Heating It Up in Tempe

Another Beautimous Lamborghini   Hey everyone! Merry Christmas to you all! I apologize for the lateness of the email, you know Christmas, it always ends up being pretty busy for some reason...😉 Not much to report, other than the fact that I am such a lucky man! I get to be a missionary in Tempe, Arizona, where it is 65 degrees on Christmas Day! How awesome is that?!? 😎 I also have the most awesome and amazing family ever. For those who don’t know, on Christmas and Mother’s Day we get to Skype our families and talk face-to-face, rather than the usual e-mail! It was so much fun, I love my family with all of my heart, and seeing their smiling faces was the greatest.  With not much time tonight, I just want to share that I know that Christ is the reason for the Season! I love him and I love each of you! I know that today we celebrate His birth, and that because of Him, we don’t have to face our challenges alone. We have His love to uplift us and strengthen us so that we ...

When your family sends a Christmas tree & cookies... Hey everyone!  This is going to be a short one, but there is one main experience that I want to share with each of you.  As you know, we are working with Adrian, who has been making tons of progress recently. You will be pleased to hear that he is still doing fantastic. We had originally planned on having his baptism on January 13th, but he is so pumped about all of this that he wants to do it on the 30th of this month! Talk about awesome! He has been super excited and happy about making this choice to follow Jesus Christ! He has such high faith and is so excited to continue to make changes to follow Christ.  Best donut shop ever. Probably the coolest part of everything has been that this will be his first Christmas believing in Jesus Christ. He told us yesterday that he had no idea how to even celebrate it! It was a really humbling experience for me to think about that. We basically explained ...

Hey everyone!!! Man, life is good, am I right? The Christmas season is here are we are having so many good things happen in the world. People are feeling the love!! The Christmas spirit I should say. Anyways, this week was different but awesome. We had lots of good things happen in the mission!! A few people from the mission headquarters in Salt Lake came down to the mission for three days to train us on what we could do better as missionaries!! It was legit! The best part was, each of those three days, someone came out with us to do missionary stuff to help us apply what we had been learning. It was a good time.  Day 2 was probably the most impactful for me. It was entirely centered on using the scriptures more in your teaching, using them as the foundation of a lesson rather than the “ornaments” as they described it. It was awesome. That night we had a dinner with a member named Jonathan. He is a great guy, he served a mission as well, and he is probably one of the nicest pe...

Arizona can be beautiful, too! Hey there all my lovely people! Thanksgiving was pretty great, wasn’t it? I always love getting together for the main purpose of being thankful, but eating tons of food is a pretty good secondary purpose. Food is life. I hope you all felt that as well.  Thanksgiving was awesome! That morning we played some football with our district, took a nap, had dinner, took another nap, then played like 30 rounds of UNO. Good times. It’s pretty weird to have free time as a missionary, you always feel like you should be doing something. So it was a pretty intense day, but I had so much to be thankful for. We went to dinner with a guy named Brigham Dallas, who is quite the stud. He invited about 20 people over for Thanksgiving dinner, so it was a party. There was tons of food, and he is such a nice guy. He offered to host for all the people who didn’t have families to spend the day with, and all those who just needed a place to go. It was so great to inter...

Don't judge...I needed proof. Lamborghini, Audi, Ferrari. Same apartment complex. Same day. Happy Thanksgiving week everyone! I hope you are preparing yourselves for one of the best holidays ever. Food is definitely one of my favorite things, so I always look forward to the feast that will go down in about 3 days. And yes, always remember, gobble ‘til you wobble.  Well, after being in the Towne Lake ward for about 2 Weeks, I have seen some awesome things. I even saw an Audi, Lamborghini, and Ferrari all at the SAME HOUSE. And it was an apartment at that. Logical? Not really. Awesome? You bet. Anyways, I definitely have a strong belief that there are people out there who need us! Something that is really emphasized as a missionary is the principle of talking to everyone, which is exactly what it sounds like. We go out of our way to talk with and get to know everyone we see. That is my favorite part of this work, we meet so many amazing people!  This week, we ...

Happy Monday everybody! It’s been quite the week, and pretty much nothing is the same as it was 7 days ago. Let me walk you through some of the changes: I am no longer in the South Mountain Ward! After 7 months, it was time for me to head elsewhere, so now I am serving in the Towne Lake YSA ward, which is a pretty good chunk of Tempe and West Mesa. It’s pretty intense. I am still a zone leader, but over a lot more missionaries than before. They reduced the number of zones from 9 to 6, which means the zones are now a lot bigger, so we went from being over 18 missionaries to 34! Quite the jump if you ask me. So yeah, pretty intense. My companion is Elder Morgan from Layton, Utah! He has been on his mission for about 10 months and is a baller. We are very similar, like creepily similar, so it’s going to be a party. #PartyInTheYSA. Anyways, with all of this change, probably the thing that has been on my mind the most is how important it is to trust. There is a saying from one of...

Gonzalo and his mom on her baptism day! Hey everybody!!! Man, has time been flying! I feel like I just sent out my last email...let's see what I can give you this week.  Best experience this week was on Saturday for sure. If you have been diligent in reading my emails for the last year you will remember that last October there was an awesome young man in Casa Grande named Gonzalo who got baptized, and this weekend his mom actually got baptized, and Gonzalo baptized her! I got permission to go, so for the first time in over 9 months I was back in Casa Grande! It was a really cool baptism, Gonzalo was pretty nervous but it was really powerful to see their family come together in celebration of Nancy's choice. It was a really cool moment. It is awesome how God works through families, and that is where we find our greatest joy.  I also was able to go on two different exchanges this week, we had our MLC and normally we would have a meeting with the zone to train them on...

Hello everyone, and Happy Halloween to you all!! We had our p-day moved to today since we have be inside at 6 anyways because no one takes us seriously on Halloween. But we also get to go to the Mesa temple as well, which is super awesome. Love the temple so much. This week was really fantastic for many reasons, but I'll maybe share just a few of those experiences with you.  First off, I was able to attend the temple on Saturday with the Bushnell's, who I taught in Casa Grande a year ago. They were able to go through the temple for the first time and being able to be there was one of the coolest things ever. Being able to see both of them go to the temple together was amazing, and there was a powerful spirit. Sister Bushnell, after going through, came and told Elder Grigsby and I, "You tell your mothers that this was worth it, okay?!?" It was really funny, but it is so true. We tell people about our mission experience and they are amazed at all that we sacrifice...

Hello everyone!! I have about 6 minutes today, so you will be getting a crash course of what has happened, but it will be awesome. I had an amazing opportunity to attend the temple with the Evans' family this week, who is a family that I taught over a year ago in Casa Grande. They were able enter the temple and be sealed together forever this week. It was the coolest experience I have ever had. I cried when I saw their two little girls walk in dressed in white, and I knew and felt how important that event was for them. They have come so far to get here and the joy on their faces was something I will never forget.  I am so grateful I was a part of it. I love them so much and will always have a strong connection with them after seeing them grow and progress.  We also had a baptism this week for Annalisa, an 11-year old girl who has one of the strongest testimonies I have ever heard! She was baptized and confirmed as a member of the church on Saturday, and all of her f...

The Mercado Army! Hey there all of my favorite people!! I hope this week was the greatest week of all time, because it definitely was for me. So many cool experiences and good things to share with you. Where do I even start? We gotta start somewhere.  First off, I am so grateful to be in the South Phoenix area for a 5th transfer. That is usually above average for a missionary, you usually stay in an area from 2-4 transfers, so I was interested to see what would happen this transfer and so far it has been miracle after miracle. I had a really cool opportunity this weekend to baptize one of our investigators named Lucia, who is such an awesome person. She had been taught by missionaries for 5 years, ad finally in August she decided that she needed this in her life. At the end of the baptism service, she got up and shared her story with all of us, and it was so powerful to hear the hard things she had gone through to get to where she is today. When I first got into the area, t...

Visited another district meeting this past week. Hey everyone! It has been a pretty crazy week, so many good things, we  had transfers and about half of the zone actually changed, so it was a  pretty crazy transfer day. We were coordinating rides, car switches,  missing tablets, de-activated phones, we had it all. Due to the  hurricanes destroying Puerto Rico, actually we have two missionaries re-assigned  from the Puerto Rico Mission! They're names are Elder Marte and Elder Rogers, one  from the Dominican Republic and one from Canada. They are awesome! We have a baptism coming up for Lucia and Nelson this weekend, so we  are super excited!! Lots of good things coming!! There was an experience that I wanted to share with you!  Last night we had a cool experience with an investigator family! The  parents, Heather and Ryan, called us to ask for help in moving, and so  we helped them move a few weeks prior to this lesson. They never...

Someone wanted me to sit on his bike for a picture. I didn't mind. Hello everyone!!! I hope you know that there is so much good in this  world. Yes, there are definitely many bad things that are happening,  but just know that the good will always outweigh the bad. And that is  still the case today. We had a great week this week! I had a cool exchange with Elder Wright from Provo, Utah, and we were in his area, which is in a city  known as Laveen, AZ. We had this really cool  lesson there with a lady named Jessica. She recently lost two of  her children through tragic accidents, and she has been feeling lots of pain  in her life. We decided to teach her more about Jesus Christ, and the  sacrifice that he made for all of us.  It was really cool to see  that the better she understood the things that Christ experienced, the  more positive she was, and the more peace she felt. She is now  progressing towards baptism at the end o...

Thanks to Sister Benjamin for surprising Trevor with his favorite cake...Gold Medal Ribbon Ice Cream & Chocolate Cake Hello everyone! Thank you  all for the birthday wishes, it feels  pretty good to say that I am no longer a teenager. But it's also not  the best because I don't have any excuses to be immature. ;) Anyway,  we had a great week. Let me tell you about it. We had a great meeting this week with two leaders of the church, Elder  L. Whitney Clayton and Elder Gregory Schwitzer. They came on Saturday  and shared some great thoughts with us on the importance of the c ommandments and the scriptures. It was really cool to see such wise  leaders who have such amazing understanding of the gospel open up the  scriptures and teach from them. I loved that. My attention was really  drawn to Matthew 18 in the Bible, where Christ talks about the lost  sheep. I love how he says that those who are lost, when they return,  his joy ...

Squad singing a hymn at our ward talent show. Hey everyone!! I hope you all had an awesome week. This week has been  great for this fella right here. I love being a missionary, if I do  say so myself. It's quite the experience. The good, the bad, the ugly,  and everything in between, you definitely get a little bit of  everything out here, and it's the greatest, because every single  experience teaches you something different. I had a few of those this  week I wanted to share. When your mom has a conference in Scottsdale and drops off a little snack. On Friday we went on exchanges with the Assistants to the President,  and I went into the Northwest Mesa area for the day and it was awesome. I went with Elder Bonilha, who is actually from Sau Paulo, Brazil. He is the funniest man on the planet. We had a blast, we found a few new people to teach and were so busy we nearly didn't have time  to eat at all! It was cool. Don't wo...

When you tryna hold a pet pig but dogs love you... Hope you like the line from a classic oldies song, and trust me, just  because the subject title doesn't say inferno doesn't mean it isn't  hot anymore. We are still in triple digits. We are out of the worst of  it though. Summer #2 is taken down!! I guess I'm a pro now. Anyways, I  hope you all had a great week! This week was pretty crazy. It always  is. So, we were supposed to have a baptism this weekend for our  investigator Lucia, but she had a baby on Tuesday, so that made that a  little difficult! It was cool though, because she still had such a  strong desire to be baptized as soon as possible!! She is the coolest  person and has a very strong testimony. So, sooner rather than later , we will be having a fantastic baptism!! Love it! We had a lot of opportunities this week to spontaneously serve others.  We had a cool opportunity on Saturday, there was a new family that...

When Sister Benjamin gives birthday presents.   Hello everyone! That's right, we are coming up on the last week of  what I classify as the inferno. It's been a pretty brutal summer as  always, but actually not as bad as it was when I came in last August.  I'm definitely becoming more accustomed to extreme heat ALL the time.  But September and October will still be 90s and 100s, and once  Halloween hits then we get into the good stuff. So next week I'll  actually have more exciting subject titles. Anyways, this week was awesome. We had something called "stake  Conference", which basically means all of the congregations in the  South Phoenix area met together in one building for two hours to be  taught by some leaders of the church. For us, since we are both adults  and mission leaders, we had two more two hour meetings on Saturday,  and then the normal meeting on Sunday. So 6 hours of church! I LOVED  it!  You m...