January 24th

Hello out there once again to all of my family and friends! Hope that everything has been going well with you guys! I’ve been pretty darn busy with a ton of work as usual, but what else do you expect right? Nobody said the work of the Lord was going to be easy! This week we had a couple of cool experiences that I’d like to tell you about.

To give you a small update on the families of the late night contacts we made, we have been able to teach one of these families, and it was a pretty great lesson! They have a giant house and a lot of crazy stuff in it. Turns out that they just barely moved in to the neighborhood about 2 weeks ago and are just getting settled in. We invited them to get baptized and everything, and they said that they would progress toward that while they studied with us if they felt it was right. We have been trying to come back and visit, and we have even brought a ton of members with us to visit as well, but every time we have gone back they weren’t there! We still have hope for them, and we’re going to go back today.

We also received a reference from the stake president this week. Her name is Dorian, a 24 year old African American girl who at one point in time was dating a member of the church. She also attended a few times the institute class that the stake president taught on Presidents of the church, so we were a little bit excited to go! He went with us to her house, and we had a Great lesson! She would have come to church with us yesterday, but she had like 4 teeth pulled on Saturday and stayed in bed all day Sunday. But we are going to go back on Tuesday, and we hope that everything goes great! She is looking like our next baptism in the area.

With respect to the rest of the investigators, right now most of them are so-so. Michael ended up being a great baptism, and he is a definite honor of the Aaronic Priesthood that he just received. He has his white shirt and tie and everything, and is getting ready to be ordained a teacher next week for his birthday! We also had a cool experience at church as well.... we have been teaching a man named Adolfo for a little while now, but it has been a little bit frustrating. He is a professed Calvinist (really rare here) and has his own crazy beliefs on religion. When my companion and I where on interchanges this week, they went over there, and in the middle of a frustrating lesson they just decided to invite him to come to church, and he said yes! He drove us to church in his car haha! We’re still not sure if he really liked it or anything like that, but we did the best that we possibly could to make it a spiritual experience for him.

Elder Sinclair and I had an idea this week on a new way to find new investigators. We have decided to have an institute class for the public. It’s called Jesus Class. We made a ton of flyers, and have started to pass them out to everyone and inviting them to our class to learn about Christ in the New Testament. We’re going to start the classes probably at the end of this week or the next, but we hope it works! We spent a long time on the invitations, and we’ll see how many people end up showing up right?

I think I’m finally starting to figure out how to be a leader around here. Before, I definitely felt very incompetent to direct a group of missionaries, and often times I found myself cranking my mind trying to figure out how to resolve the problems of the rest of the missionaries but didn’t find answers. I thought, how can I help them out if I struggle to help myself out? But I now have a testimony that the Lord prepares his servants to do what He needs them to do. I am finding it easier for me to help the rest of the missionaries when we go on interchanges. I am more apt to give advice and things like that, something that I could never do before. On Saturday, while my companion was doing a couple of baptismal interviews, I went out with one of our district leaders to a very special appointment. We visited the wife of a recent convert. She had just visited the church for the first time the Sunday before, and turns out she loved it. We taught an incredibly spiritual lesson, testified of the book of Mormon, and invited her to be baptized the next Saturday (in 5 days!) She accepted with a smile, and I was amazed. It’s incredible the things that the Spirit can do when one prepares.

I have also been working a lot on opening my mouth to everyone. I am running out of months left in the mission, and as more and more time runs down, the more worried you get about becoming the missionary you need to be. I’m trying not to waste a single moment anymore, that way I will be obeying with what the Lord has said to us in Matthew 10: “Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven, But, whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven.”

I love you all!

Vaya Pues!

Elder Tinkham

January 17th

Hello once again to all of my family and friends out there! This week was a great week for me! Sitting about 20 ft. away from a General Authority really makes an Elder happy wouldn’t you think? I got a lot to share this week, so enough with the jokes! Let’s get going!"

This week I went on interchanges with one of our district leaders who is having a lot of problems with his companion. They are really not getting along at all, and it seems like it’s really affecting their work. Elder Sinclair and I did the best week could to prepare ourselves spiritually so that we could adequately help them out and give them the advice that they needed. It actually turned out to be great. I stayed in the area this time with the district leader and we had a great day where we were able to follow the Spirit. We taught a lady with her 3 children who we had thought had been hiding from us, we had a great lesson where we taught about the doctrine of Christ, and she ended up confessing in the end that she had been hiding, but that something told her that she should listen today. We told her not to deny the promptings of the Spirit, and that if she felt it in that moment, she should keep listening to us. It was a good experience.

We also had the interviews with Presidente Flores this week, which was a good experience as well. President is trying to mold us into real leaders in these last months that we have left so that we can leave the mission knowing that there will be good leaders to back us up. We then were asked by President to accompany him to all of the Elders houses to show him where they are and to revise their area books and English books and all that. It was kind of a wasted afternoon because we weren’t able to do much work in our own areas and we were sitting around a lot, but we did get to have some quality time with President, which was good.

Now I’m going to dedicate the rest of my time to tell you all about my day on Saturday! We woke up bright and early so that we could get there way early. We showed up with our freshly dry cleaned suits, new haircuts, shined shoes, all the spiffiness just for the arrival of Elder Ballard. We sat in the first 3 rows since we were in the choir (awesome!) and waited for awhile for Elder Ballard to show up. We were all pretty nervous in the choir and the anticipation wasn’t helping. Finally, he arrived. We stood up in reverence as he approached the stand with Elder Jay Jensen from the Seventy, and Elder Clark from the Central America Presidency of the Seventy. After the opening prayer, it was our turn. We all got up there, (Elder Tinkham, Elder Morgan, Elder Hinckley, and Elder Sinclair from our group, including a couple of others, and Elder Tingey playing the piano). We started out great, I could see that we were all shaking, but it was going good. We were about to finish the 2nd verse and hit up the awesome acapella part, when I look over and see that Elder Hinckley is getting a little tipsy....uh oh.....well we kept singing for a second, not knowing what to do...and he`s out. Elder Hinckley fainted in the middle of the song! We felt really bad for the guy, so we just helped him out of the room and then we finished the song. After that we listened to the talks, which were all great! I could talk for hours about what all happened, but the time is not sufficient. Elder Ballard gave an amazing talk about becoming a missionary Master Teacher with extraordinary faith. It was just incredible listening to him talk, because...well yeah he basically wrote half of the things we read as a missionary (Preach my Gospel and Our Search for Happiness). He told some stories that had all of us shedding tears in the congregation, some of them I will never forget. The Spirit was just so strong there is no way I could explain it completely. I now have a small, but just a small taste, of what the Nephites said in the Book of Mormon when they witnessed the Savior praying when they explained that “no tongue could tell or nobody could explain the marvelous feelings that they felt in those moments (or something like that).“

After the, meeting we had to hurry home because we had quite a few baptismal interviews to hold so that they could have the baptisms later that night. I was a little bit nervous because I was going to interview a man who supposedly had been caught drinking by a couple of members about 2 days before the interview. But I did the very best that I could to have a spiritual interview, so that the Lord could indicate to me whether the man was ready to be baptized or not. I taught him all the applicable doctrine that I thought that I should teach, and in the end we had a wonderful prayer, and I was able to give him a priesthood blessing. I did the very best I could, and he ended up passing the interview. There was nothing that I saw in him that made him unworthy of taking baptism upon him.

That night, we had the baptism of Michael! It was quite possibly the most poorly planned baptism in all of existence, since in the morning we didn’t have time to plan it, AND the bishops were all gone in a meeting with Elder Ballard. But the good thing is that it happened, and it was great. Michael is going to be a great missionary, because he got to participate in the setting apart of 2 missionaries right after his confirmation (he held the mic) and he told us that it was really impacting to him. He left with the Young Men to go out visiting that very night! I love the kid!

After the baptism, we only had about 30 minutes till we needed to be in the house. So, that normally means that we would just throw in the towel and walk back to the house slowly to begin planning. But the Spirit indicated to Elder Sinclair and I that our day has not ended. We continued contacting, and ended up having 2 great contacts, and we even put appointments for this week. It was a wonderful experience of growing our faith, and “eliminating the natural man.”

This week was a great week! I love you guys and hope that everything is going well!

Vaya Pues!

Elder Tinkham

January 10th

Hello once again to all of my family and friends out there! Once again I hope that you are all found having good health (does that make sense in English?), and that you are still going strong on your New Year’s resolutions! Things are going very well for my companion and I, and we are still very happy to be together. Let me tell you about my week, cause I don’t have too much time.

We have been getting pretty serious about our singing practices for the Elder Ballard conference, now that he is going to be here this Saturday! We are actually getting pretty nervous for the whole thing. We haven`t had a whole lot of time to practice since everyone is in different zones and everything, but we are doing the best that we can. Today in the morning we had a practice, and President Flores showed up to make sure everything was looking good. I am going to be sitting on the front row since I’m in the choir, so we’re starting to get way nervous! In the practice though, I did my best to give a surprise to Elder Sinclair. Today is his birthday, and so before practicing, I whispered to Elder Tingey to start out by playing Happy Birthday, and everyone knew about it. So right when Elder Sinclair thought that we were going to be singing the song, we all screamed out the Happy Birthday song and scared him to death! It was a funny moment for us. Anyways, today Elder Sinclair and I went to get our hair cut, and we sent our suit to the dry cleaners to make sure everything is looking spiffy for Saturday! It’s only once in a lifetime that you meet an Apostle.

Even though last week Elder Sinclair and I had a great week, the zone didn’t do so well all in all. So, this week we tried as hard as we could to up the energy of the zone, and helping them to become the great missionaries that we know they can be. So we had lots of small activities for them. On Tuesday we held a Zone Meeting, and discussed the points that we thought were lacking in the teaching, and obedience and all that. We also went to a couple of the Elders houses during the week in the mornings to go and study with them. We asked them what types of goals they had as a companionship, what they wanted to accomplish together, and how they were going to do it. We also asked suggestions on how we can improve, because we know that we aren’t perfect. To make a long story short, we feel really great because the zone had an awesome week this week!

On the other hand, in our own area it was a little bit more difficult for us. We have been really trying to keep up with all of these 17 new investigators that we found last week, including the 9 we had this week, but it has been quite a challenge. Some of them aren’t really turning out to be that positive, others are nearly impossible to find, etc. We are going to do the best we can to select the chosen ones out of that group, so that we can focus on the people that are going to become our next baptisms.

Speaking of baptisms, we had to reschedule Michael`s baptism to next week. We still need to teach him a couple of lessons, and it turns out he had a small problem with coffee, but the things are under control now, and he has been more than 2 weeks without drinking coffee! We even met with him on Saturday so that he could plan his own baptism, with the talks, music and everything. We are going to hurry back from the Ballard conference to have his baptism that night!

This week I was able to go on interchanges with the new district leader in our zone, Elder Davis. It turned out being great! We walked blissfully around talking to everyone we saw, and we also were able to put a baptismal date of a man named Walkyier who has had a complete change recently in his life that led to him accepting the date.

This week I have been immersing myself in the Conference edition of the Liahona, and have learned a lot of things. I especially enjoyed reading the talk from Elder Christofferson about living a Consecrated life. I’ve been trying to set goals in order to follow the counsel of the apostles. Today I finished reading the talk from Elder Hales about Agency, which is also one of my favorites as of right now. I encourage all of you to continue reading the words of the prophets, because as Elder Costa said in the conference: The words of the modern prophets are more important than the scriptures, and the dead prophets.

I know that this church is true, I know it with all my heart. I love all of you and hope that you’re doing well. I’ll talk to you next week!

Vaya Pues!

Elder Tinkham

El Picachu City Park in the background

The City of Comayaguela

The future Honduras Temple

"White" Christmas

Bowling

Tyler's picture of his MTC buddies at the Leadership Training Meeting in December

January 3rd

Hello once again to all of my family and friends out there wherever you are! I would just like to start out by saying I love you! I care about you and I hope that wherever you are, you are safe and happy. I would like to report that I am safe, and happy. I love the work of the Lord, and I wish it would never end!

This week has been probably one of the busiest of my mission life, but as they say...a busy and active life is a happy life. Elder Sinclair and I have tried our hardest to do absolutely everything within our grasp to be successful missionaries. To start off, we were able to find 17 new investigators this week. Something that I have never before accomplished in my mission! Especially in Comayaguela....which is basically double what I had previously reached. I don’t really know how to explain it. My companion and I have been trying a simple tactic...finding by the Spirit. No longer do we waste our time knocking on doors just to knock. Instead, we have been trying to “Feel” where to go, and it has worked. We have found a ton of people to teach. There is not enough time to explain them all, but we are excited. With these 17 new investigators we found, the ones we are already teaching, and our Zone Leader responsibilities, you can see what is filling my time these days, huh?

I have also decided on a new thing that I am going to begin to implement in my studies as a revelation helper for me. Lately, it’s been a little bit difficult for me to be able to recognize the impressions of the Spirit. On several occasions this week, things happened that I thought were just coincidences, that just happened to have the involvement of the Holy Ghost, I just didn’t realize until later on. As most of you already know (especially you guys, mom and dad) I have quite the bad short term memory and tend to lose things often. So what I have decided to do is maintain a “revelation journal” next to my knees as I kneel down to pray. In this way I will be able to always remember and recognize the impressions that I receive, without questioning if it’s just coincidence or divinity. I really think that it’s going to help me lift my faith and efficiency as a missionary.

I’m not sure if I told you guys last week, but I was chosen by President Flores, along with a couple of others from our group, to sing a special musical number when Elder M. Russell Ballard comes in 2 weeks. Haha, so we are a little bit nervous for that one, but we are going to try and make it as spiritual as possible for the meeting. We are singing “Be Still My Soul,” and we had our first practice this week. Things are looking pretty good so far, and we are really excited for this amazing opportunity that we have to perform in front of an Apostle of the Lord.

In unexpected news, in our Comayaguela house, we had some unexpected emergency changes this week where one of our missionaries, Elder Martin, had emergency changes and was taken out. The motive was because there were 2 missionaries that were coming in from other missions, because they had their mission call changed and were sent to Comayaguela. Well..the missionary that was supposed to come instead of Elder Martin...never showed up. We don’t exactly know why, but anyways some double emergency changes had to be done and now one of the Elders that was working in the office of the mission has been placed in our house. So, sadly we don’t have a completely white house anymore, but the cool thing is that the other 2 missionaries that live in our house have both worked in the mission office, and so they know a lot about some small details that us “field elders” sometimes forget about. It’s a good asset.

I’ve had some people ask me how I feel, knowing that I will be coming home this year (in 5 months to be exact). The truth is, I don’t like to think about time. After you complete around 18 months, time becomes your worst enemy as an elder. With the experience that I have gained here in Honduras, I know that I cannot waste 1 minute loafing, slacking, or doing sub-par work. This glorious time that the Lord has given me is running out, and I am determined to “take it all one day at a time.” The one thing that I am going to work on as a personal trait for the rest of my mission is my faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. In Preach My Gospel chapter 6 under Faith in Jesus Christ...it explains that there are certain results that you can see when one has faith. 1 - You accomplish what the Lord wants you to accomplish, 2 - Perform miracles according to what the Lord permits, 3 - You edify the other missionaries under whom you serve...etc. That is the goal I have for the rest of my mission, to put my trust in the Lord, and I know He will bless me with what I need.

I know that this gospel is true. The Book of Mormon is true. No mortal man could have written a book such as this, there is just no way. I know that God lives and that Jesus is my Savior. Thank you all for your support and prayers, because I can feel them pushing me forward. These are my New Year’s resolutions, and I hope that you have made yours too!

Vaya Pues!

Elder Tinkham