2 Exchanges, 1 Zone Meeting, 0 Hours of Sleep

Okay, so not literally 0 hours of sleep, but that's what I feel like.  :P  But yeah!  This has been an amazing week, completely full of miracles!  I just love that as time goes on, it becomes more and more obvious to me, my companions, other missionaries, members, and the people that we teach that the Lord really is doing His work!  We just have to choose to be part of it.  As imperfect as we might feel, and as much as we feel like it's not our job or don't have a part, the Lord always qualifies those who participate in His work!  He gives them His Spirit, Power, and everything necessary to be the ministers of truth that He needs us to be.

Elder Hubert and Elder Lee

Last Tuesday was a great day for me for feeling the Spirit.  We as a zone (all 18 companionships in the South-Milwaukee area) met together in a city called Kenosha and we had a zone training meeting!  I got to conduct the meeting, so that was pretty fun.  It was great to see that we had a group of missionaries that was so ready to invite the Spirit, and the best part is that the Spirit came because the Lord knew that these missionaries were going to act on the impressions that they got!  :D  During the meeting, we received a training from the Sister Training Leaders about how to more effectively teach from the Book of Mormon, and then we watched a couple videos, and then we were able to give a training about how to develop and study Christlike Attributes, because this work really is all about becoming like Him!  The Spirit was so strong, and I learned things just like everybody else.  I especially love the opportunity to be used as an instrument in His hands to testify of truth.  It's incredible!  As soon as the meeting was over, our first exchange began.  I got to go with Elder Brand on our exchange in the Milwaukee area, and we had a great time.  It's kind of funny because he's dating a girl that I went to high school with, and that was kind of weird…  :P  But we were able to visit the Hernandez family and finally make contact with them again, and also were able to visit with Ramon Ruiz and Mario and Angelina (all different lessons) and teach towards their needs and help them come more unto Christ.

Items from Zone Training

Thursday we were actually able to work in our own area together (like the only time the entire week), and we were able to do some weekly planning which was a blessing!  But the miracle today was when we got to go and visit with Annette Ruiz and her family, including her non-member husband Isidro, and we had a powerful lesson answering several of his questions about the Temple and things like that, and rather than inviting him to be baptized, we invited him to prepare himself and his family to be sealed as a family for time and all eternity in August of 2016 - he said that he'd think about it.  So, hopefully that means YES!

Thursday night and into Friday we had exchanges again, and this time I went with Elder Fry in my area.  We had a really good time, and were able to find a family together, and were also able to teach Darleen and her amazing kids over in Cudahy.  I really hope that they are able to come to church because I definitely know that it will help them a lot!  I mean, the kids even say that they want to come, and Darleen tells us that maybe they'll come - they just need to come and reap the blessings!  :D  For their lesson though, we taught them about covenants and focused on how covenants include the sacrament, baptism, and the Temple, and invited them to prepare themselves to participate in those things.  They said that they would!  So hopefully soon we'll see them progressing!  We were also able to teach Jesus Franco, and we taught him all about the Word of Wisdom and why it's important, and he told us that he'd live it!  What a blessing!  But yeah, those were somethings that definitely needed to be taken care of.  Hopefully he'll be able to meet his date for later this month!

Saturday morning we got to play soccer with everybody and that was a blast - the only problem is that it was just SO HOT!  So we were all sweating TONS but it was okay because it was fun.  Later, we got to go and visit the Munoz family and that was fun because we hadn't seen them all week!  So we stopped by and let them borrow the movie Meet the Mormons so hopefully they'll watch it in their own time and the non-member part of the family will be able to learn from it.  :)  We also were able to make contact with Justin Vasquez, who we weren't able to teach last week at all.  We had Jared Rivera come with us and he did a great job helping us teach about the Sacrament!  Also, we had dinner with the Vallejo-Ruiz family and they gave us something called a Pizza Cone, which is basically like an ice cream cone, but made out of pizza!!  It's so good!!!  And then after that, we had an amazing lesson with the Velasco family when the Martinez family came with us, and then the Luevano's just showed up as we were teaching them about Joseph Smith, but that was okay because they were able to help us out, too! :)

Saturday night my companion and I realized that we didn't have very many new investigators for the week.  So, we decided to say a specific prayer to God and ask him to help us find a family that would progress in the gospel, but we decided to be specific and ask specifically for it to be a family of 5, (parents and 3 kids) and that we would find them as we were walking on the street and we would see the mom and dad outside on the porch talking, and that they would have 3 kids and that they would invite us back to hear more.  So, SUNDAY came around and in the evening we were tracting, and a man opened the door to us and we taught him and his wife and one of their kids, and turns out that they are a family of 8!  So, we thought, maybe that was an answer to our prayer, but it wasn't exactly what we asked for, so I guess we need to keep on trying.  So, we went over to a different area and pulled up in our car, and got out of the car, and were walking and we saw a couple sitting on their porch talking, so we went up to them and we found out that they have 3 kids!  Holy cow!  So now we have two new families that we found as of yesterday, and the Lord answered our specific prayer by blessing us with a great family!  :D

Another huge miracle that happened on Sunday was that I got to go to a dinner appointment with a member of the Milwaukee branch that lives in Waukesha, and who came and visited me while I was there?  My recent convert Rosa Vasquez!!!  But yeah, she was SO excited to see me, it was amazing to see her as well!  I was just so happy for her, because she and I are going to be going to the temple next month!  :D  Also, I forgot to mention, that Jesus Franco came to church today, so that was a miracle, too!

Elder Hubert and Rosa Vasquez!

Love you tons, have a great week everybody!  Keep on praying for the missionaries, we need it tons!

--Elder Nate Hubert