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 

Week 88

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 

Week 87

Another week has come and gone! Can you believe it? I feel like I just sent an email out and now I get to send another one. This last week was a good one! We got to spend a ton of time out in the work pounding the pavement. That always makes you feel good at the end of the day. We are working with a couple people who are preparing to get baptized! Dustin is getting baptized this Saturday. He has come a long long way. He still has some stuff to learn but he is really excited about being baptized. He has been working for it for a really long time. The other person who is preparing to be baptized is Kimberleigh. She has come a very long way. She used to have a false idea of who God is and now she has a much stronger relationship with Him. She chose her own baptismal date of the 4th of Feb. She is doing awesome! Elder Petersen and I are having a ton of fun. We get along really well and both really want to be successful, especially as the end of our missions approach. He is a stud of a missionary. Super strong testimony. So we had a super cool experience this week. We were asked by our Stake to speak at their annual Priesthood Preview. It us a big meeting for all of the 11 year old boys who will be turning 12 this year. We both got to speak about how the Aaronic Priesthood helped us prepare to serve a mission. It was a really cool experience and something I probably would never have gotten to do had I not served a mission. It is interesting to me how before my mission I would have freaked out at an invitation to speak at something like that, but now I cherish opportunities to share my testimony with others and to speak in front of people. I love it. I have never spoken in front of huge crowds, probably around 250 people is the biggest. But it is still cool! And a change in myself that I have noticed. So a funny/creepy story that happened this week. We went to a gas station because I drank to much water that day and there was a homeless guy outside. When he saw us he yelled "THERE ARE MY DISCIPLES!" and we realized that he had been drinking a ton. He tried to hug us but due to our sincere silent pleadings he didn't. We had found 4 pennies on the ground and we tried to give them to him. He said "Flip them all and they will all be heads." So we did and they were all heads. Little creepy but a little funny too. We also had a drunk person try her absolute hardest to tell us that you can sin and be close to God at the same time. It was a great week! The gospel is awesome and I love my Savior. This life is about following Him. That is what leads us to eternal happiness. I just wanna thank everyone who has supported me on my mission. Means the world to me. I love you all!

Elder Carruth 

Week 86

Well another week has come to a very quick end. Before I started my mission everyone always told me that "the days pass like weeks and the weeks pass like days." I have come to see that that is true especially over the last couple weeks. Everyday feels like it lasts forever and the weeks go by in  the blink of an eye. I feel like I email every other day. This week was good! We planned transfers all week. We spent a lot of time in the office making sure everyone was good to go on transfer day which is today. We are taking time to email while we wait for the South missionaries to get up North. We had about 60 missionaries here this morning and it was cool to see everyone. The Lord really blessed our missionary work this week. Even though we spent a ton of time at the office preparing for transfers, we managed to have the best week we have had in a long time. We hit the standards of excellece (mission wide goals to strive for every week that President sets) and that was awesome! President was super happy about that and it made us feel good. The Lord really just blessed us with opportunities to share and teach the gospel. We found a family of 4 this week. They were taught by missionaries a long time ago and when we knocked on the door their 9 year old and 7 year old were super excited to see us. They said they might be willing to listen to the message again especially for their kids. We testified of eternal families, my favorite part of the gospel, and I am excited to work with them! They are a super cool family. We also made huge progress with an investigator named Kimberly. She is 19 and is about to graduate college with a double major before starting law school soon. She is brilliant to say the least. Well she fasted on Sunday and she wants to get baptized! She bore her testimony on Sunday and testified of the plan of salvation and the joy it brings. She testified of the Book of Mormon as well. It was a miracle for us! Yesterday we got to go to the airport to pick up 6 new missionaries. 3 of them are from Washington!!! We are taking over the mission! The new UTAH! BOOM! Every time one of them said they were from Washington I would do a double fist pump in the air and President Guffey would say "I am sorry to hear that" haha it was awesome. The new group of missionaries is a good one. They will be a strength to the mission. It was weird being at the airport. Last time I was there I was the one coming off the plane not knowing what the next 2 years would hold. I am glad that these last 20 months have been filled with miracles and tender mercies. Tons of trials as well that help humble and refine us into the missionaries that Heavenly Father needs us to be. I am so grateful for my mission. It fills my heart with joy and love when I think back to everything I have done and everyone I have met over the last 20 months. It is crazy how fast time goes here. I love my Savior Jesus Christ with all my heart. He is our Redeemer. I know that with all my heart. This is his church, he is at the head. I love you all. I am grateful for your influence in my life and the support I feel from you as I have served as a missionary. I hope the next 4 months continue to bring the same joy that I have felt up till now. The gospel is true. The Restoration is a fact. Heavenly Father loves you. In the sacred name of Jesus Christ. Amen. 

Elder Carruth