrine and Covenants for companionship study and made it a goal to finish it all this cycle, and this week  I will finish the Book of Mormon for the 5th time in my mission (probably the deepest study I have done up to this point). This week I will also finally complete the task of finishing all of Jesus the Christ and this cycle I am going to read all of the New Testament.  It is crazy how much I have truly fallen in love with reading, studying, and pondering the Holy Scriptures.  How grateful I am for them in my life, the evidence of how much our Heavenly Father loves us and truly a way to bring power and the spirit into our lives.  How so much of the time we take the scriptures and words of the prophets for granted, but I know that they are true, and feel deeply blessed to have them in my life.  I am working hard to achieve my reading and study goals since I am starting to kinda realize,  I don´t have as much time in the mission left as it seems like... Sometimes just when you want time to go by slower, it starts going by faster.    I am really just trying to take advantage of this special and sacred time I have as a missionary to study and understand the scripture and especially to bring others to repentance.  One thing that Elder Nevarez has really taught me this week is the power and authority we truly have as missionaries.  Although we all can help and have a part in the missionary work, no one else in the world, besides the Apostles, have the divine power, duty, and privlege of preaching the Gospel and bringing others unto Christ through baptism and repentance.  As I get older in the mission, sometimes I feel like I wish  I had this same knowledge and understanding of the importnace of our sacred calling and am trying my best to make the most of these two years or 3 months that I still have left, because they will never come back and I will never have an opportunity quite like it.  It is sometimes sad to think that in the moment, we aren´t always as grateful or don´t always make the most of our opporunities because we don´t truly understand or appeciate them until they are coming to an end.  So that is why I have always made the decision to "leave it all out on the floor" and make the most of every moment in my life.  How blessed we all are to live in this great day.  How grateful I am to be a missionary and especially to be a member of the true and living Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints!

Well this week should be great as well, my second to last zone conference which is kind of crazy to think about, and with our ward mission leader we are planning English Classes every Friday at 6:00 since we have our normal church building back and some other ward activites.  This last Saturday we had a ward missionary activity for the young men and woman where they had to "live a day in the mission".  They had competitions like ironing their clothes, cooking breakfast, doing exercise (everything a missionary does daily) and then at the end we went out with them and taught lessons to investigators.  I know it was a really cool experience for them and they all seemed really excited to serve a misison of their own one day.  Finally, this past week I ate tacos 6 times! (5 of the times in 3 days haha) which is all the more reason to keep running in the morning.  But seriously, nothing else is quite like the tacos al pastor here and I will especially be taking advantage of this blessing the most I can in my time left here.  Thanks for all of your emails, prayers, and support and love and miss you guys tons! Have a great week!

Elder Tyler Clark