Free Coke Because We Were German

Hello!  This week has been absolutly crazy!  It just flew by that is for sure!!  We were able to see tons of success in the little time that we worked!!  We were able to find a ton of news and get lots of references!!  Our ward is amazing!!  They are all so loving! and they all want to share the gospel and it is super cool! That is part of why they have soo much success here!  We have the goal to baptize five people in first three weeks of the cycle!  But I guess i will get into the whole what happened this week thing!

Tuesday we went to Presidents house with the deads and had the going away brunch for them!  It was good this was the group that I would have been in if I wouldn't have gone home so it was cool to say goodbye to all of my friends!

and then after all that was said and done we went to our missionary meeting with our ward mission leader and I started to get to know them and the ward missionaries and all that good stuff! It was good!  This was the day that we were walking in the street and we just see some people fighting a little bit in front of us, and we were like okay well what is going on right.  It was a guy and a girl! like he wasn't hitting her or anything but they were like arguing and we walk past and all we hear is the girl say, ¨give me the keys you are way too drunk to drive!¨ and then he responds, ¨I drive better drunk than you drive sober I am driving home¨.  It was pretty funny not the best idea but it made us laugh at least!

Wednesday we had to start to plan zone conferences after we studied and so we didn't leave until the food and we started to work hard after and we ended up getting a really cool reference and we were able to teach her which we were stoked for!  Then we went just kept working and tried to find more people.  We then went to ward council and it was super cool! Probably the coolest ward council I have been to.  we got a reference there and we talked about the work we were doing and all sorts of stuff! It went really good!  Then we went for Tacos at Tacos tepalcates.

Thursday we planned for the week and got another capacitation ready to go.  Then we headed out to work again.  We went with a member and asked if she would take us to go and visit someone and so we went and found some part member families.  Then we went with some recent converts and such.  it went good all day.  We also went and helped a member put together a bed for her sick mom and we lifted her out of where she was and put her into the new bed which was a ton of work but we got it done! 

Friday we had the mission council.

We talked about all sorts of stuff and how we were going to get all the areas closed and where to close them and all that great stuff!  we talked about all sorts of stuff actually but then Elder Ostler and I got to capacitate about commitments which was super fun! We had Pres try and commit his wife to go on a date with him and then we had the Nebekers do the same and everyone seemed to like it! We felt really good about it and we hope that they could have learned a whole bunch about committing investigators!  It was at least super fun and different!  Then we headed out to work a little bit!  WE had an alright day. We were able to put a fecha and such.  We also made plans to find some news this week that we could baptize here in a couple weeks and stuff like that!  We passed with our fecha and we have to get creative to baptize her this week. She can't get a cut she has wet and so if anyone has any idea we are accepting! we are thinking about wrapping it in plastic wrap and duct tape but I will get back to you guys about how that goes! It should be on Saturday but we will confirm that later! 

Saturday we started to do zone conferences! And we started out in Ixtapaluca.  It is just so far out from everywhere else!

Oh and I felt super sick I have no idea what happened but my  throat was killing me! But things went super good in Zone Conference!  We capacitated on finding news and how we could do it effectively and such and it went really good!  Basically this next week all we are going to do is go to zone conferences so that will be fun! But we got back super late from zone conference! 

However we went and ate ice cream that was amazing from from a place where they serve it in like a pineapple or coconut!  It was super good! Shout out to pres for taking us!

I will include the selfie we took shout out to Ostler for buying a selfie stick.  Anyways we get back to the area and we went out and worked and we put another fecha with someone to get baptized in two weeks! She will be a little harder to baptize since we need her moms permission but we have faith and we think we can do it! 

Alright so one more little funny story!  Today we were waiting for the bus that takes us to the offices and this drunk guy next to us gets out of his car and he was buying more beer just like they all do and he just looks at us and he was like hey guys whats up?  We told him hi and all this stuff and he says my car comes from your country!  It come from Germany and I looked at Ostler and I was like just go with it man!  Elder Ostler´s family is currently living in England right now and so we just chatted and he threw out a few cities from germany and a few words he had learned and the guy was just so stoked that we were German and he ended up buying us coke and chatting away for ten minutes until the bus came it was too funny!  It was the first time someone had called me German before! So that was an interesting experience!  

THis week I wanted to share something that we had seen this week with our investigators! We shared about Joseph Smith and we talked about how they could also recieve an answer just like we had received an answer!  We talked a little bit about nephi and his experience when his father saw a vision and he wanted to see and know for himself and it was super cool! We could really feel the spirit and it was an awesome experience for them too!!

 17 And it came to pass after I, Nephi, having heard all the words of my father, concerning the things which he saw in a vision, and also the things which he spake by the power of the Holy Ghost, which power he received by faith on the Son of God—and the Son of God was the Messiah who should come—I, Nephi, was desirous also that I might see, and hear, and know of these things, by the power of theHoly Ghost, which is the gift of God unto all those who diligently seek him, as well in times of old as in the time that he should manifest himself unto the children of men.

 18 For he is the same yesterday, today, and forever; and the way is prepared for all men from the foundation of the world, if it so be that they repent and come unto him.

 19 For he that diligently seeketh shall find; and the mysteries of God shall be unfolded unto them, by the power of the Holy Ghost, as well in these times as in times of old, and as well in times of old as in times to come; wherefore, the course of the Lord is one eternal round.

have a great week I love you!

Elder Orchard

I'm Headed Back to the Offices!

My new companion, Elder Ostler

Hey guys this week just flew by!  We had lots of work to do in so little time! But we were able to get a few things done and that is the most important thing!  

Tuesday we had everything lined up to be a really good day! We had tons of plans and we were going to find news and everything but it just kinda ended up going down hill! Everyone was cancelling on us and so we just did a bunch of contacts!  We ended up having a decent day but it was pretty rough! Really this whole week was spent just working with recent converts trying to get references!  But we had a pretty good success and the lord really really blessed us!

Wednesday was basically more of the same except we had even more citas with investigators and they even just cancelled on us!  But we were able to find some really really cool people that might progress!  Hopefully they can get progressing! 

Thursday we had weekly planning as a district because the missionaries just don't really get how to plan or why we plan and so on but we think that we had success doing in! Obviously you can try the hardest you can to help them but if they don't want to do it there is not much we can do!  Pres always says you can take a horse to water but you can't make him drink!  So we have been trying to take the horses to water!  But lots of people don't really care about it which is really really sad! Hmm we also went out and worked and we had people there for our appointments then we were getting things ready for the house of prayer that we would be having in Tlalpizahuac!  WE also got an awesome reference of a lady that got baptized but never confirmed.  She said she wanted to start again and the only reason she stopped was for work and it got slower and she wants to keep going. She has still been living everything but she needs to go now and wants our help! We were super excited! Elder Vite should have a lot of work to do this cycle and so we are grateful for that! 

Friday was the day that we had planned to go with everybody that we had contacted the first few days and these are always the days that you don't know what is going to happen!  We set out and it was pretty slow to be honest!  We didn't have much and so we just started to contact harder and we had a decent day but I am not like 1000 percent sure what we did all day because the whole week just kind of flew by! 

Saturday we headed in to pick up Elder Camarillo to take him out to our area.  We went and taught Eldrichi and he was super excited! It seems like he is super ready and pumped for his baptism! Which is good!  THat is what we wanted from him anyways. Then we went to a baptism and went and ate with a family after that!

Oh and we had to clean the church!  In my opinion we did a really good job I don't think they have ever seen the church that clean before! Hopefully they can help make it stay that clean!

Sunday this is kind of the big and cool news of the week!  But we finally had services in Tlalpizahuac! It was such a blessing! I took a picture of Gospel doctrine

and then turned around and took the one where you can see the whole city! 

Pretty cool!  It was super cool to experience that! You could really feel the spirit there and we had an assistance of 50 people! That is not bad for the first week!  

I think that we are going to have a ton of success out there with the branch! I think here in a couple of months it could be an official branch!

That is kind of it for the week.  I also got changed yesterday into what I hope will be my last area! I am headed back to the offices and so that will be awesome to be with Pres again! And my kids the Nebekers! 

The"O" Elders and their matching socks.

So happy to see Elder Olson again!

I love you all have a great week!

Elder Orchard

Home Sweet Home the last 3 months.

Santos Got Baptized

Heyyaall so this week was a pretty good week! I guess the first important news is that Santos got baptized!  We were super excited and happy for him!  It was a long process but it ended up being super cool and paying off in the end!  Santos was the guy that I found with Elder Lopez which was super super chosen! This was the guy that had an Angel appear to him in a dream and say that two people were going to come into his life and that he should just do everything that they told him to do!  So he told the angel that he would be obedient and then we contacted him that week!  He was super chosen and did everything we had asked him to! For four weeks he progressed like a champ!  We taught everything and it all went great,  then we taught the word of wisdom and he had a little bit of a smoking problem!  He said it would be hard for him to give it up and he kind of just dropped us! It was super super sad because we had so much hope for him!  He stopped going to church for weeks and we didn't hear anything from Santos!  Well the time passed and then about two weeks ago he just showed up to church again!  We talked with him and put an appointment!  We went on tuesday and he said I have been reading the book of Mormon and he recieved an answer.  He had also quit smoking and was ready to be baptized!  It was a super cool experience and baptism!  Then he got up and bore his testimony and said that he knew the church was the church of Christ and I almost got some tears it was so cool!!  So that was kind my cool story of the week!  

Other than that we were just finding a few people that we hope can progress!  We will be working hard with them!  And we put another fecha this week with Vianney she is a new from last week that is from a part member family!  WE are super excited for her! We also taught Eldrichi and he will be ready to be baptized in a couple weeks!  Just trying to leave everything in order for if I have changes!  I also did five baptism interviews for everything this week so it was busy with all of that going on!  We also had a cool activity with Pres where he talked with our ward about how we can work better together!  It was super fun and it is always good to see him!

Well I don't have much time but I will get some pictures loaded! Things are going good here!  Love you all! 

Elder Orchard

Some random pictures he sent with no explanation.

Lots of Exciting Things Happening in Ixtapaluca!

Well this week was a pretty fast week and it felt like we didn't have much time to get a whole lot done in the area!  We had an alright week but we were expecting a lot more!  When everything else happened we had got to Sunday and lots of people we were waiting for didn't ever show up! I guess it is like that sometimes though! But this week will be a lot better we are sure of it!  We are in week five of the cycle and so we have to kick our butts into gear for the last two weeks!  Things that happened this week... well we did divisions with the APs which was fun! It made for a super long day because we had to go pick them up at the offices which was pretty far and by the time we got back out we had not much time to work but it ended up turning out fine! Santos is super ready for his baptism and he is super super excited!  We already went through the baptismal interview questions and he is ready! He was such a champion and it was awesome to be able to teach him! On Saturday at 11 am he will be getting baptized and I am super super excited!  We have also been working with a couple other people that are progressing really well to baptism!  We are hoping to get more and more going into our area so we can see a lot more of success!!  

These past few weeks we have focused a lot on the less actives! We have tried to purely work with the less actives here and cut our lists down! It is something we really need! In my little area there are over 150 familias! That is so many! Considering that we only have like 140 active members! So we have a ton of work to do and we are sure lucky that we get to work so hard with the gold mine of investigators!  Hmmm what else is going on?  

This is probably the most exciting news that has happened in the last week but a while ago we had a meeting with president and in that meeting we had discussed putting a house of prayer up and adding another companionship of hermanas in our ward! Well he liked the idea and basically after we got them sent the house never got put! As missionaries we were working hard to do everything we needed and the ward just didn't really help us out!  We called the high council man that was in charge of missionary work and he is an absolute stud but he said I will come to your ward this week lets see what we can do! Well we studied really really good what we needed to do in order to put up the house of prayer and we headed off to the meeting!  We got there and we started to talk about all sorts of things and the bishop finally realized that it was a lot easier than we were making it seem!  He said alright we will go do some visits today! Like a good missionary we committed him well and said we would go with him!  We headed out and the first house was the members that we thought had the best chance to help us out! Their house wasn't the biggest or the nicest but they said if the lord needs us to prest him our house we can do that! And it was super cool to see this family!  They decided to live the law of consecration and are giving what they have to help the church grow in this area! The goal is that within three years they can put another stake that has the ward that my zone is in!  It is a tough task but they think that they can do it and I would say they are right!  The stake president really has some great ideas and he is working hard to help the work accelerate her in Ixtapaluca!  Back to what I was saying though we will be holding our first services in the Branch of Tlalpizahuac on the 19 of June!  We are super super excited!  It was amazing to see all that stuff fall into place yesterday!  It was awesome to see my favorite scripture come true!  When the Lord gives us a commandment he will provide the way for us to accomplish it! ( 7 And it came to pass that I, Nephi, said unto my father: I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them.) He sure did provide everything we needed to be able to accomplish this branch that we have been working so hard on! 

Well I think that is about it for this week!  I can't believe the cycle is so close to ending! After this cycle I will only have two left! That is still so much time to do so many things!  I am grateful for the opportunity I have to be a missionary!  They are two years that I will forever cherish after all that I have learned here!  I hope you all have a great week! 

love,

Elder Orchard

We Found a Really Cool Drunk Guy

Hello!  This week went pretty well for us! We didn't have tons of plans but we were sure able to see tons of blessing that we definitely weren't expecting!  We worked super hard and we were satisfied with how we worked!  We had a few people come to church and we are super excited!

Tuesday was a good day!  We had tons of plans and so we just went out to try and see what we could do!  It went pretty good! We found a really cool drunk guy! He told us all about how he had lived in the Los Angeles Azules (Local band here)  And that he made three dollars an hour and what he makes now is just nothing compared to that( 500 pesos) I don't know how he did the math but he was a little bit off!  Then he was talking about how he wanted to stop drinking(pretty typical from all the drunks here)  But he didn't know how! Then he went off about how his uncle sent him back from the Los Angeles Azules because all he did was drink and all sorts of things that people under the age of 18 should hear!  Then he said I am sick of being a drunk do you know how many days I have been drinking for?  Do you know how many days I have been drunk?  3 Months!  It was quite the little story!  Every day he got drunk and then went to work at night! I think the most impressive part of this whole story was this was at 11 in the morning!  Two hours later we passed by and he was passed out on the sidewalk! Quite the life he has lived!   Then we went to the food and we had a sister tell us all about how we aren't good missionaries because we don't go visit the members and all sorts of stuff!  It was interesting! In the last week some of the sisters had started rumors that has really really effected our ward!  It is going to be hard to get out of them and prove they aren't true!   That is why it is so important to always do things right!  Then we were able to head to see Santos.  This is the guy that had a dream where the angel came and talked to him. He just showed up at church last week and so we were excited and saced out a cita!  Well he is ready to get back to listening and reading the book of mormon! Super excited for him!  More to come later in the week!

Wednesday we set out to find some new investigators because we have some good ones but if we stop finding people we will fall into a situation where we baptize them all and then have nothing!  We decided that we would do that using a list of less actives since that is where the gold mine is of investigators.  So we set out with a list of less actives and we started just going crazy!  We had tons of success and we are just going to keep working hard with it!  We saw that we could have lots and lots of success in a ward that has 120 active members and 1095 members on record!  It is super cool to go with all of them and see the way they react! We didn't find lots of them but we did find some people that are being prepared!  We also got a reference that is pretty cool for a sister but we can't go until next wednesday and so we are sad about that but it sounds like they will be ready to listen to us! We are hoping at least! That is exactly what we need right now a good family!  We were also able to find another family that has a kid who never got baptized but remembers the church and wants to go back and is super excited to get baptized! We got really blessed twice with him! The first time today and another time of saturday!

Thursdday was our slowest day! We couldn't find anybody in their house! It was really really frustrating but we just kept pushing on! We also planned for the week and we had our ward mission meeting!  It went good but it was a super super long day! However we did get all of our contacts in!

Friday was one of the coolest days!  In the morning we had mission council! It was super super cool! 

Elder Orchard's companion, Elder Vite.

We were able to learn a whole bunch and we were really excited to try and help our zone with everything that we learned!  Then we got home from that and went and saw Santos!  He was waiting for us like always, We got there late, like always and we had nooo idea what to teach! We pulled out the Book of Mormon and started seeing where he was reading and he had read a ton of stuff!  Then we talked about Moroni's promise and he said yeah I know that it is true because I have my answer! I want to be baptized! It was super super cool! He was constantly being prepared by the Lord even though he wasn't always with us! He was doing his part and he was constantly reading and it was a super cool experience for Elder Vite and I!

Saturday we had a temple trip planned but we had everyone who had said they would go cancel on us! We said we can't be the companionship that doesn't take anyone and we set out at 8 in the morning to find somebody! We thought of Eldrichi.  So we went to his house and he was there and he was able to go with us to the visitors center! We were able to make him a new and put him to a fecha! It was super cool and we were pretty blessed this whole week with stuff like that!  We are hoping that we can continue to be blessed because we need all the help we can get! We also had a family night that went cool but other than that it was a pretty lame saturday!  Especially when that is usually our best day for work!

Well this week I was studying a lot about a lot of things and today in our meeting I talked a little bit about Nephi when he broke his bow! And you know what sometimes things don't really turn out exactly the way we want them to!  But if we are willing to do everything we can! Even if it is just a little wooden bow and a straight stick the Lord will make up for the rest! That is why the Atonement is so important in our lives!  I really like that Nephi did what he could, nothing more! There is a scripture in Mosiah that I like that reads,

And see that all these are done in wisdom and order; for it is not requisite that a man should run faster than he has strength. And again, it is expedient that he should be diligent, that thereby he might win the prize; therefore, all things must be done in order.  I really like this and what it teaches us!  Have a great week!  Love you guys! Elder Orchard