JUMPRIGHTINTOTHINGS

6/27/11

Hola familia!

So lets jumprightintothings. (see what i did there?) my new companion is totally black. and he learned a new word from a Chilean Elder which is slang for black people in English that mark twain uses a lot and he likes it. i don´t so much but whatever. he is funny. It has been hard to find topics which we have in common. he likes rap music and has a foto album of famous people like... well i´m not sure who they are. from the states though. but he´s great. he seems kinda shy. and when people are shy towards me it´s like COME ON! just give a good squeezing tight hug! but you know i´ll get one from him yet.

So i´m still the same area of Costa Hermosa and he´s new here so i´ve had to direct the area and it has been sweet! i totally haven´t hesitated to say, we are going here. or, hey man this appointment i think vale la Pena. and we have found some dang good people to teach and lovely things like that. of course i think we might have lost some investigadores but they know where to find us the lazy bums. (in church on Sunday.)

We have an investigator who had a date for this Saturday and he wants to move it back like two weeks or a month and i read him the scripture that i´m not sure what it says in english but basically it´s like, what the heck is stopping you from being baptized if you have all these desires! in Mosiah 18: 8-10. i´m pretty sure that is basically what it says in English. ver batum.

Also i had to give a talk yesterday in church and it was terrible i got all nervous and forgot whatever Spanish i knew and it was on honesty. one of my investigadores offered to give me a book on Spanish grammar after. how sweet.

love you all bunches. thanks for writing me.

love you elder taylor

BOOM

6/13/11


¡Hola Familia!

No tengo mucho tiempo. but I learned a lot this week. I learned that if you hear rain falling inside your house, it´s probably because there is rain falling inside your house. and you should go grab the pot so your companion´s stuff doesn´t get all wet. That´s what I woke to last week. Our roof was leaking during a storm, and man it storms, and it was basically a continuous stream on all his clothes and stuff. so funny. I heard it and got up and grabbed the pot and was on the end of his bed catching the water when I told him his things were getting wet. Then after we moved everything and had placed the pot we went back to sleep and 10 minutes later directly above our house a flash of light, the fans, (with which we sleep blowing on us), turn off and BOOM, I literally sprang from my bed to get away from the metal bars that are outside my window.

The last week was HOT, I'm talking soaking wet sweaty hot a licious. Even the people who have lived here said they´v never felt it like this. and a member told us something about the sun burning the moon? I don´t know... the language is still a struggle.

Turns out there are freakin hidden members in our area. We found two inactive members randomly, (well not randomly but it surprised us.) One Jesus, go figure, and the other Edulfo who has been inactive for 12 years because the bishop told him they´d do a ´´rescue´´ of the less actives and it never happened so he never went back. but I think he went to church yesterday, I´m not sure. and I think Jesus brought his catholic mom.

Anyway sorry this is short love you guys.

lots.

Elder Taylor

Give Me Ideas!

6/6/11


Familia,

I´m doing great. I have no ´physical problems right now. Hey you all want to help me with something?

Give me ideas for family nights, very simple but really good. The games we do, like the mind games, they don´t work here. I tried. so there you go. Please give me ideas that we can do with our investigators. We got some awesome investigators. 5 men over 18 and 2 really are poderes.

Also ideas to do in the church to. Ideas that people will want to bring the friends to. Still simple, but just like activities in the church that I can use. That´d be sweet. We´ve no members in our area so we got to bring them together somehow to make friends.

and Book of Mormon trivia questions to ask while we walk. Just for fun. That´s be sweet.

The language is coming. It´s funny, at the very moment i think, I got this, at least in understanding, someone starts talking to me and the feeling leaves for some reason. But I did hold my own in explaining to a catholic lady, rather frankly, (due solely to the lack of ability to not be frank) that her church didn´t have the authority. But everything I do is in Spanish, journal writing talking, study, so it comes. It is not for a lack of effort that I can´t speak yet. I feel like moisés, cuz i am SLOW of speech, but hey, all you can do is practice.

In fact we´ve an investigator named Moisés and he is solid. He sees something different in our church so that is sweet. and another named Juan Carlos who wants me to invite me to the united states after the mission. He´s a little strange man. I like him.

So for a while there I was always thinking of after the mission, after the mission. but I realized there really is not an after the mission. I was think of returning to life, but THIS IS LIFE, and I want it to be. The mission is life and I need not think about after the called mission, but really the entire life is going to be a mission if we live it right. Really the success of a missionary isn´t measured during the mission but who he becomes after, and who his conversos become.

That´s all we have time for today! I love you tons.

Elder Taylor

Di Todo

5/30/11


Hola Flia, how in the shmeck are ya?

So.... a lot of things happened this week. and I feel so good about them.

first I want to describe what happened two weeks ago.

we had a zone meeting with all the missionaries. We were in the chapel of my church and the benches, (you can move them here) were in a semicircle. One missionary from utah, (there are three of us gringos in my zone) he changed into gym clothes and no one knew quite why. The ZL makes him go into the middle and starts offering us milky ways. Some people took them and some didn´t. Every time regardless if we took the candy or not elder larson had to do however many pushups. No one knew what was going on. but he just kept doing pushups. and kept doing them. and we could do nothing about it. and it was torture.

Obviously I`m thinking this is some sick mind game, and I`m supposed to act. but I didn´t. but when it was my turn to take the candy I stood up and grabbed it from the hand of elder Porter, the ZL and threw it away myself, (thinking it was a sin, turns out it was representative of Eternal Life...oops) then I kneeled next to elder Larson and encouraged while he did the 4 pushups for me. (he had done at least 100 or more by this point and was drenched in sweat and his body was shaking) then I stood up and left him alone again. Only me and his comp did something trying to help him.

After everybody had either accepted or rejected eternal life (the milky way, dang, I had it and threw it away...) and he had done over some high number of push ups, elder Porter explained the comparison. and watching someone struggle and sweat and suffer for you like that, even in only pushups has an effect. it was nuts.

but I didn´t realize how much it affected me until later when I shared my testimony reading Luke 22 40ish to 44 ish and reading about the angel and thinking of this experience, to a member who we ate lunch with. the Atonement is real.

Then last week, we had a conference with Elder Nash. He is one of the seventy pictured in the magazine even! qué chévere! He spoke in spanish but i could understand his spanish, it is the flippin native speakers, anyway he told how his son returned and said to him, di todo, which means, I gave it all. that is what I want to say. I gave it all. and after that when we went to thank him he said to me, in English, "You could understand?" ya, pretty much all of it, and he said, "I want you to know your family is proud of you. You are doing what you are supposed to be doing. You bring a good spirit with you. Thank you for being here. You are going to be a great missionary."

He looked right into my eyes as he said this. He reminded me of my strength, of the way I handle problems, of what I want for myself. and with God I can really do it. for me, he basically told me that I don´t need to fear. General Authorities are decently trustworthy and when they tell you are you good, and you have potential it sort of means a lot. He answered so many prayers.

And you know what happened this week, when I was myself and had fun? We had 9 investigators at church. That`s a lot and that`s not even all of our solid ones. so sweet. We have three weeks left in this cambio so who ever is in this area next is going to have a lot of baptisms ready.

Oh this feels so good. I have not yet found the adress or how to send letters. Though I have written some. And I always feel safe, I`m 6` 8``, amongst not 6`8`` people, unless a bird attacks, which happened to my comp yesterday. so funny.

And rain, after 15 minutes of rain a river downs my street. nuts. you wouldn´t believe.

I`m really beginning to love it and the language comes... so slowly. but I open my mouth regardless.

I decided I`d much rather burn in infierno, (guess what that means), for an act of comission than omission.

love you all,

Elder Taylor

Speaking Spanish

5/24/11


Familia!

I hope everybody is loving life. I am doing wonderfully, having recently returned from the costco of colombia and having acquired over 6 pounds of cereal.

I need all the help I can get in this language. I understand a lot, but still speak way slow. and a lot of the times I can pick out the words now but I can´t translate them fast enough or don´t have the vocab yet to understand fully. It is distressing man. but hey. Deny not the gifts of God and the don de lenguas is real! and it will come. This whole thing is really requiring me to humble myself to the dust.

And this is ironic because in the last week I have found at least 6 people who speak English really well randomly in my area. One girl works for greyhound bus lines as an operator and her vocabulary is very colorful.

I also received an invitation to Audrey´s wedding. We were practicing in the church for our missionary choir and the zone leader elder porter gave it to me and everyone was loving the ´´dear john´´ as i hopelessly tried to explain that was not the case and failed in English and in Spanish. So there you go. First girl to write me off. We´ll have to keep a tally.

I want to conquer man! I want to lose myself. these last two months i did what was required, but really nothing more. and that is messed up. I am here to leave it all out on the floor, and if I totally forget myself in the process all the better. When all is said and done, I want to be able to say for the rest of my life, I am who i am because of my mission. I really was ´´handcrafted in colombia.´´

love you all, you are all the best!

love you tons,

Elder Taylor

Spiritual Points

5/16/11

¡Familia!

¿Cómo están frrrrrrreaking mahn?

Did I tell you that is what the elders all say here? ¡TAYLOR! frrreakingmahn!

It hurts my delicate feelings. Also i think i forgot to tell you that the Mission President visited me while i was in the clinic, personally. Like i was a missionary that already had merit. which i still may or may not be.

So these last couple weeks we´ve been weak in trabajo. i didn´t really notice, or more likely i didn´t understand. but Elder Zurita kept tellin me, I´m trunky man(in Spanish) and really has been upset with himself and his attitude and is changing it and it is good. but he sees the disobedient elders we live with having all these baptisms and we got squat and he gets down and all this stuff and i´m too dumb to know the difference, just a happy puppy trying to be obedient and bark (talk?) more. But i sometimes too am like man, i would rather just sit and study for a second or a day. but then i remember the 3 daysin my house, 3 in the clinic and 4 in the office and say, ¡NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! and i want to leave again and go work!

We basically had to ditch a lot of our old families cuz they didn´t progress and find entirely new ones which is a challenge. we have powerful spiritual lessons and yet these people won´t come to church. But i have faith they will this week. Yesterday none of the people we planned on having in church came but i still had faith and i said, as we walked our lonely selves a la capilla, hey man (i mean elder), don´t count your eggs until they hatch, which doesn´t translate very well in Spanish and guess who showed up? an ancient woman who was inactive for 6 years, that we had visited 2 or three times and another inactive woman we visited once with her nonmember spouse! who just happens to be the mom of our new bishop? what? heck ya. scoring spiritual points, or really just being given spiritual points, cuz it´s hard, impossible really to score something of yourself. can´t be done.

todo bien,

love you all so much, but really this time is giong to fly, day are like minutes and weeks are like.... really short.

Elder Taylor

Enjoy Yourself in Every Situation

5/9/11

¿Familia, cómo están?

So everything´s good. My comp is struggling a little bit with having a good attitude while we work but I`ve started a thing where every night before we terminate planning we declare the miracle of the day. It has been really good. I need to find a way to make mission work truly fun.

That´s messed up. If you put effort into it you can have fun. You can mix it up. You can enjoy yourself in every situation. I have a goal to never teach the same lesson twice, to never even do the same contact twice because really you never really FEEL the same twice, every instant varies from before so teach to your FEELINGS. BE YOURSELF and enjoy it.

The thing is también que these people deserve more than a recitation to be introduced to the gospel, yes obviously you stay in the guide lines of PMG but they give you SO much room! You can do somethings different with each person and each person can have a REAL opportunity to feel and choose for themselves, to really operate their agency and follow their FEELINGS. They deserve more than the same old thing.

And you want to know why'? because Christ loves them. he would give His all to let the fully operate their agency in each contact, lesson and everything. He´d leave them feeling pumped and slightly eager for something more out of life, they´d be able to recognize what they need to change and the power God gave them to make the change. agency man, it`s what it is all about. and if we don`t do our part to try and contact or teach according to the spirit and learn how to do it then we did not give them their agency. and that is totally messed up.

So here we go. I`m going to do what I FEEL, obviously within the guidlelines of the PMG and the Spirit, thus, you gotta feel it. It`s why i am here, because I FELT it. It is why I left you familia por 2 años. solo because I felt it.

entonces, do what you feel. I promise you it´ll work out. but you really got to feel it. and feel it deep.

cuz you know somethings just resonate inside you and you are so sure, but sometimes you are not so sure until after you acted on the little feeling,

so take a crazy chance, and do a crazy dance. cuz if you lose a moment you might lose a lot, so why not, in the eternal words of hilary duff.

Also i don´t think i told you. I literally showered from a pot of refridgerated water last week. Our water was out and I had a cup and shampoo and two liters to wash my gigantic body. Colombia is the best.

also i found the costco of colombia. macro

love it.

love you all

Elder Taylor,

also mail takes a long time sometimes. A letter sent in the beginning of april just got to me last friday. so there you go.