Buses, Buses, and more Buses

¡Hola familia y amigos!

Estoy feliz, disfrutando la mision y conociendo mi nuevo sector, es MUY grande! 

Well today we cleaned up our house fully, and now it is pretty. It was not pretty before, but you can now tell that Hermanas now live in this house :) haha I also had to cut the grass today, and I used a machete.. picture included. It was quite the adventure, I am just happy I didn`t accidentally cut myself :) 

We are getting really good at using buses. In every other sector I have had, I could walk really easily, we never used buses. Here we ALWAYS use buses. We have taken the wrong bus a couple of times, and have gotten lost a couple of times, but now I would say we are basically experts at buses. I never thought I would use so many buses in my entire life. The reason we use so many buses is because our sector is GIGANTE, in a week we have only went to about a 4th of our sector. We are going to need to learn how to sectorize, I don`t think that is an english word, but I am not sure. We are just going to have to figure out how to work one day in one part and another day in another part. So we aren`t using so many buses.

I am loving being with Hna Guevara, she is great! We are always laughing and enjoying the work and we work really great together as well. It is nice being with a companion that has the same time so that we can work and use the knowledge that we have together and get things moving along in our sector. We love this ward and we are getting to know the members, less actives, converts, and finding investigators. We are working hard and we are seeing success. I know the Lord is blessing our efforts.

Yesterday we had a first lesson with this family that we contacted the other day. They are really humble, but content and happy with their life, but have a lot of worries. When we shared the first vision, we asked the mom how she felt, and she responded saying that she was really worried about something, and that worry went completely away, she felt relaxed and a happiness, and she started crying while she told us that. While listening to that I felt the spirit so strong confirming to me that this gospel truly is the only gospel that can bring that kind of instant peace. Tears came to my eyes with a feeling of gratitude knowing that I was able to be an instrument in the hands of God to give this wonderful sister a message of hope and comfort. Everyone has different problems in this life and everyone has different experiences, but this gospel is for everyone and can help everyone. I know that this is the true gospel of Jesus Christ, I know that He is our Savior and Redeemer and through Him and His gospel we can find true peace and joy, where we really can`t find in any other place. 

I am loving this time I have to serve the Lord and boy do I wish that the time wouldn`t fly by so quickly. I am just happy for the time that I do have. 

I love you all and remember that if your feeling down, turn to the Lord, He will take your worries and problems and make them lighter so that you can bear the burden. You don`t have to do it alone.

Tengan una maravillosa semana!!

Les Quiero,

Hermana Cordon

El Recreo (The Recess)

¡Hola!

Me and Hna Guevara

Well this week was changes, and both me and my companion left MIra Flores, and they closed our sector and now that ward only has one companionship of elders. I was sad to be leaving everyone without either one of us, but I know that the Lord knows what is best for this sector and that He will guide the Elders. I am now in El Recreo, the ward that touched my sector before, so basically I just stepped onto the other side of the line. Here there hasn`t been Hermanas for over 15 years, so the members are probably going to be really excited to see Hermanas here again. And so, as you probably guessed, I am opening a sector with Hermana Guevara. She is from Peru and really nice! She has the same time as me and so it will be really great to just get out and work and get things moving along here. Today we spent a lot of time organizing our house, because elders were here and a elder that just finished his mission was here, so it isn`t very clean. Hopefully by the end of this week we can clean it up and get it all organized. 

We were helping Gabriela alot this week, by sending her chapters every night to read, and she has been reading them all! She really does have a great desire to follow this gospel and to have a strong testimony. I know that with the Elders help she can be guided to baptism to recieve all these blessings. With our other investigator Stanley, I think it is going to be really great that there is going to be elders teaching him now. I am sure they will be able to relate to him more and guide him to baptism. We also found a new investigator this last saturday, Cecilia, and she is really great and really open to hearing this message, she even came to church! She came by herself and on time, it was awesome! The elders should be passing by tonight to visit her, hopefully they don´t forget. We were able to get something rolling along here and I know that the Elders will only be able to keep working and helping this area and this ward. I really fell in love with this ward, the members that come every week are really faithful and really willing to help us missionaries in every aspect of the work. The bishop is really involved and always looking for more ways to help us and everyone just supported us and helped us. I really do love that ward and really appreciated all that they did for us. 

The US beat Ecuador in soccer this week and the day before the game we were joking with our pensionista and her husband that the US will win and then we made a wager with them that the losing team has to buy the others ice cream. So they bought us ice cream!! (Picture included). Everyone was mad with us, but we were happy! haha I was sad and happy at the same time, they are both my homes. 

We tried doing a weekly scripture study class with the ward so they could bring their friends, and only the bishop and his family showed up.. hopefully this week more people will show up to that class. 

Yesterday me and my companion taught the primary class for kids 8 and older, it was a great practice for how to teach really simply and keeping their attention. It was fun!

I am excited to see what this next change will bring, I love being here and being able to work for the Lord, the best job there is! :)

I love you all!

Hermana Cordon

Me and Hna Vicky, she is the president of the primary and she was always willing to go to appointments with us, she is the best! 

My zone last thursday, we are crazy

This is a photo  I took in my last sector and I had taken a picture of my new sector, everything on the other side of the river is my sector now.

El Gozo de la Mision

¡Hola a todos! Espero que encuentren bien y feliz y estén disfrutando su verano. Está haciendo mucho frio aqui.. jaja There was my little spanish for you guys :)

My group!

Well we had to travel to Quito this week so that I could renew my visa, but it was really cool, because I got to see all the gringos from my group, which was a lot of fun! It has been a year since we had all been together, so it was fun seeing the change and reflecting back on the year that has passed behind us. I have learned a lot and grown alot as well, and hopefully I can just keep growing and improving for these next couple of months. 

My group with there companions

This week we had a cool experience. There is a girlfriend of a member in our ward, and no one ever told us that she wasn`t a member and we saw her a lot at church, so we both figured she was a member. Until we were talking to her and we asked her and she wasn`t a member.. and she lives in our area! So last sunday we set up an appointment with her to visit and talk with her. She has come to church 4 times, is reading the book of mormon, thinks it is the true church, and just loves anything and everything about the church. She is so awesome and has a ton of faith. We have had some cool experiences with her this week as well. The first lesson with her, we talked about baptism, to gage what she was feeling and where she was at, and she said she didn`t feel ready yet, because she wanted to know more. So I thought to share Ether 12: 4,6 and she was really touched by the scripture, she said that she had read it before, but it never really caught her attention, but she knew that it was a testimony that she only needed to believe. I knew that the spirit guided me to share that scripture, and I know that the spirit taught her more than our words could have taught her. Then the next day we met with her again, and we were talking about the prayer that she did the night before, about Joseph Smith, and she said that she had doubts of prophets, but as we kept talking to her we got out that her real doubt/fear was that she was scared of telling her parents that she wants to be baptized, so she was searching for a doubt to have to keep pushing back her baptism. As we testified to her that she will find true happiness in this gospel and that you need to choose God over family, the spirit entered the room testifying. We also shared with her Mosiah 2:41 and she really felt super happy by that scripture and commited to talk to her family on sunday about her desire to be baptized. She did talk to them yesterday, and they reacted really badly, she got annoyed with their reactions. But when we called her to talk about how it went, she sounded like she had a really big desire still to be baptized and to follow through with her decision to be an example to her family. She is a really great example to me and I am so grateful for this chance to help her progress to baptism and to have this happiness with her. We are going to put the date of baptism for the 25th, I am so excited for her!

Then this thursday, President Christensen had a meeting with our stake, so Hermana Christensen had called us and asked if she could go to an appointment with us that night. We were a little bit surprised, but grateful for her help, because the member who was going to go with us, wasn`t able to anymore. It was fun going with Hna Christensen and we were able to visit with her a little bit while going to the appointment. She is awesome and she was a great help with all the questions she did to get to know our investigator, we were able to learn some new things.

The trees look like pineapples here

We also had a mini-conference with our zone this week. We did an activity with a game and the object was to win as much as you could. A lot of companionships were going against everyone else trying to win as much as they could, but in the end we would have won more if we would have worked together. (For record me and my companion were trying that technique the whole time, so we were losing the whole time.. haha) But one thing that I really learned and struck me was the our personal gain doesn`t mean anything if everyone around us is losing. In the mission we have to work in unity with a lot of people; our district, zone, the ward, and most importantly our companion. I also learned alot about the importance of personal integrity and the importance of always telling the truth. Everyone is always watching us, as members and as missionaries, and we need to be true to ourselves and true to God, and hopefully that is the same thing. That was just some insight from what I learned.

I truly love this Gospel, I am so so grateful for this time I have to completely devout myself to the Lord and His work and the testimony I am gaining from it, will be a lifelong blessing. The people I am meeting are so important to me, and this beautiful little country is my home. I am so grateful that I still have a lot of time left to keep learning and growing and devoting myself to the Lord.

I love you all and I hope you have an absolutely fantastic week!! I invite you all to look for ways that you can help others to win so that in the end you all will win!! 

Muchísimo Amor,

Hermana Cordon

Zooiogioc

¡Buenas Tardes! 

Today as Hermanas we went to Baños again and went to the zoo there! It was really cool! I especially enjoyed all the monkeys, they had some pretty cool monkeys and a lot of them as well. I enjoyed the morning with the hermanas and getting to know more of this beautiful country where I have the opportunity to live right now. I will include some pictures :) It is also really humid in Baños so my hair was going crazy!

Also it is "summer" here. But, there summer is when it is really cold and rains alot. I am not really quite sure how that works out, but thats what everyone keeps saying. But, it rained like everyday all day for the last 4 days, it rains a lot here, but not that much, and its been so cold!!! The only downside of wearing a skirt all day, is that when it is cold and windy, your legs are cold. But, gratefully I am always warm in my bed, with my 2 blankets, soaks, and sweatpants :) I feel like I am probably not actually in Ecuador.. haha 

beautiful Ambato

Mira Flores just likes to be a challenging area, but we keep going and working and we are giving it our all. It is a good thing we enjoy contacting. :) I am doing good and really a lot less worried about the numbers and that as a gauge of success, I have been starting focusing alot more on what would the Lord think about the effort I gave that day. I am not a perfect missionary and I have a lot to improve still, but I know that the Lord knows my heart and sees that I am trying to do my best. I just got to keep moving forward and doing whatever I can to help the people in my surroundings. We are doing a lot better at contacting every family, it doesn`t matter if we are running for an appointment or not. I had that goal before, but somehow it got pushed down on the list, I have reput it as number one, because that should be our focus finding families to help them to become an eternal family. So that is my goal this week, to talk to EVERY family. Maybe we might be running between every contact so that we can still get to our appointment, but I am really going to focus on this and ask in my prayers for help to really accomplish this goal.

This week we were able to talk to Stanley more about baptism. We committed him to pray about the date of the 18th and asking God for help to prepare himself for that day. He didn`t accept a date, but he is preparing himself, and he is reading in the BOM everyday and he has come to church the last 3 weeks in a row all 3 hours. We just have to teach more clearly repentance so he has a desire to be baptized and be baptized as soon as possible. He just wants to be sure he isn`t going to break a commandment after his baptism, so thats a good thing. 

We were able to visit with a member this week, who we have been wanting to visit since I have got here, we just haven`t been able to get a hold of her to set up an appointment. And she is the greatest! She has 2 years as a member, but has a lot of difficulties and is fighting with a lot of opposition from her kids, they are all grown up. And she said in her prayer after the lesson thanking God for sending us to her, because we were exactly what she needed in this moment. It really made me feel grateful for this calling and time I have to dedicate myself to the Lord, because we are able to be answers to peoples prayers and quite often. Sometimes I don`t think to much about that aspect, and then moments like this remind me that we really are servants and representatives of Jesus Christ in every moment and I can`t take for granted all these moments we have to be answers to peoples prayers. It really is a great blessing we have. 

We had divisions with the Hermana Leaders this week and I was with Hna Peralta. She is a really great missionary and I learned alot from her, one thing that she mentioned was testify more frequently in the contacts. I sometimes find myself wanting to teach the person so bad that I start trying to convince them, but that never works. I have put that in to practice and I always feel good and full of the spirit walking away from a contact, whether they said no or yes. Because, I know that I was teaching with the Spirit helping these people feel something from our message. Hopefully I don`t forget that again. I just love divisions, it is a time to learn something from the Hna Leaders and really reflect about the work that I am doing in my sector. We also were able to find some new investigators for them and they are really great and seem really prepared to hear this message. I was really happy to find them and I hope that the Hna Leaders can help them to progress. 

Also there is a less active here in our sector who has been less active for over 30 years, and we contacted her about a month ago and have been trying to visit with her. At first she didn`t really trust us and always avoided a lot of contact with us, but this last week we were able to visit her and were able to share a message about the importance of keeping the promises we make with God. Then a couple of times this week she thanked me for actually teaching her something and helping her to recognize that if she is going to make a promise with God, she is going to keep it. Hopefully we can help her to realized what kind of promise she made with baptism and help her to have a testimony of our church. 

Also I am on my way to Quito this week to renew my visa.. that means I have been in Ecuador for a year now. How crazy how fast time is flying by! 

I love this sector and I just keep working and doing all I can to help the people all around us. 

I hope you all have an amazing week and realize all the little blessings that the Lord is sending our way.

Muchísimo Amor,

Hermana Cordon

Here is a sign in Baños for all the gringos that are there, I thought it was really funny