Challenges and the Chicken Dance

Weekly update from Temuco, Chile: It has been another challenging and learning week for me. Every day I am faced with new problems that are different than I have ever experienced in my life and through them I am able to learn and grow. I have experienced about every emotion possible here, ranging from the greatest happiness to the greatest sadness. I know that the things that I am going through here are shaping my life to what the Lord wants for me. Every difficulty and test that I face, I thank the Lord for the opportunity to be humbled and learn something new. It is so surprising to me that amount of change I have seen in my life in such a short 4 months, not that I have changed my personality but the importance and priorities of things in my life have definitely been shaped to what they should be. But as I said this week I have had some challenging times, but also I have had some really good experiences.

We played basketball in our church clothes against one of our investigators and his friend. It was pretty funny, we had all the neighborhood kids surround around the court watching us 2v2. It was pretty hard to play in church shoes but the gringos did come out on top:)

Also another thing that happened this week that was pretty funny was we had a ward activity. And as some of you probably saw, we taught the old men of Catrihuala the Chicken Dance and performed it in front of the ward haha. My mom knows where the video is if any of you want to see it. It was pretty dang funny trying to teach the men it, they were getting so confused and it is the simplest dance ever.

We also did some service this week and cleaned a "front lawn" of one of the members. I have never seen so many rocks and weeds in my entire life. By the end of it was just all dirt and I´m pretty sure we are going back another day to plant a garden. Just gardening in Chile, wow.

This week I had an intercambio with Elder Currulef, he´s from Argentina but he knows English pretty well! It´s so funny when Latinos know English because they all know sayings and quotes from movies and it is so hilarious when they say them. Anyways we had 3 appointments and they all fell... So yeah we contacted all day. It was really hard, we didn´t have any success. It´s difficult to think that I am going to love Chileans after days like that haha they were pretty mean that day. They say some pretty rough stuff and even the nice ones won´t listen to our message most of the time. But it´s all good, we´re working hard.

This week and recently I have been impressed and amazed by something. The amount of trust that the ward members have in us, as missionaries. I mean I am an 18 year old boy who has pretty much just messed around his whole life, working hard in school and sports but never having any real hard challenges, but still the ward members share things with us and ask for help in things that I never would expect they would. But that is why we are here, we are representatives of Jesus Christ and I am so grateful for the opportunity to have these people here. 

More about the ward activity, it was a countries theme and the ward gave the USA to us... So Elder Miller cooked his famous friend chicken, and I had to give a testimony on the difference between the United States and Chile. Dogs and fences, I refrained from the urge to say how the USA was better than Chile in EVERY way haha jk but yeah that and the chicken dance after.

Facts about my life in Chile right now: We only have 3 light bulbs in our house so we have to carry them around to the rooms we want light in, it is a million degrees outside when we work, and I´m thinking of inventing some missionary shorts and sending them to President Monson to see if they´re good.

Okay a really cool experience that happened this week to wrap things up. So we have these two really good investigators named Patricia and Paolina. They were able to come to the Stake Conference yesterday. Patricia works with the Stake president in our stake but he didn´t know that she was investigating our church. During his talk in the stake conference, he saw her in the congregation. At the end of the talk, fighting tears, he addressed her, and bore one of the strongest testimonies I have ever heard. It was incredible to see the sincerity and love in his voice and you could really see such a great joy that he had from just seeing her there. They were both crying by the end, it was amazing. This is the work of the Lord and this is His true church in the world today, I can bear witness of it. I love you all and hope that you guys can stay strong in your faith and invite others to come unto Christ and the truth as well. Until next week.

Elder Clay