Week 98

Well another week has come and gone!! This week was awesome! Every week is awesome! I think I start out all of my emails the same way.... Awesome! We had a baptism this week!!! It was incredible. The spirit was so powerful and peaceful. Alanna was so excited for her baptism. You could truly see the light in her. She has changed so much already. The gospel has worked miracles in her life. Her whole family was there! Like a ton of family. Brothers and Sisters and Neices and Nephews. Packed house. It was amazing. She is amazing. We are working on going to the temple with her this week before conference! The temple closes after conference so we wanna go now. That would be amazing to be able to go to the temple with her for the first time. I am excited!!! We are working hard at finding new investigators! We need people to teach. This last week we taught very few people. We have a couple people who are working on getting baptized which is good. Time will tell. This upcoming weekend is genreal conference! We get to hear from the prophet of God and the Apostles. It is an amazing time to receive answeres to our prayers and feel of God's love. I invite all of you to watch it! 10 AM to Noon and 2 PM to 4PM on Saturday and Sunday. That is New Mexico time.... You can watch it live on lds.org! You will love it!! I love you all!!! 

Week 97

Well another week has come and gone in the Albuquerque heat. That is right people we are about to break into the 90s. Nothing like waking up and sweating on you walk to the fridge. This week was really good! A lot of craziness happend but still really good. We had a cool experience yesterday. We got to participate in a mission prep class with President Guffey. There were only 2 people who attended. But one of them was a convert of less than a year who is excited for his mission! It was a super cool experience. We have a baptism coming up this week! That is awesome! Alanna is doing great!! She is so excited to be baptized. She teaches us when we meet together. She is incredible. She is so prepared for the gospel. We also have someone else preparing for baptism. Her name is Marissa. She has been on date before but this time she is much more committed. She is really excited. She came to church this week too! Super cool. Amazing things happend everyday out here. I am sorry this email is so short! I love you all!!!

Elder Carruth 

Week 96

Hello friends and family and friends of family and family friends and all of the rest of you! I hope this last week has filled you heart with joy and gladness and that you are excited for the week that is coming! God loves you! A ton! This week was crazy. We had so much going on all week it seemed like there was never a break or time to breathe even. We had to prepare for zone conferences that are coming up the next 2 weeks. Luckily we don't have to go to all of them this transfer. So we get to go and be normal missionaries in ours and enjoy the rest of the time to proselyte. I love it. We had 3 exchanges this week. Tuesday night we had 4 missionaries in our apartment for an exchange all day Wednesday until 5 PM. Then Wednesday night we had 4 more for an exchange all day Thursday. And then Friday night we had 2 more come in. This week we have 2 more exchanges coming. Crazy!!! I love exchanges. It is a great way to learn from other missionaires and to grow. We have seen a ton of success this last week from them. We have started teaching the restoration to everyone we meet on the street. We just walk up and basically start teaching from the pamphlet for 2-3 Miniutes and then set a time to come back to teach them. It has been really awesome and full of miracles!!! So we had an interesting experience this week. Alanna has been preparing for baptism for the 22nd of this month. She is super amazing. She teaches us the gospel when we meet together. She is pretty incredible. Well she moved. And she moved out of our zone which means we would have to pass her to some other missionaries and a different branch. Well we found out that she lives in a couple different places and so after talking to our Branch President we decided to keep her here! It was awesome and we are excited for her and her baptism coming up!! Only a week and a half away!!!! Boom!!!! That is all I can think of this week. I love you all!!! Keep being awesome!!!!

Elder Carruth 

Week 95

Hello family and friends! How are you? Was it a good week? I hope so! This week we had a ton going on. I don't have a ton of email time right now but I will try to capture some of the highlights. We were not able to get in contact with Alana at all this week. We tried to reach out and go by her place but were unsuccessful. Well she showed up at church! Apaarently she had another family emergency that took her out of town, and she also moved out of her apartment. A lot of crazy things and she still made it to church. It was awesome. She even got up and bore a super powerful testimony about trials and the peace she feels at church. We had a lesson with her after and she accepted a baptsimal date of March 22nd! It was so cool! She is so awesome! I feel blessed to be able to meet with her and teach her. She strengthens my testimony. She is doing awesome. We had a super good conversation with the Zinc family. They are super cool but are dragging their feet a little when it comes to learning about the gospel. Their 10 year old daughter really wants to learn about God and our message so we asked her parents for permission to teach her and they said yes! It was awesome!! She could be a great example for her family. They are moving to the West Side of ABQ at the end of the month though. That will be sad. We got to go to the temple this morning! Missionary Monday. All 166 of us at the temple at 4 different sessions. It was cool. I love the temple. It was cool to be able to work so closely with the temple to make all of this come together. I know all of the temple presidency now pretty much. It is weird to get a phone call and the caller ID says "Temple" haha. Good experience though. That was my last big temple trip of my mission. It felt weird at the end not going to lie haha. I am grateful for the temple though. This next week is going to be great! I am excited to see the miracles that come and the joy we find in the service of the Lord. I love you all!!! Keep being a great example. 

Week 94

Hello friends and family and friends of family! Good to be with you on this beautiful Albuquerque morning. I hope this email finds all of you doing well and happy. It is important to be happy. I have learned that as a missionary. This last week was pretty crazy! With transfers and stuff going on I couldn't remember what day it was. It was good to get out and do some work though. Missionary work is the best thing ever. We had a couple really cool stories. Alana was going to get baptized this last week but had a family emergency come up that took her out of town. When she came back she had a stronger testimony then when she left! She even paid tithing yesterday. She is doing so amazing. Her testimony is bright and her love of the Savior is real. I am so grateful that I have had the chance to meet her and know her. She will probably be getting baptized in the next couple weeks. We are meeting with her tonight. We had another really amazing experience this week. A couple weeks ago a man named Rudy called the mission office for a blessing. Sister Guffey called us and we called some other Elders to go visit them. Aparently Rudy used to be married to a member of the church. He had a pretty bad alcohol problem so he got a blessing from some missionaries a long time ago. After that blessing he never took another drink. 45+ years sober now. The other Elders gave him a blessing and then we went by a week or so later. He told us that he believes in the power of the Elders. He asked for another Blessing from us and he asked us to dedicate his home. That was the first time I have every dedicated a home. It was a sacred experience and a powerful expression of God's love. We began teaching them and they agreed to meet with missionaries. They don't live in our area. But they are incredbile children of God. Our Father in Heaven loves us all. I know that to be true. I have seen His love in my life over and over. I know He is there. This is His work. I love you all and am grateful for the positive influence you all have had on me. Keep up the great work! 

Week 93

Well this week was crazy. So much moving around and traveling and stuff. Oh and we had transfers yesterday! We had two zone conferences last week that we went to. One was down South. We headed down Monday night and stayed all day Tuesday and came up Tuesday night. We got home a little before 11 on Tuesday night. We had another Zone conference in the north on Thursday. We got to give an hour long training in both of them about how to teach using the pamphlets we have been given. It was super cool and it went pretty well. I enjoy training and teaching people even when it is a room with 100 people in it. We spent a lot of time last week planning for transfers too. We had a lot of moving parts. On Monday we picked up 11 new missionaries from the airport. Wanna hear a funny story? Good. At the airport this guy walked up and started talking to us. He is a member from Iowa. He was on the phone with his wife and asked us about a missionary in our mission who his wife is like 2nd cousins with. Well I am also closely related to that missionary, Elder Turner. So I asked if his wife knew any Carruths and she said her Grandma's maiden name is Carruth! Small world. Crazy stuff. The new group of missionaries are all awesome. Super solid and powerfu. They are going to great things in this mission and in their lives. Yesterday was trasnfer day. It is a really cool feeling watching the trasnfer van leaver with a ton of missionaries on it and to think of all the hours of work and planning that went into that one moment of time. It is cool and it all inspired by the Lord. All glory be to Him. We had a cool experience this week with Alana. She has been doing super well and progresing in the gospel. She feels it and knows it is true. She was going to get baptized today actually. But last week she had an unexpected death in the family. When we got to go teach her and ask her how she was doing she told us that she had been praying a lot and that she was at peace. She said she is excited to came to church and pay tithing. She did come to church this week and participated a lot. She is doing amazing and will get baptized sometime in the next couple weeks. We are really looking for new people to teach. The work is going great! I love the Lord! I love my Father in Heaven! I love all of you! 

Elder Carruth