Bishop, Thatcher PT

Hello Everyone! It's been a while since my last email, but I am still alive! Things have just been super busy here—we hardly have time for anything that isn't proselyting! We've been having a great time teaching people throughout the holidays and getting people to feel the love of God while they celebrate Christmas and a New Year! We've had a great holiday season here, celebrating Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's with the other Elders. It's really amazing to commemorate such spiritual holidays as a missionary! To count our blessings and give thanks for what we have, to remember the birth of our Savior and Redeemer, and to celebrate a new beginning and create goals to better ourselves this year! Meanwhile, we've had a few baptisms! Our friends Jeremias, Menezes, Silvio, Osvaldo, and Anderson all decided to start a covenant relationship with God! We've been really blessed to see so many people progress and grow closer to their Heavenly Father. This ...

Hello Everybody! For the last while, we've been teaching Jocinda and her family, and yesterday they were finally baptized! They have such strong testimonies and were so ready to be baptized that the 6-year-old actually cried a little because he had to wait to be baptized. It has been a wonderful experience teaching this family, and I am so happy for them that they got to make a covenant relationship with Heavenly Father. We also had an awesome activity Saturday before the baptism with the Elders Quorum to try and help our Branch start having activities more! We had a fun barbecue by the cliffs and really helped the Elders integrate more. Unfortunately, I don't get to keep helping Jocinda or the Branch anymore, as I have been transferred to the Belas Zone. But the really cool thing about this is that I have now served in every zone in my mission! I'm also a ZL now, so I get to try and help all the missionaries in our zone be as effective and efficient as possible so that we ...

Hello Everyone! So it's been a while, but I am still alive! We had a hard few weeks at the beginning of this transfer. All people that were progressing suddenly just stopped keeping commitments, and our teaching pool fell down to 0. However, this week we had a bunch of miracles! We were having trouble bringing people to church, and then out of nowhere, 2 people that we've never met before showed up to church 2 Sundays ago. We were really excited and marked lessons with them so that we could meet them later and begin to teach them and hopefully help them gain their own testimonies. Both of them are super awesome, but the absolute golden miracle was Jocinda. When we went to her house, Jocinda had already read Joseph Smith's testimony, so we explained to her the restoration of the Church of Christ and had a great lesson. She invited us to come back the next day so we could teach her husband and all her kids, which we were happy to do! During that second lesson, while we were t...

Hello Everyone! So last time when I said the work was slow, turns out I kinda lied. Now that everyone in the Zone got new comps and I'm now training, we've been on fire. My comp and I basically had to start from scratch in our area, but it turns out that wasn't too hard to do because we found 32 new people to teach that week, and my ZL's (being both crazy and inspiring) found more than 100 new people last week. So we've actually been kinda swamped teaching in the area where our new chapel is going to be. We also had this awesome activity in Eiwa (our Group) where members from the branch came to the group and went out two by two tracting for us. At the end of an hour and a half, we ended up with 53 new references! We have to start calling them so we can actually meet all of them, but this should help out a lot! So much of the past weeks have been focused on finding, and we've been really blessed in our efforts to find so many people that want to learn more and re...