February 23

Hello once again to all of my family and friends. Yesterday I did not have time to write so I asked permission to write to today, I will explain more of that later.

Things are going pretty decent here in the horrid heat of Juticalpa. Seriously, I'm melting here, we have now officially begun the hot season, and wow. It seems to me like the shade is even hotter than the unshaded parts of town.

Anyways, let me get started explaining this last week I had. I'll start out with the special highlights. On Friday we had the opportunity to have interchanges, and I stayed in my area. Elder Loarca, companion of Elder Cardon, came over and we worked for a day. I learned a lot from him, especially a ton of contacting skills. Since we have been having some trouble finding new investigators, he helped me out showing me a lot of different techniques to "persuade," you could say, people to let us in to teach. We had a lot of fun together, and we ended the interchanges heading over, the 4 of us together, to a service project. We dug a pretty big trench that was about 20 ft. long and 3 ft. deep for a member to put water pipes that will run to his house. Whew, now that was a service project! I haven't been able to hit up the manual labor in awhile so I still have a couple of hand blisters, but it was really fun. I also get the chance to have interchanges again today, but this time I'm going to the other area with Elder Cardon! It will be really fun since almost surely one of us will be leaving soon. We will find out the transfers this upcoming Sunday, and I'm fearing that I might be leaving. I don't wanna but who knows.

We also had a really awesome activity on Saturday with all of the members in the branch. It's called the Mini MTC, and we taught all the members how it is to be a missionary. We made plaques for everyone that came and put them in companionships. We were the MTC instructors and taught a few classes such as: how to contact, how to answer your friends questions with the scriptures, and introduction to Preach My Gospel. We watched a couple of video clips to amp up the spirit of missionary work in the branch. All of the members said that it was a really awesome activity and we felt really proud because we planned a lot of the activity and put a lot of work into it. All in all, it was a success.

Things are going pretty good with our investigators. The Ruiz Matamoros Family are still looking good for their wedding on the 5th and baptism on the 6th, and Denia, well, were holding our breaths. She has a husband, but they are not married, and he lives in the U.S. working. So we had the Law of Chastity lesson with her the other day, and she really wants to get married to him when he gets back. She is praying and reading, and doing everything, so I REALLY hope she accepts the baptismal date for this weekend. Hopefully I'll have good news for you guys next week on that one.

So, the reason that I didn't write yesterday is because I had to go to Tegucigalpa, again! We had the trainers evaluation meeting/newbie meeting, and so we were there all day. I got up at 4 AM to get there in time at 10, and I was quite sleepy, but I did learn a whole lot. When I had my newbie meeting it was a whole lot more fun because we were newbies, but now that I'm a trainer, President is a little bit harsher with us haha. I left the meeting pretty shaved up, but hey it's what I needed in order to become better right? I learned a great lesson about obedience. Recently I have been doing a lot of justifying, in other words, there are a ton of small rules that the mission has, that sometimes the missionaries disregard. But if I'm not being 100% obedient, how can I expect to have true baptisms of converts without the Spirit? I learned that I should never justify a sin, even if it's the tiniest thing, because sooner or later it will get back to you, turning into a larger and larger sin.

Anyways, that's about all I have for you guys this week. I hope you are all doing well and taking care of yourselves. Until next week,

Vaya Pues!
Elder Tinkham