Happy Father's Day!

Well these have been a really busy last couple of weeks!

A little bit unexpectedly, we had a lot of stuff come up in terms of planning and meetings and exchanges and everything else. It was great to be busy, but time just kind of flew by for all of us here. One of the great parts of last week was that we had a visiting Area Authority come and do a mission tour with us. His name is Elder Pajaro from Quezon City in Manila. We had a meeting with the MLC and then two zone conferences for all of the missionaries. Some of the topics included how the Pajaros were converted to the church and the importance of missionaries and becoming Christlike. Then after the mission tour we were able to go on exchanges in our area with some of the Zone Leaders.

One of the interesting parts of the week was when we went to go visit another zone to check up on some missionaries. Because of the time, we decided to just have lunch in that city before we took an hour drive back to Naga. We just kind of picked a place at random, and when we walked in saw a white guy sitting at one of the tables. After we ordered he motioned for us to come over, and so as we talked with him, we found out he was here with his wife (a Filipina from my first area). He's a member, served his mission in Argentina, I think he said Cordoba. We start talking with him and his wife and find out that his wife isn't a member yet, but is an investigator of my companion's sister up towards Manila. And then it turns out that the guy is from Granite Bay and knew Sutter where Dad worked and everything and knew the areas where we lived. Just a lot of random coincidences.

But the cool part of the conversation was when he kind of stopped for a moment and said, "Your Dad must be a great man. Full tithe payer, honest, kind, good guy. I can see it in you and in your demeanor. I can just tell that he is a good man from the way you are." So I just thought that was really interesting. And I just wanted to say thank you and Happy Father's Day to you Dad, and thanks for everything you do for me. I love you so much and I'm excited to see you and the rest of the family in just a week and a half. Then we can go biking and skiing and riding. If you can still keep up with me old man haha.

Love you all and I hope you have a great week! This will be the last full week of my mission and I'm going to try and give it everything I have!

Also we went to a waterfall this morning (which is why this email is coming a little late) so I will try to send some pictures once I have sorted through them all.

Hey everyone! Sorry, a bit of a busy day, so this is a little late.

Honestly, not a whole lot happened last week. It was great with our MLC and giving a workshop on the Atonement. We also got to talk about some things that will hopefully help the mission focus on Christ more. We kinda noticed that a lot of our discussions tended to drift towards ways of putting up barriers to disobedience or encouraging them to find, or whatever, but then we realized if we were just able to help the missionaries focus more on Christ more, all the other problems would just start to sort themselves out. So we had some good discussion about all of that.

We then went up to one of the far zones for exchanges and had a pretty good time up there. Got to go to the beach for probably the last time before I come home, so that was pretty great. I also got to teach a Seventh Day Adventist for the first time. Kind of an interesting experience. He claimed that anything not coming from the Bible is not a foundation for truth. Then when we asked him how he knew the Bible was true, he said it's because the Bible says it's true in and of itself. And then he kept trying to challenge us by asking if we think the Bible is enough for our faith. We ended up bearing testimony of the Book of Mormon and it ended pretty well.

The rest of our week was spent in meetings, or planning, or visiting our area a bit. My companion has been sick for a little bit, so that put a damper on our work, but we are hoping to get out a lot more this week and find some new people. It's just been a struggle lately getting out to all of the people we want to visit. We are hoping Carlito can be baptized this month, but we'll see what happens.

Well, that was a short version of just a busy week. I'll see you all in 3 weeks anyway! haha. Love you all and have another great week!