Elder Oaks doesn't hold back!

 Monday October 5, 2020

Hello everyone!!

Awesome week this week!! I was super excited for General Conference this week. It's crazy how your perspective on things change when you're out on a mission. Before my mission General Conference honestly was more of a burden to me because I felt like I could've got more time to sleep in, or had more time to hangout with my friends or something. Now that I'm out here and focused on the right things, my appreciation for the Prophet and the Apostles and any other leader of the church has gone up exponentially. Listening to their talks is the closest we can get to God other than receiving personal revelation for ourselves. It was so great to hear the words of them this weekend! I'll talk more about conference a little later, but for now I'll talk about our progressing people.

So last week I said Alex and Gerardo were our 2 best people, but since then we've dropped Alex, and we are still teaching Gerardo. We dropped Alex because we can just never get a hold of him and we never have really taught him a really good lesson yet, it's always been just like summaries because he's busy. He seemed promising, but I'm not sure how into it he was. A lot of people will agree with our message and then not want to learn more because they don't think joining a church is important. With Gerardo he is doing really well. He doesn't have a hard time at all accepting our lessons or anything like that. We've invited him to be baptized like 3 times, and the reason why he has said no is because he just doesn't feel prepared. He says he's willing to be baptized, he just doesn't know the commandments and is worried about what comes after. He's just a very nervous and shy guy, and I think when the topic of baptism comes up he gets kind of scared. So we've been teaching him the commandments and we will teach him the rest of the lessons and then invite him to be baptized by the end of this week. We will see how it goes! We have a new person!! So her name is Martha Sagasta, and we talked to her like 3 weeks ago. Literally my first week here, and she just had tons of problems with her family and stuff. We had that lesson with her at the Branch Presidents house, (she was already great friends with them so we thought it would be good to include members). Anyways so yeah she was really stressed so since then we've been letting her have her space. THEN she texted us earlier this week and said that she wanted to talk with us. So we went over not really expecting anything crazy. Long story short we put her on date for baptism! Apparently the Branch Presidents wife gave her an LDS packet thing that helps people strengthen the relationship between their family. In the packet it has scriptures from the Book of Mormon, so she read all the scriptures in it and told us it helped her a lot! She basically told us she wanted to get baptized and we didn't really have to do anything else. We have her on date for the 24th of October! That is 4 days after transfers so hopefully none of us get transferred but you never know. I was really excited for her. She's is a great lady and making the best decision she can ever make in her life right now. 

Back to Conference! My favorite talk was by Elder Holland in the Sunday Afternoon session. On Saturday we watched Conference at the church with 3 other Elders, then on Sunday we watched Conference with the Branch President and his wife in English, then the afternoon session at the Rojero family in SPANISH. So the afternoon session I didn't really understand, so I had to re watch it haha. Conference was super epic! Definitely had the theme of persevering through hard times and having faith in the Lord! Conference to a missionary kind of felt like the Super Bowl haha, it was epic. I have tons of quotes from Elder Holland, that guy is awesome. Also I loved Elder Oaks, he really doesn't hold back! He probably got a lot of hate, but we just need to remember that what the Apostles teach of from God, and although we may not like what the Government is doing, we still need to obey the law and also obey Gods law. Doing both is possible! Awesome example that President Oaks used was when Jesus said basically do what your supposed to do under Caesar's law, and also do what you're supposed to do under Gods law. 

Anyways speaking of Elder Hollands talk, it was so good! He talked a lot about how things aren't going to go our way 100% of the time. I loved his definition of faith he used. He said "Faith means trusting God in good times and bad, even if that includes suffering until we see his arm revealed in our behalf". Things aren't easy I can imagine in the world today. All we need to do is have faith and trust that the Lord will deliver us when the time is right! I have a couple other quotes from Elder Holland I liked. "All of our concerns are heard, but may not be answered in the way we wanted, but they are always answered at the time and in the way that they should be answered". The second one is "Christianity is comforting, but it is often not comfortable". How true are these words from our modern day Apostle! I cannot express the amount of gratitude and appreciation I have for those men and especially for God for giving us the lessons and revelation we need to press on through life. 

Anyways this was kind of long, but I hope you guys are doing good! Love you all have a good week!

Elder McMullan

Pictures:

. We took a dub as a zone in some event called "Battle for the Cactus". The prize was a golden cactus haha

. Dish from Argentina, it was super good!

.  Me and my comps wearing AZ cardinals hats given to us from one of the members. We are now apart of "Leo's club". 

Us at dinner with Leo.