Elk and Mountains

 Hey everyone! Sorry I always get these out late I just hate writing on P-Day but anyway. This week was a solid week...not too much happened but also no near death experiences so we like that. Also this week I saw some Elk! So for those who know me ya know I was loving it and losing my mind.

    So Elder Alvey and I are SMS (Social Media Specialist) missionaries and long story short our mission is SO TERRIBLE at social media and contacting our referrals that we get from social media. In fact so terrible that church cut our missions social media budget hahaha. So that means we're failing miserably sooo we spent a lot of this week studying, researching, and preparing presentations to train our whole mission and we'll start doing that this next week so hopefully that goes well.

    This week we met a family who has like 900 hundred people living in their house and their grandma went to the hospital with a blood issue, I'm not sure exactly what but we were able to go visit her in the hospital and that was awesome! Also turns out she is a member! She was baptized a long time ago so now were gonna try to reactivate her and start teach her whole huge family!

   Oh so we went skate-contacting and we rode by this huge church that was having a festival. They invited us over and fed us and we left and I fell so freaking hard on my skateboard but hey we're still alive.   

   Oh turns out I'm a master painter because a lady in our ward asked us to repaint a picture of Jesus she had on a rock and I have to say I killed it. 

   This week in town was the Green Chile Cheese festival and there wasn't green Chile or cheese so I don't know why it was there but it was a big party and we got to contact a lot of people haha. We didn't have too much luck and then this week we had a lot of people interested but we couldn't get anyone to let us come back and then even a few people said they would come to church on Sunday. So we called and texted all Sunday morning and they still said yes I'll be there but no one ended up coming. Thats alright though just gotta keep planting seeds and trying haha.

   So PDay was SO SICK we drove out to a place called Ruidoso and it's kinda like a mini Jackson Hole. It actually has mountains and it's green which was a nice change of scenery from Roswell. We also saw tons of elk and an awesome Bull Elk so highlight of the week right there.

   So one thing I was thinking a lot about this week was Christ's infinite love for all of us, and specifically his Atonement. Because of his love for all of us, he performed the Atonement. Now a cool thing we were talking about this week was the Atonement is not a THING, it's something that Christ DID. He did it so that he CAN forgive us. It's important because when we feel that forgiveness, it's not the atonement we're feeling. We're feeling Christ forgiving us through his love and mercy. And he can only do that BECAUSE of the atonement which he suffered. I loved thinking about it like this because all my life I've thought about it as the Atonement, and forgiveness of our sins. But thinking of it this way makes it a way more personal experience, and brings Christ to the center of it. It makes our relationship with Christ way more personal.

   Sorry not too much happened this week! Love you all! Talk to ya next week!

Love, Elder Ryan

My Masterpiece

Ruidoso

Roswell has alien stuff everywhere

Street Contacting

Elk in Ruidoso

One Month! And translating FAIL

 Hey everyone! I can't believe I've been in the field for a month! And I've been set apart as a missionary for over 2 months now! It's so crazy. I'm not gonna lie time moves so weird here and everything just blends together. Sorry this email is coming late my P day is so messed up this week because we had a mission tour conference. So I don't remember what I wrote about last week and what I did this week so hopefully its different stuff haha. 

    So this week we had Stake Conference and they asked me and Elder Alvey to translate it. So I was pretty nervous and I said some prayers and fasted before. They gave me two full talks to translate which was stressful but I was ready and getting pumped up. So they sit me in this chair in the back of the Chapel and I've got a headset on with a microphone in front of me and it's a little intimidating but I'm pumped I'm ready to go. I look into the crowd before me and see a bunch of people with headphones waiting to hear some Spanish. So my guy steps up to speak and I'm nervous but hey I've got the Lord with me right? What could go wrong? Well...this guy stands up and had the audacity to say something along these lines "in the 1800s Johnsons Army went to war and something about the Mormon Battalion and Johnson was fed up with the army and he went rogue and enacted a treaty and was captured" and all this stuff as my chin literally dropped to the floor. So I'm sitting there saying zero words because I have no idea what to say and all the sudden all the people wearing headsets start turning around and looking at me like is this dude gonna start speaking yet? Well so I ripped the headset off and turned and said here take the headphones because I was done haha.

    So that experience actually made me think because I wondered why would God let me fail so miserably when I had so much confidence and faith. Well then I thought of Abraham and how he was literally ready to kill his son and and God stopped him. It was more of a test of faith. I like to think of my experience as similar to an Abraham experience because both God and I knew my Spanish is no where near ready to translate haha but I stepped up and swung anyway. I missed SO incredibly bad but hey ya live and ya learn haha.

    So one night this week me and Elder Alvey kinda disturbed some kind of drug deal or suspicious thing between two guys we don't know what and it was a sketchy situation but we are safe haha. And then later that night we met Mauricio's mom. Mauricio is this super awesome special needs kid we hang out with and he's actually my favorite person I love him. Anyway we were able to help her move in and bless her house and she would like to talk to missionaries more so that's good!

    On Saturday we had a car wash and that was lit. We found a lot of new people AND it was one of the closest things to swimming we as missionaries can do. 

    Oh we also attended a church here called Church on the Move and it's literally just a concert. There was a huge concert and then some bogus sermon and then after when you leave you go to a gift shop haha. It was a joke but we did it because so many people here go there so we wanted to say we did.

    So we've been struggling to find new investigators lately and not only that but new investigators who speak Spanish. So we made it a specific point to pray specifically for those people who speak Spanish. And on Monday night I went on exchange with my Zone leader and we two awesome lessons with two different Spanish speakers! It was so great and these guys are so promising. They're very interested, don't know a lot about religion and just wanna know more. So I'm very excited and also it was a great learning experience to teach those lessons in Spanish. My Spanish needs a lot of work for sure but it was cool how the spirit helped me to remember certain things as I was teaching.  

    This week in our mission tour conference we talked about Matthew 22:37-40 which talks about the two great commandments, love God and love thy neighbor. They're so basic and we always talk about them but they're so important. Any problem we have in life we can root it back to Love God, and if you love him you'll follow him and his commandments. Any problem you have can be solved by increasing your love for God!

    Well sorry this email was so long but I love you all! Talk to ya next week.

Love, Elder Ryan

Skate Contacting and Stuff

What's up everyone! I can't believe I've been set apart as a missionary for two months! Time truly moves so fast out here yet at the same it can move so slow haha. Also I'd like to apologize to my mom because I've been terrible at taking pictures so I'll do better this week. So this week was interesting! We did a lot and a lot went wrong but a lot of lessons were learned haha.

  So my comp and I decided we wanted to be more normal and natural so we bought skateboards to ride and street contact on. I'm really terrible and we get chased by dogs on them and I've almost died several times but we're getting there haha. Just like we should in the Gospel, I'm improving on my board every day. And it has surprisingly worked. There's been multiple times when we're riding alone and people from backyards will call out to us and then we strike up good conversation. So my testimony of skate contacting has increased haha.

    This week we met this super awesome dude who lives on a Pistachio tree orchard and he built his own house (mansion) all out of clay! Its the sickest thing. He's building more houses out of clay on his property so we're gonna go help him!

    We had some awesome opportunities this week to give a few different blessings! Each one was a pretty serious circumstance. One guy needed help in his marriage, another was leaving her house with her kid for safety, and another had family issues. Before we gave the blessings, all of these people were very stressed, anxious and scared. But it was so cool to hear what was said and promised in the blessings and then to see how happy and calm all of them were after. Their problems hadn't gone away, but now they had the spirit and christ with them. Its awesome to see the difference Christ makes in all of us! 

     So this week I went on an exchange for one lesson with my ZL Elder Karras. He needed an elder who spoke Spanish so I kinda laughed when he picked me haha. I'm still not great at Spanish but I'm able to understand pretty well. Anyway, the man we taught was named Patricio and it was awesome! We taught him the Plan of Salvation and he was engaged and loved our message. So we were both super excited about him!

      And then this week we did lots of skate and street contacting. We found lots of cool potential people! But this week was rough. It felt like no one wanted to talk to us and no one was interested which is pretty usual around here haha but this week we had a lot of solid people that we've been teaching just randomly drop us. So it was hard and I was just confused and sad and then I listened to a talk called "Missionary work and the Atonement" and if you haven't heard it i would highly recommend it! Theres a part where he specifically talks about missionaries struggling and why and he says that missionary work and bringing others to salvation is not easy because salvation was not an easy experience. Christ suffered more than we can ever imagine for us, so we're gonna suffer a bit here too. And that line gave me hope and helped me realize why I'm out here! 

      Another awesome thing this week has been my studies of the Book of Mormon and my testimony of it has improved so much! I've started to love reading it and I've been understanding it better than ever. One of my favorite scriptures this week was from Alma 17 and it talks about the Sons of Mosiah and how they got their success, and I think it's a good pattern for modern missionary work.

  2 Now these sons of Mosiah were with Alma at the time the angel first appeared unto him; therefore Alma did rejoice exceedingly to see his brethren; and what added more to his joy, they were still his brethren in the Lord; yea, and they had waxed strong in the knowledge of the truth; for they were men of a sound understanding and they had searched the scriptures diligently, that they might know the word of God.

   3 But this is not all; they had given themselves to much prayer, and fasting; therefore they had the spirit of prophecy, and the spirit of revelation, and when they taught, they taught with power and authority of God.

I love those verses! They offer guidance about ways you can increase our ability to feel the spirit and be effective missionaries! I love you all!

Love, Elder Ryan

-Standing on top of this guys home at a pistachio plantation

-The skateboard came

-Nature      

-

Cartels, Scorpions & Dogs

    So this week was fun! I learned some crazy things so apparently there's a lot of cartel activity here in Roswell which I personally think is sick as long as they leave me alone. But it's super sick we see them driving around town in their caravans and stuff. We also stumbled upon some drug deals and iffy stuff I'll talk about later haha. And then in our church building me and Elder Alvey had a showdown with 2 scorpions who somehow got past the poison line. It was pretty wild but evil cannot win so we eventually prevailed.

    Anyway this week we had a few awesome lessons with a family that I'm really excited about! We've had 3 lessons with this family now and the first two was only with the grandma, her daughter and her 2 kids. The grandma is Jojo and the mom is Sam. They're seriously so cool and they love visiting and talking with us which is super rare here so we're cherishing that. On the third lesson, we finally got the Grandpa, Chad, to join us. We actually call him Pooky though because he thinks his name is too white haha. Anyway, he sat in and we had an awesome lesson about The Plan of Salvation and they were all loving what they were hearing and feeling. We're hoping to get Pooky to come to basketball on Tuesday night! They're a super awesome fam and we have a few more lessons with them this week...hopefully we can get them to church on Sunday.

   The next guy we taught was a man named Luis. And honestly, this is the first time I've spoken Spanish besides at church haha. But it was so cool to see the spirit help me say what I needed to say! We taught him the whole first lesson and he said we can come back. The trouble is he can't read, so he can't study the book of mormon right now. And he doesn't have a phone haha. But he also has 2 sons who want to talk to us more and we're hoping that they can come to Basketball as well!

   So we went to this neighborhood called The Fruit Basket. It's called that because all the street names are a fruit haha. Sounds sweet, but it is the utter ghetto. I mean, this whole town kinda is but especially here. And while it was sketchy we made tons of contacts there! We had like 3 or 4 different people make return appointments with us! So I'll let ya know how those go next week. Then we found this guy named Gunner and he was talking with us and had some CRAZY stories about people getting killed on his street and stuff. Anyway we set up a return appointment and then outta nowhere it started dumping rain. And they don't have gutters here so the roads just turn into rivers. It was so crazy. We got to a members house and they made us dinner while the road was a legit river about a foot deep.

   Anyway we then went to a neighborhood called Base which is also ghetto. But usually we can find some good people to talk to there! We found someone who weirdly was just like very open to coming to church on Sunday and what not so we'll see if he does. And then we walked up on these guys in these really nice trucks and they get all scared cuz they said they thought we were the cops haha. Then they exchanged something and drove off. So that was interesting. And in the same neighborhood we got chased by multiple rabid dogs. I had to kick one and these dogs down here are scum of the earth. Gross nasty things so I will be ordering a dog whistle. We also had a minor break in incident with a neighbor downstairs but no need for the specifics haha.

     Anyway this week was awesome! I'm loving the mission! It's so cool to see people's life start to change as we talk to them about Christ. I listened to a talk by Elder Holland where he said that as you testify of Christ, that people's eyes will lighten up as they recognize something familiar about the message. I know that's true! I've seen it just in the past two weeks. I love this gospel and I love you all!!

     

Matthew 7:21 "Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven."

Love, Elder Ryan

1-They had a DOWNPOUR the other day and they all got soaked. Bryson and his comp, Elder Alvey.

2-Bryson and some of the other Elder's and a Sister in his district, soaked after the downpour!

3-The view down one of the streets in his area.