June 20, 2011

Before I forget, I tried taking money off of my PLatinum card and it rejected my PIN. It's the same as my other card, and my account online, right?

Wow, it's sad to hear about all the fires up there! That's pretty scary, but all the life that will follow will be really pretty in the mountains!

This week was full of miracles in the zone. It was Artigas's bday Sunday and all the schools had required activities, and none of the members went to church but the branch pres. and family, and investigators. The same thing happened in all the wards in the Stake, but all the people preparing for baptism went in the zone so that was a HUGE miracle! The Ferreiras are excited for their baptism Saturday. Yesterday we had a FHE and made torta fritas and played UNO. They are doing super well and Ing Wei the oldest son (18) we have him pretty excited to serve a mission. Hopefully he's done with cigarettes. He said it would be hard to quit, but he only smokes 2 a day, so we challenged him to man it up and quit cold turkey. Young people quit so much easier than old people!!!

All morning I worked on binding my Preach My Gospel in spanish that I've had my whole mission to gift to Javier Weisbach in Salto my convert that today turns 1 in the church :) (By the way... HAPPY BIRTHDAY COLTON!!!!) and now he's nineteen and should be done with his mission papers in 2-3 weeks. Just has a couple interviews more and medical papers to go. Hopefully he'll have his call by the time you come to pick me up and maybe I can convince him to wait for us to open it up :) haha I sent a letter to his dad and his uncle (Terecita's dad, she told me she chats with you guys on facebook haha) challenging them to listen again to the missionaries, so I hope to hear a good miracle from them. They need to get to the temple!!!!!!!!

We're doing really well here in Fray Bentos, I'm learning a lot about working with church leaders. I love this city a lot and hope to stay here for the rest of my mission. Elder Stevens is a great comp, we're working well together and he'll be a great friend after too. We have been doing divisions several days of the week with missionaries in the other cities for training and these last 2 weeks its my turn, so I'm pretty tired of traveling haha It feels so good to sleep in my own bed.

We had the zone conference with Elder Foster of the 70 on Thursday. It was on the doctrine of prayer and on working through missionaries. He put missionaries into 3 columns and showed us the success that we'd have in each. The first was missionaries working by their own efforts, the second members serving the missionaries, and the third was missionaries serving the members. We're about halfway between 1 and 2 as a mission and our goal is to get into column 2. Then the challenge is convincing missionaries that they can't do this work on their own and humbling them into service. It'll be lots of fun haha We have the Lords promise that we can double baptisms in the next year, so there's no excuse not to do so.

Well, I'm out of time ya, but I love you all a lot and I'll let you know which days we'll be where and hotel info next week. Don't be trunky!!!! haha Levi be humble, Colton be smart, Kayli be happy, and Mom and Dad be patient. I'll try and be all of those. Good luck with preparation for you new job dad, and congrats!
Stay safe and work hard in all you do!
Elder Magnusson