Elder Garrett Alexander Watts: September 29, 2014

September 29, 2014

Hey mom, So glad to hear that the party for Ben went off without a hitch!

MORE EXCITED TO HERE WE BEAT BOISE STATE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Should find out if I got the package tomorrow, zone leaders are down in conce today. Elder Ospina finally requested sour candy. ,Like the sourest stuff you can find if you haven’t already sent the Halloween box. How is the photo book coming along? :)

So these last two weeks I’ve learned something of utter importance. Chileans are busy! Almost everyone we talk to is "really in a hurry" or has "something to do" like watch TV for example...or perhaps watch a kid watching tv.

One of the few Chileans we talked to this week that wasn’t busy really didn’t like gringos. His name was Ramon, and we was convinced that God was punishing the US because we had hurricanes. He said that i should "tell your friend Osama (he meant Obama) that we shouldn’t be taking the Palestinian’s petroleum" Elder Ospina and I had a great laugh about that later on in the day.

So this week we had a mini cambio and a mini mission. Mini cambio basically means we switch companions for a day, and a mini mission is when we teach some of the priests from the stake what a day in the life of a missionary is like. My companion was named Oscar and he had just got baptized like 3 months ago and he really wanted to go serve a mission. He lacked a little bit of the finesse in talking to people in the street but that comes with time. We worked in a "city" called Quillón about an hour south of us. STRAIGHT FARM LAND. and it was raining and we forgot all our rain stuff. It was a really good experience for him. He said he learned a lot and I was happy to be able to help him get a taste of the mission life.

In the mini cambio I was with Elder Chuctaya, a Peruvian that has been with me since the CCM in Santiago. We had a great day and I learned a lot about how to get members to accompany us. Chucky (his nickname in the mission house) can literally get a member at any hour of the day. or at least it seems.

This week i was studying a lot about the Plan of Salvation and how God is our Heavenly Father and he really loves us. HE LOVES US. He puts up with a lot of our crud too. We know that the plan applies to everyone, and that everyone will be saved, hence the plan of salvation. But I like to think of it as the plan of Exaltation, because that’s the goal right? It’s like the difference in aiming high or aiming for the minimum. Heavenly father wants us to have Exaltation, but because he loves us, he knows that it should be our choice.

Other than that, another standard week here in Chillan Chile. Cambios are next week. We shall see if Elder Ospina and I will remain together again or if there’s a change. Elder Jensen, the BYU linebacker is heading home this Sunday so well be having a mini cambio together this week. I think it’s gonna be a good time.

All my love and So much more,

Elder Watts