May 4th - 10th

Hello hello!

This was a great week, it was awesome to get to talk to you guys via skype, it really made me happy and it was very calming for me. It was pretty fun talking to Austin in spanish!! haha. He looks like he is doing great. I hope you had a great mothers day mom and nat. Matt, thanks for showing me the a thing or two on the new ace, it sounds great and The Nat Parks sure did fill the empty spot in my heart for the next year. haha. Syds looks great with her rebel hair. I liked Chip`s rebel hair too. I forget to tell him that "quiero taco bell" though, I know that he would have understood. But that was truly a very happy hour, I am glad that everything went great, I miss and love you guys!

This week was good, nothing very new to report! We are just looking for new investigators, we found a few potencial investigators that we are going to visit this week but other than that we are working with Omar that will get baptized in 3 weeks! This past week was my companion´s birthday, so we bought a cake and eat it with our favorite family, Navarro family. They are awesome. I have picutres but I forgot to bring my camera! We also ate another cake us four in the apartment as well. It was a very good day, I think he was really happy. 

This coming week we are probably just going to keep working hard looking for new investigators! I would like to bear my testimony this week on the importance of always remembering every day the blessings the Lord has given us. It is really quite the miracle the family that I have, the opportunites that I have had in my life to go to school, to have a good home and live in such a beautiful place, and most of all the gospel that God has given me. If we remember our blessings everyday, we remember our duty to God to willingly serve him with all our heart, and when we are happily willingly serving God, that is when we live the most happy and enjoy all that God gives us. 

I hope that you all have a great week this week, thank you for your emails and for all your support!!

Elder Miles

May 5th

Hola hola!!

This was a good week! Transfers were yesteryday so thats why I didnt write, even though nothing changed for us! I am still here in Armenia with Elder Herrera. So thats great, I am super excited to keep working here. The best part will be the baptism of Omar the 16th of may! Wooo! We are still working with him and he is progressing great. He went to church this past week and he even went to a young single adults dance/party with all the youth in this branch. How cool is that?! He already has a lot of friends and family in the church and he is excited to become a member himself. Also on the 16th of May we are going to watch via broadcast the dedication of the Cordoba Argentina temple, which is the mission nextdoor to us! Its fall here now in Argentina.. Its been getting a lot bit chilly here this past week! They say it will get pretty cold. I am LOVING the cold weather. Tomorrow is the birthday of my companion, so we are going to buy cake and ice cream and stuff so that will for sure be pretty fun. 

FAMILYYY!!! This sunday we will be skyping for mothers day!!! WOOOO! So, I will be calling you guys on Skype at 4:00 p.m ARGENTINA TIME, which is 12:00 UTAH TIME. This skype will be 1 hour long. I know that if Matt and Syd are in town they will probably go to church that morning so you might have to leave church early to be there at 12 if you want to talk to me! Converse amongst yourselves about where you will all meet and make sure the skype is working good! I am stoked to talk to you guys!! 

Well thats really about all for this week, I hope that you all have great week.

Love, Elder Miles

April 27th

The first picture is Roberto, Elder Herrera and I outside of the church in front of the sign. Then Roberto right after he got bapitzed. And the last picture is Elder Pacheco and I. I just put that one on there because we are truly best friends and I am going to go visit him in Chile someday. 

April 20th - 26th

Hola hola!!

I hope that everyone is doing awesome. This was a truly great week for us! I will remember it for sure for the rest of my life. First of all, Dallin H. Oaks came to Resistencia and talked to all of the missionaries on friday. An area seventy also came, named Elder Gonzalez. President Franco and his wife both gave talks, the area seventy and his wife, and Elder Oaks and his wife gave talks. We all got to shake the hand of Elder Oaks, it was pretty cool. It was also a great day because all the missionaries from all over the entire mission came together for this meeting. So that means that I got to meet up with all the missionaries in my MTC group that are in my mission, which was fun because I havent seen some of them since the MTC and it was great to see and talk to them again. (Photos attached). It was good to see how far we have all come, all that we have learned and how much we have all grown up. The sisters from my MTC group are already half way done with their missions, how crazy. I also got to see a lot of the missionaries from my old area, which truly are some of my very best friends. (Elder Nava, Peña, Bott (Pictured attached)). It was a stellar day, super spiritually uplifting.

What I learned from Elder Oaks:

Elder Oaks spoke a lot about different topics and it was all very very helpful. What I think that I liked the most was the enfasis (is that a word?) on teaching our investigators what a blessing the sabbath day holy can be in their life. Keeping the sabbath day holy, meaning going to church and eliminating distractions that day, can give us so much spiritual power to be able to have a good week all the rest of the days of the week. He also took a lot of time to talk about how to recieve revelation and inspiration. What is it? Do you see it? Feel it?.. He talked about how to discern if the Spirit really is the spirit telling us to do something or if it is just our thoughts. Something that I really liked that he said was "When I recieve a spiritual prompting to do something that I WANT to do, I am suspicious. It may just be my thought. But if I recieve a spiritual prompting to do something I DONT WANT to do, I do it immediately". And that is something really true! We have to overcome the natural resentment to do hard/uncomfortable things that we dont want to do when we feel like the spirit is trying to tell us do something. I learned a lot from Elder Oaks, it was a great meeting. 

ALSO, this week was the baptism of ROBERTOOO!! Woooo!!! It all went great. Well, almost. The water for the baptismal font didnt work again so we had to fill up the baptismal font with buckets of water, but I am used to that by now. A lot of members came to support Roberto and it all went really smoothly. A member (Antonio) baptized Roberto. Elder Pacheco, Morrin, Herrera and I all sang a "I heard him come" for the closing song, it was very spiritual. Roberto was really happy and it was great to see someone enter the waters of baptism. It was the first baptism that Armenia 1 has had in over a year (thank you zone leaders for the baptism! ;) haha. His confirmation the next day went great. We have seen Roberto make a ton of changes in his life to be where he is at. It is great to see results from the work we have put in here!

I forget to mention to you guys that 2 weeks ago a new mission rule passed in our mission that we are no longer to eat lunch with members anymore. So we have to make and cook all our food for ourselves. So.. We are all getting pretty thin!! haha. No, luckily all my companions are great cooks and I am learning how to prepare a lot of great food. 

Unfortunately Omar didnt come to church this week.. dang. So that means we will have to postpone his baptism. We still dont know why he missed church but we are going to go talk to him today! But he is progressing really well, I am stoked for his baptism in a few weeks.  Ruben and Antonella didnt come to church either, so we are going to have to stop passing for them. 

I LOVE my zone leaders and all the fun that we have. I really am enjoying the mission a lot right now and time is going by really fast. I bear my testimony that Christ lives and loves every single one of us individually, life really is easier when we allow him into it. I hope that you all have a great week! THank you for your emails! I am going to send another email with more pictures attached!

Love, Elder Miles

April 13th to 19th

HEY!!!

I hope that all is well for everyone! We had an AWESOME week. Let me tell ya about it. We worked really well with members this week, we had a few really good lessons with Roberto (Our new investigator that use to be the investigator of the zone leaders but he moved into our areas boundaries). We have a member here named Antonio, which is a stud member that loves to help the missionaries. So we had a lot of lecciones with him together with Roberto this week. Roberto came to church this week! He is struggling with a lot of difficult problems right now. One of them is that he wants to be a perfect person and keep all of the commandments 100% before he gets baptized, which is great, but he has a lot of doubts about being baptized. But we saw a ton of progress this week and he has made the decision to follow through with his baptism this saturday!!! Wooooo!!! The first baptism in Armenia 1 in over a year!! We are super happy. We are going to make his baptism this saturday really really special, we are going to work really hard to invite all the members that we can to make him feel really good. He is a super special person to me, he tries so hard to be a good person and is going to be a great member of the church. So that is exciting. ALSO, Omar came to church this week! We were able to work really well with him and members this week. A lot of his uncles and his grandma are members of the church, so we have been inviting them to come and particpate in the lessons with Omar. Omar is 19 years old, and he lives with his grandma. This sunday when he came to church, the members really helped us a ton by making him feel really welcome, he made a lot of friends with the youth. He is now really committed and excited for his baptism on May 18th. I sure hope that I stay another transfer her to be able to be here for it! We also worked really with Ruben this week, Antonio accompanied us to many lessons with him this week too, but unfortunately, he didnt come to church this week again. We are starting to think that we will have to stop teaching him if he doesnt start coming to church, which is really hard and devastating as a missionary because we have come so close to him. This week has been a really rewarding week for me, its been really great to see the results of a lot of hard work. This week has also given me a lot of self confidence as a missionary and as the leader of an area. 

This sunday was also extremely special because we had an area seventy come to our sacrament, Elder Remeu. He is from Buenos Aires. He spoke about the importance of keeping the sabbath day holy. It was a great talk, and I got to shake his hand at the end. We had a record breaking church attendance of 108 this sunday. That is AWESOME for Armenia. ANDDDD!! This week, on friday, Elder Dallin H. Oaks is coming to speak to all the missionaries in our mission!! I am so excited!! He is one of my very favorite apostles, I have read like 3 of his books. So I am just stoked about that. This coming week is for sure going to be a week to remember. 

 Being a missionary is very hard, its sometimes super hard and frustrating to see the difference that all that we do makes. Its a rollercoaster of good days and bad days. Happy days with your companion in unity, struggling days with your companion in unity. But its all worth it, a missionary gains so much more than he could ever lose. Something that I have noticed this week is that the mission isnt just changing my habits, its changing my nature. Which is really different. If I just follow rules because I want to follow rules, that is changing my habits. If I follow a rule out of the love that i have for my savior and Heavenly Father, that is a change in nature. Another example, at the start of my mission, I really didnt like to serve my companion that much. I would hate to wash his dishes. But I am now changing my nature, I love to serve my companion, I look forward to washing his dishes because it makes me feel super good. The mission is a great opportunity to serve God, to whom we are eternally indebited, but we also get a TON out of it for ourselves, we get the great chance to change our nature. A mission is like 10 years of experience condensed into 2. I really am starting to love the mission. I have learned a ton about attitude, about controling my own happiness. I dont mean to brag, I have just noticed great changes in myself and I recommend a mission to everyone that can! 

Well, thats about all. We had a great week. I hope that you all have a great week too. Thank you for all your help and support, thank you for the emails! I bear my testimony as a representative of Jesus Christ that He lives, that He loves us, and that there is a divine purpose for us in this life. The greatest peace and happiness lies for us in his church, which has been restored to earth today. I hope you all have a great week, thank you!

Love, 

Elder T. Miles

6th - 12th of April

Hola!

This week was great for us! I hope everyone had a good week too. I dont have too much to say, just the same old, day in day out! Solid week. This week we have had the opportunity to teach Roberto. He is a really cool guy about 35 years old that lived in the area of my zone leaders, but he recently has had family problems and he moved into our area in armenia 1! Woohoo! So he now belongs to us in our area, and we are the missionaries that are going to teach him and baptize him now. He has a baptismal date for Abril 25th!! So we are going to rob our zone leaders out of having a baptism :) haha. No, it really actually isnt anyone´s baptism, its the Lord´s baptism, but its just funny. We are super excited for his baptism in 2 weeks, all 4 of us, my companion and I and the zone leaders, are going to make it really special for him. The zone leaders have taught him for a while and they have worked really hard to prepare him. 

Also this week my companion got sick for a couple days, he had an allergic reaction to juice that he drank and got rashes on his skin. So we stayed in the apartment for one day. Other than that, we have been teaching Ruben and Antonella, and Omar all this week. And none of them attended church, which is frustrating. We have also been spending a lot of time knocking doors and looking for new investigators, as well as working on reactivating some less active members. I cant believe this transfer is already half over, the weeks have flown by. Everyday we leave the apartment and im always slightly nervous that we are going to run out of plans for the day or we arent going to know what to do, but somehow miraculously, the days always turn out good. We always have somewhere to be. The spirit always guides us somewhere or helps us remember someone. I have definitely seen the hand of the Lord helping us out this transfer! Its getting less hot.. Its starting to rain quite a bit! Its definitely a ton more comfortable, which probably is greatly contribuiting to my happiness. 

This week I read Our Heritage, Our search for Happiness, and True to the Faith, all in one week! They are gospel books basically about the Restoration through Joseph Smith, why the gospel is so important, etc. But really, after reading those 3 books this week, my testimony has become completely solid. I had a super spiritual experience this week where upon finishing Our Heritage, I felt the Spirit so strongly and in that moment, I knew that everything was true, without a doubt in my mind. I have always had my doubts about God and about the restoration growing up, and I never thought I would really ever have a complete 100% testimony like how many people say they have, but after this week I truly do feel like I can say that. I mean I always had a testimony before, but this week it truly just all clicked. Very cool. And so, my testimony really is that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is true. I know that Joseph Smith was a prophet, and I know that through him God has restored his church, the same church he established 2000 years ago. The power of the priesthood, or the power of God, is once again on the earth. And how beautiful is that? God speaks to us today. His church is on the earth today, that helps us to be happy.The atonement is real.

I wish you all a great week, thank you for your emails, they are very much appreciated! 

Elder Miles

Week Ending April 5th

HEYYYY!

Friends and family! I hope everyone is doing well, we had a super good week here. Conference was awesome, I sure loved it a lot. For conference here we all went to the district center (like a stake center, but for districts/branches) and they had the conference transmitted on a big screen. There was also a a room where they had a TV playing the conference in english, for us gringos. But I watched half the conference in spanish, half in english! And I understood both languages equally! Woohoo for spanish!

 This week we spent a lot of time working with our investigators Ruben and Antonella, which unfortunately didnt come to church (conference) this week. We are also working a lot with Omar, our investigator that is the grandson of one of our members here, who didnt come to church this week either. Dang. Other than that we have been contacting (door knocking) a lot and looking for new investigators! We havent been able to find very many other people to teach yet but we are not getting discouraged. The unity between my companion and I is still really good, we are really liking this transfer especially with our zone leaders! 

Conference was very spiritually energizing. I loved the talk of Gerald Caussé about how we should always try to have spiritual experiences every day. I feel like a lot of the time we get into routine prayers and quick scripture studies and we become a little bit spiritually numb. It happens to me a ton on the mission. But we have to remember to take the time and the effort to make every prayer and every scripture study meaningful and feel the spirit. I always really liked Uchtdorf´s talk about the atonement.

We found out this week that Elder Dallin H. Oaks is coming to our mission to talk to us at the end of April!! WOOO!! I am going to have the chance to listen to an apostle in real life and hopefully shake his hand! That is super exciting! 

Thats about all for this week, nothing very new happening! I hope you all have a great week!

Elder Miles