Dear Family and Friends!!!!!!!!!
HOLY COW!! This week has been incredible! I can't believe it! It has been insane! So many things happened this week! Wooo! Well, the first cool thing this week was playing soccer! Aww, I love soccer soo much! Our zone started playing at 6 in the morning and it's sooo sick! It's awesome! But at the same time it does make us pretty tired, but we rested a little bit this week and I'm glad we did! Woo hoo because we needed the energy for the miracles that happened this past weekend! Aww, it was insane! But I will get onto that topic in a little bit!
Well, to start off to explain our week, it can be summed up in one word. . . horrible. . . But as I said that was just the start! I'm getting to the juicy details later! But, yea, basically this week started really, really bad for us! I don't know why, but it was really lame and we just ended up knocking on doors for the first part of the week and we didn't have any lessons. As well, I had to help my district with a lot of stuff which meant I was outside my sector traveling to their sectors to help them out with what they needed. One was pretty funny, though, which was when the sisters in my district called me and they were crying and told us that someone robbed their house. This was at about 9 o'clock at night so I booked it over there, called the pensionistas and zone leaders and got over there as fast as I could. Then I got there and the other elders arrived and they said the door was open when they showed up and when the other elders got there someone from inside closed the door. So that is when they started to freak out and I was on the phone with the zone leaders and then the pensionistas and one Chilean elder was calling the number of the police. . . right when the lights in the house turned on and it was the roommates of the sisters in my district laughing. . . Yea, it was all a big joke, but they did it really well. I will have to give them props for that! Ha ha, aww man, it was dumb but really funny! ha ha!
But I kept busy this past week with stuff I had to do with divisions, and with meetings with the zone leaders and everything. One cool thing was when I was on division with an elder in my district and they hardly have anyone to teach and they have been a little depressed with not having or finding anyone to teach. We basically contacted all day long and knocked on doors. I was really trying to motivate him and to keep him excited, but at the end of the night we didn't have any success. That is when I saw a tiny little pasaje and told him that we were going to find people on that street if we contacted everyone. So we did! But we still didn't have any success until we got to the very, very last tiny house. The elder told me that I was wrong and that this street was dead. But that is when I ran to the last house, turned around and told him that we were going to find a family of 5 here! He doubted and just smirked, but I knocked on the door and a family of 7 answered the door!!!!! Woo hoo! And they are going to have a lesson with them tonight!! Woo hoo! It was awesome! I'm glad I was able to motivate this elder.
But other than that, we ended up on Friday night with only 7 lessons for the whole week . . . which is horrible! That night the zone leaders got on me and got on my case that in this zone missionaries should be averaging between 20-25 lessons. With it being Friday in the night with only 7 lessons, we were WAY behind! I was a little frustrated, but I knew we should have had more lessons at this point in the week, approaching the weekend.
As well, Saturday in the morning we had a meeting with President as a mission which took some time too from working, but I am actually really grateful for that meeting! President is really called of God! He is incredible and I love him so much! In this meeting he taught us a lot of things about the Doctrine of Christ and how we can achieve more than we think we can. That is when I thought of the quote from Dad when he wrote me, "success is when preparation meets opportunity." It was a really big spiritual uplifting meeting and afterward Elder Kimball and I had soo much excitement to achieve more than what our minds thought we could because that is what we really needed in that moment! We decided that even though we were way, way behind for the week we were going to see miracles. I am so grateful to have Elder Kimball as my companion because we both just have this excitement to give it completely our all!
So we decided to get to work! I kept yelling out to Elder Kimball that it was "Game time!´" Ha ha, just like Jake Wright would always say, ha ha! We got ourselves really pumped up and decided to go straight to work! And Saturday was incredible! I am actually really tired because we decided to do a day of verification on EVERYONE!! So we literally ran house to house to every single person that we know! And we got 5 lessons just in the night!! Woo hoo!!! It was incredible! I don't think I have ever had 5 lessons in one day in my mission before . . .well, not until that Saturday at least. But it was truly a blessing! And we were even able to get a lesson in right before we ended the day.
We had four lessons and it was 8:50 in the night. We just wanted one more lesson so we started booking it to some more houses that we knew up until we got into a less actives house at 8:58 in the night. If we were two minutes later we wouldn't have been able to enter the house, but if you get into a lesson before 9:00 you have till 9:30! Woo hoo! So Saturday we were able to visit a lot of people and to help a ton! We really showed our faith to the Lord and loaded our backpacks with a total of 5 Book of Mormons, which makes it heavy, but we knew the Lord was going to bless us with the people to give them away to. As well, even though we knew it was going to be cold that night, Elder Kimball and I decided to take all of our winter clothes off to show our faith that the Lord would protect us with blessing us with a lot of houses to be warm in. And He did bless us! We did enter into all those houses and, as well,l gave all the Books of Mormon that we had! Wo hoo!
But just wait! It gets even better! Better as like I know yesterday was one of the best days of my mission!! Cualquier Milagro!!! So feeling content of the days work, we still knew that we needed a lot more lessons to finish up the week and to hit our goal. Saturday night the zone leaders congratulated us, but still got on us that we still lacked almost ten lessons and that Sunday is the last day of the week. There was a meeting I had to be at in the stake with the zone leaders Sunday night, but they told me to not come until we had at least 20 lessons for the week. That's how I am writing it but they told us a little bit more up front and with doubt that we could actually do it. But then putting us as underdogs in the situation just motivated us to work even harder on Sunday!!! Oh yea, baby!!!
Sunday we woke up and were able to go to church with three new investigators we found who are all teenagers, but they have some friends in our church. So we got them up and going and went to the church which basically this whole transfer we haven't had a real single investigator attend church. So that is what started the day great! But there was sure a whole lot more the Lord planned for us as well that day! Because not only did we have three investigators attend church but we had 13 LESS ACTIVES ATTEND AS WELL!! Woo hoo!! I don't know what happened, but we had brought 16 people in total to the church! I have NEVER had that many people in my sector attend church! It was such a beautiful sight to see the chapel full! With this new pilot plan that we are doing we have had a goal to increase the attendance of the sacrament meeting by 20% and with the 16 people we brought to the church we went over our goal and almost had a 100 people attending! It was incredible! And it sure was a great opportunity for the members to gain their trust in us!
But!!! It just keeps getting better and better! We knew we had a great time at the church and everything, but we knew we needed to do a lot to make up for the lost week! That is when we went GAME TIME ROUND 2! Ha ha! And we sprinted to every single house. We loaded our backpacks with 6 Book of Mormons this time and we decided that we weren't going to go enter the house till we didn't have a single one! And the Lord blessed us incredibly . . . All night last night and just writing this now it just brings tears to my eyes of how merciful the Lord has been with us, because we were able to have 9 lessons yesterday and find 8 new investigators, and put 3 new baptism dates!!! Aww, I have just been overwhelmed with gratitude this day.
With those 9 lessons we got up to 21 lessons and were able to go to the important meeting at the stake where I needed to be. I came to find out that the zone leaders put that same challenge for the other district leaders and if they didn't have that many lessons they couldn't come. And as I got there, you should have seen the face of our zone leaders! And it turns out that I was the only district leader to have accomplished the challenge from them! The zone leaders came up to me after the meeting and apologized for not trusting in us that we could do it. I let them know that it was totally fine and that it really pushed us! And the meeting was great! It was with three of the seventy talking! It was great!!! I loved it! I felt like I really earned that opportunity to hear the words of the prophets.
I know that all of those lessons, all that time we used, all those new investigators that we were able to find and teach this past day and a half basically was not from our efforts. It was completely the hand of the Lord. These past two days were testimony builders to me of that the fact that the Lord really does direct His work. There is no way that Elder Kimball and I could have done that alone. With almost a year in the mission, I have NEVER been able to do that. And I know this time we were able to because we had the faith and the excitement and trust in the Lord. I am so grateful for His work and to just be a humble servant in His hands. I will go where He wants me to go. I will say what He wants me to say. I know that faith is a principle of power to endow us with miracles. I hope none of you think that I am boasting or just thinking of numbers only because those lessons that we had were people that only the Lord, at that moment, prepared for us. They were waiting for us and I know that was only because of the Lord's work. I am so grateful to be here in my mission and I love this work so much. I have really learned that I am absolutely nothing. The spirit is the one that does all the work through us.
I hope you all will be able to understand the huge load of miracles that our loving Heaving Father always blesses us with. I hope all of you will strengthen the faith. I have never understood this principle until now. I can almost say that I'm not even sure I had true faith before my mission. He lives. He will come again and He is hastening His work. I know this gospel is true without a doubt and I'm so grateful for it!
I love you all sooo much! Have a great week!
Love,
Elder Cowan
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