Week 92

Monday seems to be everyday now. Next Monday is arrivals and we get to go to the airport again and pick up 11 new missionaries. Remember the last time we picked up the new missionaries? Feels like yesterday. This week was a good one! I will try to capture the highlights. We had a special MLC with Lee Donaldson. If you know The District, he is the Mission President of District 2 in San Diego. He is a professional trainer for the church now so he came to train us and President Guffey. We got to go teaching with him on Monday night and it was awesome! He taught us a ton about the Doctrine of Christ and the Plan of Salvation. It was awesome. MLC was super cool too! We had 91 missionaries there and we managed to take a picture with all of them! Pretty cool. The meeting was super inspiring and I am pumped up to apply the things that I learned! I have a lot of tools for teaching people now. Besides that we had a baptism! Kimberleigh got baptized this weekend. She has changed a ton. She was super excited though and it was a good day. The spirit was super powerful the whole time and I loved it. I could spend all day at baptisms. It is almost like being in the temple. Kimberleigh is doing awesome. We have another baptism coming up on the 22nd! Alana is her name. She is awesome. She has come to church 3 weeks in a row and stayed all 3 hours. She is really excited to be baptized. We are excited too! This upcoming week is going to be crazy! We will be in El Paso tonight for Zone Conference tomorrow and then another Zone Confernce in ABQ on Thursday. Transfers are next week so I don't really know when I will email. Probably Tuesday. I am not going to get transferred. I will stay here till the end of my mission most likely. I love you all!!! 

Week 91

Well hello there everyone! What a wonderful week this last week has been. It was a little crazy at some points. But it was great. First of all I didn't even know it was the Superbowl this week until last Thursday when missionaries were asking us about the policy for the day. My desires and focus has changed a ton on my mission. Last year I knew exactly when the game was and who was playing. This year I didn't even have a clue. Mission life takes over. I am glad I have changed though that is nice. Anyway back to this crazy good week. We are still working with Alana. She is preparing to be baptized on the 22nd of this month. She is amazing honestly. So prepared for the gospel. She bore her testimony yesterday in church and it was awesome! She is awesome. We are excited to continue to work with her. I don't know how much I have talked about Kimberleigh. She has been being taught for a long time. She has been close to getting baptized but things seem to always pop up. In church she sent us a text that told us she wanted to get baptized this weekend! We just so happened to have our District Leader in the same building so he gave her an interview on the spot. She is ready to go! Boom! We are going to have a baptism this Saturday! I am excited for it. We had a drunk homeless guy walk into our sacrament meeting yesterday. That was exciting. He passed out in the middle of it all and snored up a storm. You never know what is going to happen on any given Sunday. We had MLC this week. Usually it is a spiritual feast. But when you are on the AP side of things it is a stressful 8 hours. I conducted the meeting and that went fine but we were about 45 minutes behind schedule at the end. It was crazy. I was so stressed. But it was still awesome. It was great to see everyone there and get to see some El Paso friends as well. I am grateful for all of you!! Thank you for your support!! I love you a ton!!!

Elder Carruth 

Week 90

Well today might just be a short email. I lost some time this morning to meetings with President so I am running a little behind. So please forgive me in advance for not filling you all in on everything. First off we had some big changes this last week! There was a worldwide missionary broadcart with Elders Oaks, Bednar and Anderson of the 12. They changed the missionary daily schedule. They gave us more freedom to move things around in our day and gave us the chance to sleep more at night. They also made pday longer. So that was cool. It was pretty big news across the mission and I am sure across the world. Modern day revelation is wonderful. I am excited for the change. We got to go to El Paso on Friday. We had to take a car down to a missionary who needed it. So Elder Petersen and I got to drive all the way to El Paso in separate cars. That was WEIRD. Holy Moly I have totally forgot what it is like to be alone for any length of time. I didn't know what to do with myself. It was a good taste for after mission awkwardness. I appreciated it. It was good to see some of the missionaries from down in El Paso too. That was good. On the way back from El Paso we got to stop at a place named Sparkys. It is a burger place that is know across the mission of being the best. I have heard about it my whole mission. Well we gave it a try. And the myths are all true. It was amazing. SO good. I will go back someday. I attached pictures in case you were hungry. We have a new person we are teaching! She is a huge miracle! Her name is Alana and is a YSA. She really wants to do what God wants her to do and knows she needs a relationship with Him. She is currently on track to get baptized on the 22nd of FEB. That is super cool! She came to church and stayed the whole time yesterday! Super cool. Besides that we have had a ton of meetings this week. Busy busy busy. I love you all!!!

Week 89

Well I feel like I Just emailed all of you yesterday. So not sure how it is Monday again. But this last week was super awesome! We had some miracles and some really awesome experiences. I love being a missionary. I have said that a lot but that is because it is true. We had a baptism this week! His name is Dustin. He is awesome. I remember teaching him on exchanges with the APs like last August. And now he got baptized! It was a really spiritual experience. Dustin was smiling super big and was super excited.  I have a miracle story. We were with our Elders Quorum President in the YSA one day and he noticed on his phone that there was a unbaptized YSA aged person that we never heard of. We decided to go try by. No one was home. That's not the miracle. A couple houses up we saw 3 men digging a ditch outside a house. We tried talking to them but our Spanish is pretty rusty. One of them, named Juan, spoke enough broken English to tell us that he would allow missionaries over. We didn't think a whole lot about it, it was just a normal average contact. We did pass on his information to the Hermanas. Well at Dustin's baptism, we saw the Hermanas walk in with Juan!! It was so cool! He talked about how good he felt there and all about the trials he is facing. He grew my testimony on talking to everyone. It was so cool. The Lord puts prepared people everywhere if we are willing to talk to them. Miracles are everywhere. So we had a lesson with someone this week and when we came out of the house we got to watch someone back into our car. That was a first. He tried to tell us that it was fine and that we didn't need to worry about it. I told him that it is God's car and not ours haha. It was interesting. We had a really neat experince this week. We went up to Santa Fe on Friday for a District Meeting. I have some good missionary friends up there so it was cool. Well one of them asked me for a blessing right after the meeting. She told me that she had thought about getting a blessing from me a few days prior and that it was a miracle that we were there. The blessing was incredibly powerful. I could feel the love of our Savior and how much he loves her. I know that the Priesthood is real. I am grateful for the chance I had to serve one of my sisters. It was a great week! I am excited to see what next week holds!! I love you all!!!

Elder Carruth