Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Happy Thanksgiving!

Well I’m going to start out apologizing because I was ready this week to send you a ton of photos because I have like a ton to send...and I brought an adapter and everything today but as we were walking through the city I realized that I didn’t have the most important thing...my camera...so yeah I’m not able to send pictures today. I guess you’ll have to wait a whole another week ha-ha I’m so sorry.
Anyways this week has been a pretty good one. We actually had a thanksgiving feast! We had district meeting that day and I arranged everything with everyone that everyone was going to bring something different for our feast. We ended up having pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes, juice, and we bought a turkey and it actually turned out pretty good! It was funny though because we did it at like 11am and we all have to eat lunch at members houses at 1pm so lunch was pretty difficult that day...that same day for lunch we ended up eating meats and potatoes. I was dying, it was hard to eat it all!
 Oh funny story! So this week a member invited us over for dinner at their house at like 8:30 so we went and they served us guatita!! Or in English, sheep stomach! Haha my companion hated it but I actually liked it a lot, I ended up asking for second’s ha-ha. Do they sell that in the states?? There’s so much stuff here that I love that I doubt they sell in the states.
Okay, so the work went pretty well this week. I have many stories but I will be home soon and I can tell you then. Haha  I want to leave you with something I have been thinking a lot about this week. Being Thanksgiving week I have been thinking about gratitude and why we say thanks in our prayers. So what I’ve learned from the scriptures is that we say thanks to acknowledge the blessings we have and give credit to God in a way of humbling ourselves, but the interesting part is that it is more important to show our thanks in the things we do. Almost everyone says in their prayers "we thank thee for this day", yet do we really take full advantage of that day to do Gods will? Alot of times we say it and don’t even think about it afterward and pretend like it’s our day, when really we already acknowledged that it is not. So I’ve been pondering on this a lot this week and I would like to extend the invitation to everyone including myself,  to really think about what you are thankful for in your prayers and then show it in that day and in what you do! I hope everyone has a great week!
Love-
Zack



Monday, November 6, 2017

THANK YOU!

Wow! What a surprise getting all the birthday wishes in my email! You are all so awesome!
THANK YOU!!!!
Alright so I’m leaving Chiloe this week!! I’ve been here for 7 months already ha-ha a long time...but this week I’ll be heading out! I’ll be going to a city called Valdivia...its sick because if you look it up...this was the epicenter to one of the biggest earthquakes ever recorded, fun ha-ha. I’m stoked though! I’m actually going to be with a Brazilian that I already know and he’s a super cool kid! I’m going to try to learn Portuguese with him ha-ha we’ll see how that goes. But yeah I’ll be moving down to be district leader for the last 7 weeks of my mission which will be nice to not be zone leader anymore. I’ll be leaving on Wednesday and my birthday is on Friday so I’ll know like no one ha-ha so I probably won’t be doing anything for my birthday, oh well ha-ha. Not a big deal. Anyways so today we went on a super sick hike; I’ll send you some pictures of it right now! And pics from Halloween and stuff…sorry I do not have a lot of time to write again but I love you all! Thank you so much for the birthday wishes! I feel blessed to have all of you in my life! Have a great week!

Zack






Crazy Week

So we are in Chaiten right now again, we didn’t really get to do much today because everything’s closed for bad weather. It rained all last night super hard, but oh well...Anyways we had some funny experiences this week! Stuff that legit like I tell people here and they just say "That’s definitely an Elder Walden thing...that doesn’t happen to anyone else..." So First thing...getting on the boat to Chaiten, we had to board at 6 and we were supposed to get there at like 10. Well the boat didn’t dock until 8:30...and we ended up getting to Chaiten at 1:00 in the morning. Then we stayed up talking to the other Elders for awhile because they never get to see people. So I am super tired today because we still woke up at 7:00am...wooo haha.
 Okay so this week we had to make an emergency trip to Ancud as well for some stuff that we had to drop off to the Elders...soooo we get there fine and on the way home we buy some bus tickets for a bus that left at 7...and then as we were waiting we were told it would get there at 730...then they told us 8...then they told us 830...finally a bus gets there so we ask the conductor if that was it and he said yes so we get on...and they pull out and they’re on their way and we realize that our seats don’t exist...so someone tells us we should look on the first floor of the bus...so we go...still don’t exist...then we ask someone where the bus was going and they tell us "Santiago..." We had already been on the bus for like 10 minutes so we were like far away from the terminal...so we told the bus driver just to leave us where we were...so we got off...hitch hiked back to the terminal...got there...and the bus we had waited an hour for had just passed by and we missed it!!!! Gosh dang it!!!!! So we ended up explaining the whole thing to the terminal jefe and he hooked us up with some free tickets on a bus because he felt bad for us and thought it was really funny what had happened to us...but hey that picture I have of that sign that says Los Angeles was where that bus dropped us off, so at least I got a cool picture!

Anyways another cool experience was when I went with Elder Clements on an intercambio for a day and we went down to take a taxi up to the sector and we waited there for 15 minutes and I was ticked because that’s a really long time and empty collectivos (taxis) were just passing by without stopping! Well after like 20 minutes an Hermana that I had never met before came out of nowhere and said "Hey elders I’m a member of the church and live right there, and my mom is 95 and is sick and dying, could you come real fast and give her a blessing?" So we went, gave her the blessing, left, and got a collective (taxi) right away...I guess she was praying and looked right outside and we were right there waiting for the taxi, almost magically, I guess God had a different plan for us ha-ha. Now I know why we didn’t get a collectivo right away. Also 2 of our citas fell through that day, which stunk but it ended up being a blessing because we ended up teaching this one investigator we found a few weeks back for like 3 hours...because she wanted to know everything and had so many questions and she wrote down every question she had and the answer and was crying during the lesson and now she wants to get baptized...it was awesome. So definitely a blessing that our other cita fell through and we could be there for more time. Also after that we went and knocked some doors. After because the other cita had also fell. And then we realized we had to do some stuff for the zone in centro...so I said "Ok, we were going to talk to 2 more people in their doors and then we will go do that" Because it was getting late...well we knocked, and knocked, and knocked and NO ONE ANSWERED!!! Literally no one...so we got bothered again and we almost just left...but we decided to not let God down and talk with at least 2 more people...well right after that we knocked a door and a guy came out...named Rodrigo...and it caught me off guard because we had just knocked for like 2 hours without anyone answering...so we talked to him for a bit and he invited us in! And we taught the restoration and he told us that he doesn’t go to any church...but believes in God and he feels like what we teach could definitely be true! It was awesome! He said that whatever we said, made him just feel really good inside...so it was awesome! We also figured out right there why no one was answering their doors...if 2 others answered their doors...we would have left and never would have found him. But God wanted us to find him specifically. It was awesome! I also gave a talk yesterday because everyone think I’m out of here in a week...because I’ve been here for 7 months...but who knows ha-ha, I also gave the class yesterday...woo ha-ha go Chile! Have a great week!!!!