April 29, 2013

Well it has been a super fast week down here in El Puerto with a lot of good days with lots of appointments and some other days with not much to do. Even though there were some hard times this week I have grown even closer to my Savior and am even more thankful for the Atonement and sacrifice He made for me. This week I have been praying a lot and studying a ton about the Atonement so it´s been a pretty powerful week for me in the study category. Tomorrow I hit eleven months in the mission so that´s pretty crazy, at times it feels like I´ve been out for a long time but when I think about it these eleven months have flown by. 

 

This week we weren´t really able to make a ton of progress with our investigators, but we did place a date for one for the end of the month. So now we have two dates for the month of May. I´m pretty sure one will get baptized and the other one, we´ll just have to wait and see the effort she puts in to the church. They have some challenges right now with work on Sundays so they haven´t been able to attend church yet, so that will be a big step for them. We found a lot of new investigators the end of last week and the beginnning of this week but it has been hard to hold on to them. Part of the problem is people are very nice here so they will tell you what you want to hear but not really what they´re gonna do so that is still frustrating for me. But this week we were able to have a fast to believe. For me this fast was very special and really helped me this week. To believe that we can meet all the goals we set in our zone meeting and to better each of our areas here. 

 

Probably our most powerful lesson this week was with a less active family. It was just going to be a short lesson with them about the importance and power of prayer. It started out kinda weird because the wife wouldn´t come join us for the lesson. When she finally came and sat with us, she wouldn´t look at us or participate in the lesson. I tried to ask questions and help her feel the Spirit but she just seemed angry. So to close the lesson we shared our testimonies of the power of prayer and I shared that whatever trial or problem we have, we can´t blame our Heavenly Father for it because he is only there to help us through those things. He has to be our rock, not our excuse. After that she started crying and told us some struggles they are having, but then I got to share my testimony of the Atonement with them and help her understand the purpose of it and the blessing it is. It ended up being a very spiritual lesson for me and hopefully for them. Sorry to say that the story doesn´t have a super happy ending because they didn´t come to church yesterday but we are going back to them this week. Well I don´t know how but our time is already up. I love you all. Thank you for all your prayers this week!

 

Love,

Elder Jorgensen

April 22, 2013

Whew I can`t believe how fast the weeks go by. I`m coming up on eleven months already. This week was a pretty good week for us, I feel good about it anyways. Just a little side note, we just had interviews with President so now I`m all sorts of rambled but I`ll do my best. Let`s see this week we were able to find some pretty good new investigators which is awesome because we are always cycling through new investigators because most people here are kind enough to let us in and give us hope that they will progress. Then when we go back and try to find them, they happen to not be home or they have too many people visiting or other excuses. Sometimes I wish the people were just more upfront with us so that we wouldn`t lose time looking for more who are willing to accept the Gospel. 

 

This week though was super fast because I had divisions one day with one of our Zone Leaders, Elder Gillespie from Washington and we also had Zone Conference. The day with my zone leader was interesting. He is a different kid, really good missionary, just oblivious to some things that might bother other people. I learned a lot from him though, he is a really good teacher. Our Zone Conference was awesome though, soooo powerful. We talked a ton about humility and the Atonement. I hope to be able to use the cleansing power of the Atonement to its fullest, it is amazing. We also made a lot of goals and stuff like that baptisms in these upcoming months and how we can better help our wards and branches. Really good stuff, I`m not so sure some things will be as helpful to us just cause some of the challenges we face in our branch are to the extreme at times. But we have a lot of good ideas about how to keep working and improving the family within the branch. Our family home evening nights in the church might not be working out to great anymore though, we only had two show up last week, our convert Angela and one member who is preparing for a mission. So we`ll see if we can continue to do those or not. 

 

Transfers aren`t for three more weeks so I won`t know for a while so about that, it is the Wednesday after Mother`s Day! Super excited for that day! I really am not sure what to put in this email ha my mind is all scrambled. Things with my comp are still improving everyday, we still have our moments when things are frustrating but every day gets easier. I don`t really have any cool stories this week either. On Saturday we left with Sister Tuli, our cook, to look for less actives. We had to rent a pickup (only 5 bucks driver included) to go visit them. They live clear up in the mountains, about an hour away, ridiculous haha I dono how the missionaries found them. But they weren`t too positive we will see what happens though. Other short story, Tuesday was a little slow so when we were walking by the river I found a little piglet, there are pigs everywhere here! But I chased him for about fifty feet, those things are freakin fast and I am way out of shape ha but it was fun and something a little different. 

 

Sounds like things at home might be start picking up weather wise anyways. Getting a little warmer hopefully. Brandi is dommin up in track, in your pic you looked pretty professional and I could tell you were in first haha. I`ll be praying for you to be able to get better so you can run faster, how did you get more sick than me?! And Mom, you are still running too? Ten miles a day,  I dono how you do that, how long does it take you to do ten miles? Well that`s about all I got this week I love you all so much and thank you for all the support you always have given me and are still giving me! Good luck everyone who is coming up on finals and all the crappy tests in school haha take luck! Have a great week!

 

Love,

Elder Jorgensen

April 15, 2013

Well I´m not exactly sure where to begin this email. First of all I guess I´m very happy to say that we found a lot more lessons this week than last week, more than double actually so that was cool for us. I´m still not big on numbers, I hate being compared to other people and other areas because not a single one of us are the same. But oh well we have to turn in our numbers every week. 

 
The new role of District Leader is...different haha. I have to prepare a district meeting every week, which is just kinda like a motivational lesson to help the district and also helps us exercise and increase our faith in the Lord. At first I was pretty nervous because I was the youngest in the district besides my kid, so I thought someone else should be the leader but I guess the Lord really wants me to learn and grow this change so I´m trying that out haha. I had divisions with one of the Elders in my district this week, Elder Chaclan from Guatemala. He was in the area about a year ago so he showed me all his old investigators so that day with him was awesome. I learned more from him than he learned from me. But all those new investigators I´m sorry to say now want nothing to do with us so that was a tid bit depressing but what more can we do. The progress with our other investigators is slow. We still have a solid date for Guadelupe on the 27th, but the other families we are teaching, I´m trying not to lose hope that they will realize how important these things are for them. And we´re not just talking about the word of God, like all the preachers and pastors down here. 

Me and my comp are still doing good together, I think everyday gets a little better and easier for us, he is just a little bit of a different character. But I am learning a lot from him, a lot of patience and humility. He is definitely helping with the Spanish part, still trying to learn new words everyday and work on the fluidity of my speech and proper grammar. I wouldn´t say that I am fluent in Spanish but I am confident in Spanish so there ya go, for me I´m happy to be able to say that! 

This last week was a little rough for the branch. I´m trying to stay positive with everything that is going on.  We´re doing our best to help everyone we can. It is kinda sad at times. It´s hard for me to sit back and watch. 

 Other than that stuff, it was a normal week for us. I don´t have any fantastic stories or anything. We did help a guy out from Honduras well I dono how much we helped but he showed up on a Thursday night in El Puerto with one suitcase no money and looking for a job. We shared with him a short message and I offered a prayer and gave him enough money for breakfast the next day. I haven´t seen him since but it was kinda the same experience we had a few weeks ago with me and Elder Scurr talking to a guy on a bench so that was cool. Other than that same ol same ol. Sounds like home is goin alright haha. Brandi is loving the ACT and SAT so that´s cool haha.  Hopefully she can relax a little and enjoy her dance. So have fun there Brandi! And hopefully mom can stay in top shape for her half marathon, we´ll probably both be sweating pretty profusely at the same time so I´ll be thinking about ya then haha. And hopefully Dad can find some nice patio furniture so you can sit outside and freeze in your 40 degree weather HA. Forty degrees to me sounds miserable now, I´ll probably die my first winter back in Idaho haha. But that´s all I got this week. Keep me in your prayers and keep moving forward with faith. 

Love you all!!!!

Elder Jorgensen

April 8, 2013

Well how is everyone doing? I´m doing good down here in El Salvador just trying to not screw up as being district leader. It was a pretty surprising phone call from the zone leaders, they just called me Wednesday night and said I better start planning my District Meeting for Thursday so I started panicking instantly because I´ve never had to worry about that before. Being a District Leader I get to go on divisions with all the elders in my district and tomorrow I get to do divisions with Elder Chaclan from Guatemala. He served in El Puerto (my area) about a year ago so hopefully he´ll be able to show me some of his old investigators because we desperately need people to teach. This last week was tough for us with one lesson with a member present and only four others, with a whopping three less actives to top it off. I´m glad to start a new week. We did have Guadelupe and her family come to conference, right now she is pretty much our only solid progressing investigator, but she said she loved conference. She is a single mother of six or seven, I think. We´ve had to drop our other investigators or it is just super hard to find them so that's depressing but we´re not losing hope on em yet. We only had an attendance of about 30 from our branch and they only came to one session on Sunday. Our branch president only came to that session as well so that really angered me, we can´t make progress if the most influential leader in the branch and the head of the branch doesn´t want to do anything. But what can I do?

 

I also got my birthday package! I was super excited for that! The two ties are probably my favorite and the jerky is all of the latinos´ favorite haha. I wore both ties on conference weekend, they´re too nice to wear to work every day so I gotta keep em nice. But the other stuff was awesome too, the cd´s, shirts and just all the good food haha. Thank you so much and the Birthday cards I got from everyone was awesome. Thank you so much Grandma Evie and Grandma and Grandpa Bowman, and Grandpa and Grandma Jorgensen my mom said yours is in the mail so I will thank you right now as well. Still can´t believe I´m twenty, I don´t feel it. 

 

So how did everyone enjoy conference?! It was my favorite so far, but I´m pretty sure I´ll say that about every conference for the rest of my life haha. My favorite talks were the fourth one from Saturday Morning Session, Bishop Cardon, and others on obedience by Thomas S. Monson, and faith by Jeffrey R. Holland was freakin awesome too. The worst part about conference and the only bad thing about conference is there is a closing prayer that means it´s six more months until conference again. I hope all you guys had questions answered and felt the Spirit from this conference. 

Sounds like things at home are still going, I wanna go do yardwork. This week we raked leaves for about 30 minutes and I probably sweated enough to fill up our pool at home, it was ridiculously hot.  Apparently April is the hottest month down here. We´ll see if I make it to next April haha. But Brandi sounds like your track meet was awesome.  And I´m not sure who asked you to the dance but hopefully you have a good day! Mom how is your training going for your half marathon? And thanks for the update on mission calls, that´s sweet! Dad feel free to get going on the hot tub cause i could sure go for one right now haha. But that´s it for me for the week. I hope you all have a great week and I´ll chat you up again

Monday!

 

Love,

Elder Jorgensen

4/1/2013 I'm coming home!!!

Well like the subject of the email says I´m coming home! Apparently in order to change or split the mission they have to send some missionaries home so I´m gonna have like two months of down time! HA HA  April Fools! But wouldn´t that be sweet!!! Anyways so I logged on today and had 31 emails!!! Thank you everyone for emailing me and Brandi thanks for the pics of California, those were sweet. For my birthday though it was a pretty good day. At lunch we went to Hermama Tuli´s house cause she made me a double cheeseburger with bacon and homemade french fries and FRY SAUCE! Then to finish it off she brought out a 3 milk cake. It was different but really good. Then she also got a yellow lab puppy this last week, and I got her to name it Kate. So now I have a yellow lab puppy here in El Salvador! Makes me miss our dogs a lot but it´s alright. Also on my birthday we did divisions with some members from the branch, that was alright we weren´t able to get much done. But to finish off the day some investigators invited me over and they made us some dish of Shrimp and vegetables, it was super good. Don´t worry I took pictures of all the food haha. It feels super weird being 20, actually I don´t feel any different but whatever. 

3 milk Birthday Cake!

 

Kate thinks its hot here too!  She likes to cool off in the fridge.

 

Birthday Meal!

 

Hermama Tuli's new puppy!  I convinced her to name her Kate.

 



 

Yumm... Shrimp and Veggies!

 

Overall this week was a lot better than last week. Our number of lessons went up a little bit even though on Saturday and Sunday we only taught one less active. Semana Santa is huge down here. EVERYONE goes to the beach for the week so my area was freakin packed with people that didn´t care to hear from us at all, just yell Mormon stuff at us. I did receive a few friendly waves from some people but it´s against the rules to talk to them haha. Saturday though was insane, down here it´s really not Holy Week at all, just free time party week, and Saturday night they had parties everywhere, it was more wild than New Year´s and Christmas. We made it through though. 

 

This last Sunday we didn´t have any investigators in church but our attendance is going up. We´ve been in the sixties and upper fifties for about three weeks so that´s been cool. Our one investigator with a baptismal date hasn´t come to church yet and I don´t know what her deal is. Hopefully we can find her this week and she will be coming to conference. This last week I´d have to say my favorite time of the day was personal study every day, I don´t have my study journal with me right now but this whole last week was awesome. One thing that I´m trying to focus on is making every good thing a habit. I read from the teachings of President Lorenzo Snow that living the Gospel is like learning to play an instrument, at first it´s hard and we have to think about every note, every sequence, and how to act all the time. After practice we can play the song from memory and from habit, we have adjusted to be able to do it. And to play something wrong is almost difficult but it is more easy to correct when we do. The same with the Gospel, if we are trying to live the Gospel at all times things outside the Gospel or things we do that make us lose the Spirit seem difficult and are hard to do. When I read that I really liked it. I only read it this morning before I left the house but I´m gonna try to put those things in practice haha. I know that would be a blessing. 

 Well I´m glad everyone had an awesome fun Spring Break and was able to enjoy being together. The pictures looked fun and the emails I received made it sound like everyone had a good time. Even though it was Spring Break I hope everyone was able to remember the importance of this Sunday and the hope and happiness the Atonement of Jesus Christ brings to our lives. The power of the Atonement is amazing, it cleans us and it is a blessing to repent. I love my Savior and I love my family and I love my friends. Thank you all so much! One more quick note, make some questions for this conference! It will be a more powerful conference if you do! Que Dios Les Bendiga Mucho! Que les vayan muy bien!

 

Love,

Elder Jorgensen

March 25, 2013

Yummy mangos!!!

 

 



Woah... I´m going to be 20 years old tomorrow, I don´t know how this last year has gone by so fast. A lot of things have happened to me in this past year and I´m so thankful for the changes that I can see in myslef. First off thank you everyone for the happy birthday emails, those made me pretty dag gum happy and even though I didn´t get my package I got a present of seeing you guys on a beach in California. So basically we are in the same place! Ha I hope the beach there is a little more tranquilo than it is here, we are starting semana santa, holy week, and everyone and there dog heads to the beach so this week will be crazy. Hopefully even though it is gonna be crazy we will see more success than we saw this week. It was another low week, for numbers anyways. But I think I learned a lot. 

 

We had some bad luck this week though. Our two most positive families dropped us. One family decided Jehovah Witness is the way to go and the other family just doesn´t want us to come back for a couple weeks...So needless to say, once again we don´t have many investigators to visit so that means a lot of walking every day. Usually we can find people to talk to in the street but these last few weeks no one will give us the time of day so that´s a little disappointing. But we did have some success with some less actives. Our church attendance was 63 this last Sunday, the highest I´ve seen here in El Puerto. One less active family lives about 45 minutes from the church and they walk the whole way because they live very humbly. It was awesome to see them there though. It brightened my week quite a bit. 

 

Friday was a little bit of a tough day for us. Every Friday we have a weekly planning session where we plan our goals and everything for the upcoming week. To finish the planning session we do what is called a companionship inventory where we talk about the strengths of our companionship and set goals on how we can improve and be more unified. Every time we do it I ask my comp if there is anything I can do that will help improve our relationship or anything that I do that bugs him, stuff like that. Well this week he tried to tell me I needed to be more kind to him and show more charity, and well then lets say I gave him a piece of my mind as well .... so we had a pretty rough start on Friday morning.    Pretty much Friday in the morning was pretty bad.  On Friday everything fell threw except for our Family Night we had in the church. We´re trying to get the branch more unified so we played a bunch of games and gave a small message and then had refreshments, there was about 35 people there so that was awesome. 

 

 

This week we also did a fast on Saturday as a district, it´s pretty hard to fast here cause it´s about 105 degrees or so plus humidity during the day and a cool 84 to 90 degrees at night, but anyways like five minutes after starting the fast we walked by a water stand with what I thought were two models giving out free water. Freakin temptations haha!!!   It was hard but we made ´er through and were able to complete our fast. Well that´s pretty much all I got this week, hopefully my birthday brings us some luck or blessings cause we need em. I hope all you guys at home have an awesome Spring Break and enjoy Sea World, Universal Studios, and Disneyland. I´ll be thinking about ya and praying like always. Love you all so much!!

 

Elder Jorgensen

1 Nephi 18:16 March 18, 2013

Hammock Time!!

 

 

Bananas that don't taste the same.



What`s Up everybody! I had a way better week this week than last week so hopefully I`ll have some more stuff to put on this email ha. Let`s see first off me and my comp are doing lots better now. I had to convince him that the mission is supposed to be fun. This work is the Lord`s work, and we are bringing eternal happiness to these people so it only makes sense that we are able to have fun in the mission. I told that to him on Tuesday and every day has been getting better and better. Saturday was probably our best day just cause we were able to keep a positive attitude all day with jokes and stuff like that. I definitely need to be able to be me as a missionary and not some robot but things are going much better.

A little info about our investigators and the branch real quick. We are teaching complete families right now, first time in my mission that I`ve been able to say that and it feels good haha. The only problem with all of our investigators is attending church. Because my area is on the beach it is a tourist area meaning guess who has to work every Sunday in restaurants, hotels, cleaning and police and all those jobs. So that part is going to be kind of difficult for us with all of our investigators but we`re not losing faith in them. Our most positive family this week we just found out that the wife is a Jehova Witness but less active but they are occasionally listening to JH missionaries so that  sucks ha. They are really solid, but they are having a hard time praying about the Book of Mormon. Our other families are pretty new and hard to find so that is another obstacle but just read the scripture reference and it explains how I`m feeling.

 

This week I had two awesome meetings. Wednesday we had our trainers meeting with President and Thursday we had our Zone Meeting. In the trainers meeting..wow it was awesome, I left there with a completely different outlook on my mission. Just erasing fear with faith. Thursday as always zone meetings get me pumped too. It was pretty much an extension of the trainers meeting erasing fear with faith and enjoying my time being a missionary having fun! Then on Thursday I had divisions with another missionary Elder De Leon from the Dominican Republic, it was a pretty fun day with him too. His Spanish is so much clearer than my comp`s so I loved that part ha I didn`t have to ask him to repeat everything he said. On Friday we had a cool experience too. We were just walkin from Angela`s house to another lesson and a silver van drove by and layed on the horn. I thought it was maybe some white members visiting one of the beaches but about three minutes later we hear someone yell ELDERS!! we turned around and it was President Glazier and his family! His son and family are visiting him for spring break. So we took a quick picture with them and they gave us a juice and some m&ms. I chugged the juice but gave the m&ms to some kids, made their day haha.

 

Oh we also had our house inspection this week. So our District Leader came over on Saturday and somehow we passed ha. He was like wow I`m really suprised at how clean this house is way to go guys. I know it`s not clean at all and I didn`t believe him at all when he said it...so I gave him some candy to help us out there too haha I think it worked. This week was better with lessons too but just a little bit. We didn`t break 20. I feel pretty good if we get 20-25 lessons especially in this area cause it`s freakin huge haha. But anyways. Sounds like everything else is going kinda slow at home. And windy. Still no wind and no change in temperature here. Just freakin hot and humid all day all night. I can`t remember what a cloud looks like anymore haha jk. I still miss the snow though...long time till i see it again dang it. But thank you all for your prayers last week and all your help. I am doing much better now. I love you all so much and hope everyone is doing great and is taking time to read their scriptures everyday. Scriptures are the key to true happiness, just take the time to let them change you. I know this church is true and I love you all so much!!!

Elder Jorgensen