New area!

Cool Cool! So the new area! First of all, I live in a house. It is nasty... Trashed. I don't like that haha, so we are cleaning today! :)... I don't know the address, I will get that to you all next week. But my new companion is Elder Sharp. He goes home in less than 3 months! It is a blessing to be with him. He isn't trunky and he knows how to teach and he is pretty laid back in the sense of personality so that is good. He is from Phoenix and is going to be a neurologist. He goes to Arizona and he is 23 years old so he has already been to 3 years of school. We get along really well. The area is amazing. We live in Deltona, but it should be called Deltonarico... Deltona and Puerto Rico.... Everyone is Puerto Rican and from New York basically. New Yorriquens... New York and Puerto Rico haha.... So we find a lot of them, but the majority of them speak English better than Spanish and have the New York accent.... We cover the whole Zone!... Which has Deltona, Deland, Daytona, New smyrna beach, bunnel, and other towns... But we only stay really in Deltona and Deland. Because Deltona is where our church is and the other cities are 45 min- 1 hour away... It is a new little building. It is like a mini church haha.. It has everything, just miniature scale. We have like 3 columns of pues and like 7 rows haha.. It is pretty cool. We are a branch, but about to be a ward. We averaged around 80-105 people at church last year, but church started at 9 in the morning and this year we start at 1 so we should have a little bigger attendance. The cool thing is that most of the branch is active! We have like 130 total members and 90 active. Really uncommon in Spanish work.

Deltona is full of houses, basically no apartments (switch from my old area), and it looks like Fallon. No lie. Yesterday we ate dinner with a member family from Brazil. I felt like I was eating at the Faught's house and the Hutching's house if they had a kid haha.. They had a couple cows, chickens, and a really beautiful house. My Grandparents would have loved it. All their kids are gone now and one lives pretty close to them so they have 4 grand kids that visit them often, so it is a grandchildren house. They have a bed that looks like a wagon, a tent in the living room, etc. haha.. They eat there own animals so it was some good food. Feels good to get out of the city and get back in the country. He had a diesel truck too. Probably the 2nd one I have seen on my mission.

The people here in Deltona are crazy!!! No lie. There are some normal ones, but I think Deltona is famous for being a little crazy haha. So there is never a dull moment. I was stunned my first day here. But I love it.

Love you all and thanks for the prayers!

Elder Christiansen

Transferrreeeeddd

Yup Yup... So long to Windy Ridge.. 7 months later (5 and a half with the same companion haha)... It is definitely a Bitter Sweet. I made a lot of good friends here in this area and it has definitely been my favorite, but I feel like I've been here forever, so I am kind of happy to leave.. My next area is called Deltona 2.. It is in the very north of our mission. It is the only Spanish area in the Deland stake, so we cover the whole stake. It will be my first area with the beach on it because Daytona is part of it. So next week I will send you my new address. I guess it is super country, so I am guessing it will be a lot like Fallon haha. We will see though. And it might be my last area in my mission. I have accumulated a lot of junk on my mission, and I am pretty sure it all won't fit in my suit cases and stuff, so I have to start throwing some stuff away.

But anyways this week was a good one to end on... O ya, you remember how last week I said "Wait for the miracle this week,"? well.... We had a baptism!!! So you remember how I told you about Carlos who was the dad of a member and just visiting from Peru? well he has been going to church for about 3 months straight and he wanted to wait to get baptized when he returns here in like 2 more months because he preferred it like that, and then last Sunday he told us that he wanted to be baptized. And that he wanted to be baptized Wednesday. We hadn't covered a ton of the lessons with him, but he was definitely ready for baptism, so on Monday we basically taught him every lesson except for the plan of salvation and we also taught him all of the commandments. He is really smart, so it wasn't too big of a problem. Then on Tuesday he got his interview and passed with flying colors then on Wednesday we had the baptism! And it was the most spiritual baptism of my baptism. At the end he gave a little testimony and it was so perfect! We were blessed. The Lord did some amazing work once again. :)

Then we also found a guy last week that we just said a prayer with him and we blessed him and his mother in the prayer, then we asked if we could come back and he said yes. So we came back and taught him and invited him to Carlos's baptism and he came, then we taught him again and invited him to church this week and he came to church along with his mother and they really liked it! :) They are from Cuba.. Cuban Spanish is a little difficult to understand sometimes but its all gooood.

I went on exchanges with a Portuguese elder in his area and so I studied some Portuguese for language study and then went to work. It was an awesome exchange. But I couldn't speak Portuguese at all, so I just listened and spoke back in Spanish and they usually can understand me. I really enjoyed it.

Well Imma miss this area :''''( but on to the next one! It should be awesome

Your prayers worked a lot of miracles for us these last two weeks!
Love you and miss you all!
143
Elder Christiansen

Miracles

O MY GOOOODNESS!!! Livin' la vida loca over here in Disneyworld! We had such an amazing week. As I told you last time, we have shifting the area where we were working and basically starting out from new. We were so blessed this week. We still taught a good amount of lessons, but we found so many Spanish! And they have a lot better chance at progressing. The members in the area where we work now are also helping us find. You ready for an awesome story?

So there is a apartment complex called MetroWest Summit, we knocked about 7 of the 12 buildings there in about 2 days and we found some decent people, but not anyone too solid. Then we went over to a member's house and he said he had a referral for us that he sees at school (he is like 40 yrs old) and that the referral works at the school. He said he didn't know his name, his address, or his phone number, and it is break time, so he isn't going to school right now, so he said we would have to wait. He did tell us though that he was from Peru (Peru has the best food btw hands down). He also knew that he lived in MetroWest Summit complex, but no idea where. I remembered that we knocked a Peruvian's door, but they weren't interested AT ALL. So I was hoping that it was a different Peruvian in the complex haha. So like 3 days later we went to finish the last 5 buildings in MetroWest Summit. As we were locking up our bikes, I saw a Spanish family get out of their car and start walking towards their building. We were too far away and I didn't want to hit a dead sprint to go talk to them, so I did what I do best and creeped. We watched what door they went into, then we knocked that door 30 min. later.. A girl came to the door, didn't open it, just spoke to us through it and asked for us to come back the next day. So we came back the next day. We knock the door and the dad opens the door. He told us he was eating and was acting like he was in a hurry, and he was trying to speak English, so I told him that he spoke pretty good English and asked him where he was from... Where do you think he said? Well he said he was from Colombia, haha jk, he said he was from PERU!! Then the Spirit reminded me that Hno. Leonel Dominguez's friend is from Peru and lives in the same complex. So I asked him if he knew Leonel, he looked kind of puzzled, then I said Leonel Dominguez, he looked like it sounded familiar, then I said that he is Dominican... The guy went crazy!!! haha He was like "You know Leonel!!!???" I said yes, he is our friend, we go over to his house a lot, then he said, "He's one of you??" Haha.. But he opened up so much and told us to come back because he was eating.. Miracle!

We were so blessed this week, thanks for your prayers and for putting our names in the prayer box!

Just wait for the miracle that I tell you about next week ;)

143

Elder Christiansen

Merry Christmas!

Hey! Hope you have an awesome Christmas! I am doing goooooood! I am going to be really short this week because I will be talking to you tomorrow night! via telephono.. I will call you all at like 9:00 pm EST... my time... Sound good? cool well guess you can't respond back, so hope it is good.

This week was a pretty good one! We saw lots of little miracles. We are teaching some cool people. We are going to be trying something out though that is new for our area. The Ward Mission leader has asked us to move out of little Mexico/Honduras/Dominican Republic and to switch our focus to a more wealthy area called Metrowest. There aren't a lot of Spanish over there, so we need a lot of prayers and maybe our names in the temple prayer box as much as possible. There are some great members over there and so we will be working a lot with them and just working our hardest. It is a big step of faith so we ask for your prayers :).. Thank you and Merry Christmas!

Elder Christiansen

143

Heyyy!!!!

Wellllll another week in the books, they are going way toooooo fast! I love writing home, but it seems like I do it a lot more than just once a week! So this week, I don't know where to start... So Last Monday, the Portuguese elders, American elders, and us decided to do a competition to see who could give the other set the most referrals... Well the English elders beat us because they gave us one referral, we only found young single adults, so those referrals went to the sisters... But with the Portuguese, we won haha... We were walking around in an apartment complex and I heard the word "dijiste" which in Spanish means "you said"... so we go over towards the voice and it is a ton of like 18-20 year olds and some little kids. So we talk to them and they turned out to be Portuguese. I can kind of understand Portuguese like the basics, but can't speak it. When I go to speak it, I just slur my Spanish and I think it gets pretty close to the word haha... We talked to one of them and he said he was LDS... He spoke quite a bit of English, but not perfect... We guessed there were about 8 Portuguese people in that area, so we took the Portuguese elders to the area, so they could knock around the area and try to find them. He didn't really give us his address because of the language barrier. It is really hard for the Portuguese elders to find people who aren't on vacation, so we try to help them out as best as we can. So they started knocking doors looking for Portuguese and we knocked doors in another area looking for Spanish. We had no success, so we started walking out towards the street of the apartment complex while the Portuguese elders were still knocking. We see 3 younger people like 20 yrs old, so we talked to them and they were Brazilians. We found out they would be staying in Orlando for 3 months on some universal job exchange thingy. Then within about 3 minutes, 20-30 more young Brazilians started walking towards us, they are really friendly and like to practice their English. They speak really good English and it is their first time in the U.S... Them Brazilians are a smart people. They learn English in Brazil. Some guy spoke like German, Italian, and something else along with English and Portuguese... Luckily the Portuguese elders came out finally and started talking to them, one is from Brazil so they all hit it off really well... So we took that referral battle home!! haha... So we then went to the ward Christmas party together (our ward is a Spanish/Portuguese ward) So the Portuguese elders give us rides a lot because we are on bike and the church is like 7 miles aways from the house uphill both ways and snowing usually... So we were bragging to them about how there was no way they were going to beat us because it was Saturday haha and we got to the church and there was a Venezuelan family there that showed up that the Portuguese elders prayed with and invited to the activity haha.. So it was a pretty sharing night. The family is wayyyyy cool though. We have an appt with them tonight. The ward party was CRAZY!!! Spanish people know how to party. Everyone is dancing and us missionaries just sit there... They always think it is weird that we don't know how to dance the salsa, bachata, mareinga... Us white folk are boring.. Every Spanish person knows how to dance...

 

We are teaching a guy right now who is amazing! He has seen some wonderful miracles. It is amazing to see how people trust us so much and will open up to us and spill out how they feel without even knowing us for that long. It is such a testimony of the reality of our calling as representatives of Jesus Christ. It is truly humbling. He will get baptized, but probably in a couple of months just because of circumstances.

 

We gave a church tour to a lady this week. It was amazing, she felt the spirit so strong. Afterwards she said "I am coming to the relief society activity, the ward party, and church this week! And you have to get my husband to go to the ward activity and church too!" Then the sad part was, she avoided us all that week! She never answered our calls, opened the door, nor came to any of the activities... It just shows me how new investigators must feel about changing. I think they get scared a lot to change their lifestyle. It takes a lot of faith, but I know the end result is always worth all the change!

 

Well love you, talk to you soon familia... We are allowed to skype this time... So let me know what you want to dooo.. Skype or telephone? what's your skype's address if you wanna skype??? I don't know what time we would do it, but I will let you know next week, be on your toes.

 

143

Elder Christiansen

Christmas Miracles

Well this week was a great week! We had a couple investigators at church and the 18 yr old Manuel got confirmed this week! WE saw a lot of tender mercies this weekend. We found a mother who is less active and not on the church roles, she has two daughters that are 10 and 8, they seemed really excited to come back to church, but they couldn't for some reason on Sunday. We also had an impression to knock a door this week and we found this one kid named Jesus (good bible name) that is 18. He is really interested in what we are sharing. He has gone through so much as a kid telling us some of his stories, but he is like a perfect saint. He is such an example to me and my companion. He unfortunately couldn't go to church this week because he got called into work. We had like 3 investigators who were planning on going to church this week, but got called into work.. FRUSTRATING, but count your many blessings :).. I am kind of finally learning on how to look on the bright side I think. I have been in some of the hardest areas in the mission (according to trends of the #'s) and I think the Lord is trying to teach me how to be grateful and optimistic. It is a very tough lesson for me. This week we had about 15 solid commitments for people to go to church and 3 came. But I am so very grateful for those 3 that did come! In my first five and a half months in the mission, I think I had only 2 investigators come to church all together haha. I have learned that when we are grateful, we are a lot more happy and that complaining and whining only make us less effective as servants of the Lord. We saw some miracles this week with member referrals. We had some cool referrals that we received a while back, but they just really never turned out. So during this week, we felt impressed to go visit one of those referrals that told us that "they would call us" for us to come back over, and they let us in and her daughter a blessing because she was sick. It was such a wonderful opportunity. Then yesterday we felt like we should visit a lady who was a referral and she came to church the week before, but we had lost contact with her after that. So we went to visit her and she had a friend there with her, they let us in to talk, but they wasn't a guy, so we just had to stand in the doorway and talk from there. The one friend of hers said that she took the lessons and almost was baptized. I asked her where she lived and she replied, "I'm not gonna tell you, you will come knocking on my door!" haha, she's good... And so we kept talking and then the referral started talking about how she went to church and how amazing it was and how much she liked it (I was stunned :)) and then we kept talking about everything we believed and the referral's friend said after a while, "You know what, I'm going to visit your church this Sunday." BOOOOOOOM! And then we said ooo that is awesome! Can we come by and explain more? She gave us her address and telephone number. Then we set up an appt with her tomorrow night. So we saw that miracle. And we were trying to get an appt with the referral too, but she just works a ton, but we finally were able to get a good time with her and she will be at the appt too tomorrow. We were blessed. This work is the best, hands down! And my companion got in another bike crash this week! Fifth crash in four transfers.. Pray for him please haha.

 

Love you and I appreciate all your prayers!

Elder Christiansen

Dec. 3rd, 2012

Well I hope everyone got to see the Christmas devotional last night. We were asked to watch it. 8 o clock over here on the east side of things. I loved it. I loved what President Uchtdorf had to say. It is so true how well when I get I gift, I feel like I need to give someone a gift back and it needs to be more expensive haha. I have had problems with that on my mission! It really made me think about Jesus Christ and His gift to all the world. His sacrifice for us. I am so grateful for that gift and for that we don't even have to pay him back! It is the best gift we could receive. And he doesn't require a gift back. We just have to open the gift and enjoy it and use it! I testify that the way we open, enjoy, and use the gift is through faith, constant repentance, baptism, receiving the gift of the holy ghost, and enduring to the end. I know that this is the best gift that we can receive. I know that it brings the most happiness and the most blessings both spiritual and temporal. It is an opportunity to be able to carry this gift with me and share it with everyone here in the Orlando area. Especially during this time of the year. It is sad to see those who don't want to hold the gift, those who will hold it for a little bit but never open it, those who open it and look at it and then decide they don't want it. I think it applies very well to the story that President Uchtodorf told of the aunt who didn't accept the gift that came from the love and care of her niece. In the end, both were sad. I know from first hand experience that we don't have to pay the Savior back for His infinite loving gift that He has given us. I learned by well being wrong haha. I'll explain. My first day in Florida, I got to President Hall's house and went upstairs for my turn to get interviewed. We sat down and started talking. I don't remember much what was said during the short interview but I remember very well part of the conversation. He asked me why if I was excited to get to work. I replied, "Yes very excited." He asked me if I was going to work hard, I replied yes again. He then asked me why. I thought... and told him, well I have received a lot of blessings from Jesus Christ and experienced a lot of miracles because of him and He has done a lot for me and I feel like I can pay him back a little bit and was going to work very hard to pay Him back as much as possible (Naive me haha)... And he looked at me in the eyes in his strict loving manner and said "Elder that is selfish, you don't have to, and can't pay Him back." I testify that that is the truth. I felt the Spirit bear witness to me of its truthfulness. I know that the greatest gift is eternal life and that it is possible through the gift of the Atonement. I know that helping people experience the Atonement is the greatest gift that we can give this holiday season.

I love and miss you all. To see our nativity activity this week in the church and see some pics go to msFamilyPhoto.com/nativity I might be in a picture haha.

Love You,

Merry CHRISTmas