Change Is Good

Dear Family and Friends,

Okay, okay, I am really panicking to finish my letter today! We enter the internet place and I was writing my letter and then the computer crashed and I lost everything I was working on and now they are telling us that they are going to close in 20 minutes awwww! Ha ha, but alright basically this week there were A LOT of CHANGES! Which is always good. I have come to learn in the mission, well, as long as it is in the right direction.

But, okay, basically we had three meetings in three days. It started Thursday with President and it was a really late notice meeting to advise us of our new game plan for the mission. And then our district meetings got changed to Friday for some reason and then Saturday we had a meeting in Talagante, where we got to hear from Elder Gonzalez from the 70. All the meetings were all about the same thing. Our mission along with Blake's mission and two other Argentina missions are going to try out this new pilot program that the authorities want to try out to see if we can strengthen the missionary work! Basically we are going going to focus on three things. We will be doing this pilot program till December. The three things are  Baptisms, Confirmations, and Less Actives with an Assignment. I wish I had more time to explain this new project that our mission gets to try out, but it sounds awesome! We are basically going to focus almost all our time with less actives. Elder Gonzalez kept saying over and over again that Chile lacks the priesthood in all of their wards and they have thousands of less actives in their membership records. He kept telling us that we need to nourish the tree before it can bring forth more fruit (baptisms) so we are going to focus a lot on less actives! Woo hoo! It will be fun!

So we will teach less actives (and part of the plan is to go in without a plan too! ha ha like Nephi "not knowing before hand what I will do.") We will teach them a short lesson and then we have to give them an assignment in the ward. As missionaries we don't have the right to call people to different leadership or other callings in the ward, but he told us that we can give assignments. And, basically, that's what we are going to do! It's really interesting! But I'm grateful that our mission gets to try it out! And that's basically all we are focusing on. With our indicadore claves, (Blake and Trevor know what those are) we are dropping Members present in lesson, Other lessons, and References and Contactadas! Ha ha and now we are only going to focus on those three. Now we will still teach our investigators, but really only the ones that are progressing and we will still try to have members present in the lessons but when we give in our numbers for the week we are only focusing on those three thing: baptisms, confirmations, and less actives with an assignment! 

Also another fun thing that happened this week was we had a ward activity where an investigator of the other elders got married, which is super rare to happen in Chile, ha ha, no one gets married! But they did! And the activity was awesome!!! And this Sunday guess how many people we had at church!!??? 101!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WOOO HOOO!!!! When I showed up here there were only about 45 and now we have doubled it! How amazing! This ward has changed completely and I love the members here so much! Aww and the bishop is a machine now! He is awesome! The ward has turned a 180, really! There is so much strength and unity here in the ward! I talked with the bishop and next week we are going to try to open the curtains and to put up more seats!!! Woo hoo! That has been my goal since I came here for the past 4 months! It is truly amazing to see the Lord's hand over this sector! He is with us! I can testify of that! 

Another awesome thing was Jose, who I think I talked about last week, but seriously he is SUPER PREPARED! We taught him again twice this last week and he is just so awesome! He loves the gospel and loves the Church and wants to be baptized! I kept thinking that he has to have a doubt or problem with something because everyone I have  talked here in this sector always has a problem with word of wisdom or something, but he doesn't have one problem! I think he is an answer to my prayers lately since we have been struggling with our investigators progressing! He will be baptized in May!

Another change was with Javiera who is the daughter of a less active member that isn't baptized. We started teaching her about 2 months ago, but then she rejected everything. And she never wanted anything more with us. I had no idea what happened, but this week we went by and taught her mom and during the lesson Javiera entered the room and sat on the couch and started to listen to the message. And then we finished and asked who would like to end with the prayer. And right away! Javiera jumped up and yelled out, ´´Oh me, me! please!´´ Ha ha. My comp and I both turned and looked at each other with a look of surprise and we let her pray and it was awesome! Another great change! I hope we can continue with her!

Another great change is that we finally have a Elders Quorum President and he is awesome! He is a returned missionary and is going to town with the Elders Quorum! He organized home teachers and taught an awesome lesson yesterday! He is so excited to work with us! Another great blessing and change!

Alrighty! The internet place is going to close! I will print all your letters and read them later! Sorry I didn't have time to write anyone! Enjoy the summer! It's starting to get really cold here! Ha ha! I love my mission so much! I know Heavenly Father is blessing us right now! I am a little nervous because transfers are on the 5th of May (Dad's birthday, woo hoo) and I don't know what's going to happen! But I´ll go and do whatever the Lord wants! I love you guys so much!

Love,

Elder Cowan