"Re-inactivating"? (July 29, 2013)

Elche District (oh, Calvin swears his Comp won't be cutting his hair again)

[Exchanges with Scott then Suzie] 

estoy aqui. i want to apologize about that email above [last week]. i was whining so much and for no reason. i feel bad about it. by emails shouldnt be about that. i wanted to come back and say this the next day but, i couldnt. really things arent bad at all. i wish we worked a little differently, but we had 25 lessons last week and our district average was 19. we had 8 new investigators as a district and we had 5 of them. things arent bad. i'm just a whiner.

On Mon, Jul 29, 2013 at 4:37 PM, Scott Wiley <wiley.r.scott@gmail.com> wrote:

I understand but also don't feel like you need to sanitize your letters to me. I understand what you're going through. There's no shame in pushing to do the best you can. 

I'm in Idaho taking M to visit Rexburg. Heather and Nate and kids are here for a family reunion so were having breakfast with them right now.

[Calvin] nice tell them all i say hello. i think i just get angry because i want to be the senior companion. i feel like i dont stretch myself enough because there's someone more experienced than me. a lot of my friends from my group are training now and i was a little upset and confused that i wasnt training. but its ok i need to be here.

[Calvin to Suzie] the beginning of this week was reaaaally long. and i kept thinking "this is only week one of the transfer..." but it got better. I think I'm just getting bored of the area. Every week is exactly the same. We go to this pueblo on this day and we teach these people. It's fine though I guess...

Wednesday we met with Miguel, an investigator. He is still reading the Book of Mormon like crazy, and finished 2 Nephi in two days. We were going to talk to him about 2 Nephi 31 (Gospel of Christ/Baptism), and when he opened up to it, he had underlined and marked ALL THE VERSES ABOUT BAPTISM. There's a verb in spanish 'escrudiñar' which means to read with attention and to examine and understand. He was totally escrudiñaring. We weren't going to set a baptismal date with him because we didn't want to to push him too much, but after we saw how much he had read we decided to. I asked if he would follow the example of Christ and be baptized and he replied by saying 'Claro' which is like, yes/duh. It was really cool. We decided for the 18th of August. But then, we saw him later that night, and he said he wanted to be baptized a week earlier, because the Stake is having a temple trip on the 24th, and he wants to make sure that he can go to the temple with his family for that. Of course we said that was ok. And then he said he'd only do it if I baptized him. So that was really cool. So a year ago in this family, only the father was a member. Then last november the mother was baptized. Then we baptized one of their sons, David, a few weeks ago. And now their other son is going to be baptized in a couple weeks. It's really cool to be able to bring the family closer together in the Gospel. 

We've been trying to show some of the videos the church has put out about members being part of the missionary work. I don't know if you all have seen the video "I'll go where you want me to go" with the family in it. It's realllllly cool. You should all watch it, everyone. Saturday we went to our investigators house and used his weight set for a little while. It was nice to be able to bench press for the first time in a while...I'm still pretty sore.

Sunday Elder León and I had to speak in Church about the new vision of the missionary work. It would have been really helpful except we only had 30 people at church...I talked about how the members need to treat our investigators as members, inviting them to activities and stuff. The investigators shouldn't have to be dragged around by the missionaries everywhere. O yeah and I was trying to say that we need to reactive the less active members, but I accidentally said we need to reinactivate them....to be reinactivated to have to be reactived though, so it kind of makes sense...

Today for p-day we went to Elche. We got two new hermanas opening a new area there so now we have 10 people in our district. hermans Kunz is one of them. She's  from my group in the MTC and she's really cool and a good missionary. She's already training her second missionary, and she's the senior companion opening a new area. So she's a stud.

The BYU-Utah rivalry - translated into spanish.

that's crazy about the ward. how are they going to fit 4 wards in the same building? 

i'm so homesick because of cato, it's getting to be hard for me to talk about him with others because i lose all focus on everything else... 

our mission president said that we will talk about the dress standards next zone conference which will prob be in a few weeks. i haven't bought any khakis yet but i want to.

i handled my money pretty well this month. I'm all out right now but we should get paid today or tomorrow.

Gatorade is probably here but I won't get it until zone meeting so in a week or two.

yeah you can send a package here. try and put a bunch of stickers/pictures of crosses and Christ and mary so that it doesnt get searched through customs.

yeah we heard about the missionary on the train. the members are going crazy over it. posting stuff on facebook and calling us about it. we watched an interview he had with fox or someone. pretty cool. great way to start the mission!

love you much and miss you!!