Sunday, June 9, 2013

Operación Alma- Email 6/3/13

First off...haha mary I TOLD YOU!!!! hahaha i told you you would train your third cambio. I'm so proud of you. You are doing great out there in hong kong and although that is a whole new set of challenges, its so blatantly obvious how much trust the lord has in you and how good at this you are. Training a new missionary is so much fun, because what you show them becomes their expectations for the mission - obedience, work, everything. Its really fun and you'll love it. Work your butts off again and i have no doubt you'll be baptizing exactly 6 weeks from today....

So. crazy week here, like always. I got to go on my "honeymoon" this week! Haha Girsberger and I had to go to Concepcion which is like a 5 hour bus ride and it was our first big trip together so we called it our honeymoon. Fun stuff. Also, buses are so cool. They have huge super nice luxury 2 story buses here and elder girsberger made so much fun of me because i literally thought it was the COOLEST thing ever. why am i such a nerd? i was freaking out the entire day. Anyway we got to conce and there was some pretty big news there. Basically....they're changing the entire way we do missionary work. I know that sounds like a big exaggeration but its really not haha.

So we know how usually every missionary does everything - finds new people, baptizes, helps less actives, recent converts....well, not anymore. They think that we are too spread out, and they have been systematically putting 4 missionaries in every branch to prepare us for Operation Alma. Operation soul that would be? I don't know what that is in english. anyway....2 missionaries are now 100% dedicated to finding new people, baptizing, pure work with investigators. The other set of missionaries is 100% dedicated to less actives, recent converts and incomplete families. That way people can better focus on their respective things and be able to improve the quality of work in each sector. It has seemed to work in the places they have tried it in. in Lebu, a district here, the assistance has doubled from 78 to 150 in 2 months, with 9 baptisms and over 40 less actives reactivated. Its not supposedly a PERMANENT thing, but im guessing it'll be the rest of my mission. So i'm about to have a much different mission then i thought! Haha i'm like a permanent home teacher now. Cool but very interesting. Anyway, my sector is the recent convert and less active sector because we have more of them than they do. So thats our big thing coming up right now. We have to present this to the zone right now and that will be interesting, because we have a ton of fechas bautismales right now and i cant imagine people are going to be stoked having to pass of their investigators. but its all for the work of the lord and if we don't its just our own pride holding us back. Kind of a good barometer of where your faith is at, no? 

Anyway, other fun stuff. Damian has literally disappeared off the face of the planet. We have called, visited, everything. cant find him for the life of us. so....thats kind of disappointing. but we are going to keep working and not give up. Its been 10 days since we have talked to him so we are kind of worried, but oh well. Maria Castillo is doing great as well, she is set for the 15th! it will be super fun.
Other stuff...today we went to Temuco! Thats the second biggest sector in our mission besides Concepcion, and it was super fun. We went bowling and everything haha. I loved it though, we had a super good time and it was good for the zone to be together.

Last thing...so this past week it was raining a ton here so we just were playing so many pranks on each other (last p day after we wrote). Girsberger and i took some of the water balloons someone sent me and literally made the BIGGEST water balloon ever. Like the size of a normal helium balloon but with water inside. Haha i don't know what we were thinking, but it started off so well. We brought it upstairs, were about to launch it out the window to get our companions as they were coming home from buying food, and then it broke right next to the window. We have wood floor panels upstairs and we were like aw thats too bad. until i started hearing something downstairs and i rushed down and realized t was DRENCHING my desk where all of my stuff is and was just a waterfall coming through the ceiling. oops. And then thats not even the best part, it filled up a lightbulb (that luckily was off) with water (don't even know how thats possible) which then shattered in this giant explosion as we were trying to clean up the water. haha it was such a disaster. our companions had JUST cleaned the house too and were so mad at us. ahem....oops?

LOVE YOU ALL! Ive learned more this cambio and this week than ever before...the lord tries our faith so much. but its all good stuff, and we can get through it if we truly trust in him. Love you all.

Les quiero mucho

Elder Tengberg

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