Jan 23, 2012

This week was an awesome week here!

Tuesday we had interviews with President Ward which was awesome ha I love when I get to see President and Sister Ward they´re the best! Then Tuesday night we got a call from the ZL´s saying that my comp had to be in the city tomorrow for a training meeting because he´s training next change, he´s gonna be an awesome trainer I’m excited for him. So because he had to go to the city I had to go with one of the other elder´s in the zone. At first I was kinda nervous about having to work with him because we haven´t really gotten along to well but it actually turned out really cool! We worked pretty hard and had some way good lessons! And we became good friends out of it haha so that was sweet.

Thursday was amazing! On Thursday we got the opportunity to go listen to Elder Russell M Nelson! It was so cool! He got there around 2ish I think ha I can´t remember for sure and went and took a picture with him and then we went back into the church building. But as we walked back in we got to shake the hands of Elder Martino who is a member of the Quorum of the 70 and in the area presidency over Central America and we got to shake the Elder Nelson´s hand as well ha he´s a lot taller than I thought he was. It was so sweet! Then we went into the chapel where we heard from President and Sister Ward, Elder Martino and his wife and Elder Nelson and his wife. Ha it was so sweet and the spirit was so strong! Basically the topics which they talked about were obedience and following the promptings of the spirit. Something that I really liked which was said is that obedience brings blessings, but perfect obedience brings miracles. At the end of the meeting Elder Nelson left a blessing upon all of us and the spirit was SO STRONG I loved it!

Yesterday we met with one of our investigators we have a baptismal date with. He´s always super positive and always has super good questions to ask us. We love that! When we first started teaching him he didn´t seem that interested and we kinda thought that he might just be taking the lessons because he liked this lady that is in the ward but as we´ve been teaching him about the church and the gospel we´ve seen his interest grow and I know he´s in it for the right reason. He had to work yesterday morning but was able to get off early so he could come to church, but when he was on his way there was a wreck or something and traffic wasn´t moving at all so he walked all the way from his work to get to church.

We have changes this week ha I’m kinda sad to be leaving this area but I’m excited to be going to another area as well! This should be an interesting week!

Thank you for all of the love and prayers

Elder Westwood

Jan 12, 2012

This week was a good week, we worked super hard and had quite a bit of success come from it!

Tuesday my comp came to me and said that he felt like we should do a fast to see if it would help with the work because lately it seemed like everything wasn´t going very well. Our investigators weren´t really progressing and we were having a hard time finding new investigators. That day was awesome! We ended up finding a ton of new investigators which were super positive as well and the spirit was so strong in our lessons. It was awesome!!

One of the other things we tried this week was getting more referrals from the members and searching for more old investigators. We found an investigator from almost a year ago and she was progressing super good but then the missionaries had emergency changes and the shut down the area for a while and the missionaries that reopened the area didn´t go back. So we went and found her and started to talk to her about what she remembered from when she was taking the lessons. She actually remembered quite a bit and has read almost all of the book of Mormon! We were super excited to hear that so we´re hoping that she´ll be baptized soon.

This week we also got a reference from some members in our ward who had a neighbor that is super interested in the church. So we went up and talked with him this week was well, he´s just as they said he was! He is really interested about the church and has a lot of enthusiasm towards it, he just needs to be taught more and hopefully he´ll be baptized soon as well.

It´s awesome how when we sacrifice the Lord will help us out. I know that most of our success in finding these new investigators were blessings that came from fasting. I love it!

This week Elder Russell M Nelson is coming to Panamá to talk to us! We´re all super excited about it! It´s gonna be awesome!

Thank you for all your support and love

Elder Westwood

Jan 9, 2012

This week was a pretty good week down here this week. Ha things are finally starting to get back to normal after the holidays so that´s been pretty nice ha-ha.

We´ve been having a hard time lately finding people that we can teach, it seemed like almost everybody we would teach and then set a return appointment would fall through so we´ve been looking for other ways to find people to teach. So I got the idea to search our area book to see if we could find anybody in there that looked like we could teach. I came across a couple of teaching records of old investigators and we decided to go visit them. One of the records we found was a couple who had been taught everything and wanted to get baptized but they couldn’t because they weren’t married and they couldn´t get married because the lady was under age at the time, but that was about a year ago. So we went and found them and discovered that she is old enough now and still has a desire to be baptized so hopefully we´ll be able to progress with them. I love when the area book is filled out! It is so useful when things are done correctly!

We had something sad happen this week too. We were teaching one of our investigators and trying to explain to her about how everything has to be done with the proper authority because she had been baptized into another church and was afraid of being baptized again because it says in the bible that you should only be baptized once. Well, we were trying to explain to her about authority and I could tell that things just weren´t quite clicking with her... at the end of the lesson she just told us that she was happy in the church that she was in right now and doesn´t want to change. When she told us that both Elder Wade and I just felt terrible, we were both super sad because she had been so positive before and then this happened...I think we´re gonna go back again soon and see if we can teach her more, but we´ll see how it goes.

But yesterday we had an awesome experience; we had received a referral from some of the recent converts in the ward about a man that lived by them who was interested in learning more about the church! So we went up there and had dinner with him and afterwards talked about the church. This guy is actually a super religious guy and is super active in the Evangelical church. But he got invited to come to church with our recent converts and it sparked an interest in him. He had a ton of questions about the church and the book of Mormon and everything, it was so sweet! And he´s super interested so we´re praying that he´ll progress as well. I love getting referrals from the members!

Well I think that´s about all from me for this week. Thank you for all your prayers! I love you all
Elder Westwood

Jan 2 2012

Well I hope everyone had a good new years! Ha it was crazy down here just like every holiday here in Panamá haha.

Last p-day we went to this temple in our area called Templo Bahá´í. I guess there´s only 8 temples of this religion in the whole world! It was pretty interesting, it´s up on top of this huge hill and looks like a giant egg when you´re far away ha but it was pretty sweet to check it out.

This was a pretty good week though in the work! On Tuesday we went on splits with the AP´s. that was awesome!! We worked super hard and I learned so much from them! Because Elder Wade and I both don´t have a bunch of time in the mission we´re still trying to figure out what teaching methods work best for us. But the day we did splits with the AP´s we both learned a lot of new methods which we want to start using in our lessons to help make them better.

Last week as we were walking down the street and we stopped and talked to this lady that Elder Betanco and I had contacted last change but we were never able to go back and teach here. Well we were talking to her and she was super positive and wanted to learn more about the church so we set up a return appointment for this week. So we went back on Wednesday and it seemed like nobody was home so we were getting ready to leave and a bunch of little kids that were around the house started yelling at us and telling us that she was there. So we turned around and went back and again there was no answer. So we started to leave again and then the kids started yelling for her as well and then she came to the door. I guess she was in the back room of her house and couldn´t hear us. So we started teaching her about the Restoration and the spirit was so strong! It was so awesome! Ha it was towards the end of the day and so elder wade and I were tired so our Spanish was terrible haha but the spirit was there and it was so strong! We went back and taught her again later this week as well and the spirit was still super strong and she still super positive!

Ha I can´t believe it´s 2012 now. Last year went so fast! I’m super excited for this upcoming year though! It´s gonna be awesome!

Thank you all for everything!
Elder Westwood

Dec 26 2011

Well I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and has a Happy New Year this upcoming weekend!

This past week was a fun one for sure! We had a multi Zone Christmas party with President Ward which was pretty fun. Each of the zones came up with a few skits and then did them during the party which was pretty funny. And then we just played some games, ate some food and read Luke 2.

This week Elder Wade and I went in a few parts of our area that we´d never been to before. The areas were super rich, probably the most rich parts I’ve been in since I’ve been here in Panama. But, unfortunately we didn´t have much luck in those areas. I´ve learned that most of the people who have been prepared and are ready to listen to the message of the gospel are those that don´t have much. They´re more humble and a lot of times are looking for something to make their lives better. And we as missionaries have that opportunity to bring a better life to them. I love it!

This week I also started reading Jesus the Christ! Wow that book is amazing! I’ve learned so much from the little bit that I’ve read so far and it´s answered a bunch of questions that I’ve had. It´s so cool! If anyone who is reading this hasn´t read that book yet I encourage you to do so. It´s an awesome book!

So who knew that people celebrate Christmas with fireworks?? Well I sure didn’t haha until Christmas Eve! Ha our neighbors were blasting off fireworks and blaring music until about 4 in the morning! Ha needless to say we didn´t sleep much that night but it´s ok haha. It´s funny to see the difference in how people celebrate holidays. Ha I wonder how new years is gonna be haha.

Christmas was awesome!! That morning we went and had breakfast at the house of some of the members in our ward. I didn´t really know the family to well before we went but we all had a fun time. I got to talk to my family which was awesome!! Also our cosineta cooked us a huge dinner that night. She bought like a 24 lb turkey, a ham and a pork leg and then we had potato salad and a bunch of cake and cookies and all that kind of stuff. Oh and rice, of course haha. It was super good haha I ate so much!

Thank you all for everything!

I love you all!

Elder Westwood

Dec 19 2011

It´s beginning to look a lot like Christmas! Well, minus the snow, and the lights, and the songs, and a few other things haha. But it´s all good! I can´t believe that Christmas is already here! It has come so fast! Our lessons have been more directed towards Christmas lately though and I love it! We´ve had some super spiritual lessons!

This week was a pretty good week though! We had changes Wednesday which were pretty interesting. Betanco left which we all figured would happen, ha he went to this place called Bocas del Toro which is basically the furthest zone in the mission, and it takes like 14 hours to get there or something like that haha. Elder Mahina and I both stayed in the area, but we both got new comps too! Elder Mahina is training again; his new comp is Elder Macanche from Nicaragua, he´s a pretty cool guy but really quiet. My new comp is Elder Wade from Oklahoma. It was pretty funny when we found out who my comp was because Elder Wade lived in the house next to us when I was in Arraijan so I got to know him super good there so we´re already really good friends. I was really excited about that! But the other funny thing is Elder Wade and Elder Mahina were comps in the MTC so they knew each other super good as well. So needless to say we have a really good time because Mahina and Mecanche are still living with us because they haven´t found a house in their area yet. It´s cramped in our small house but we make it work.

So the other night we were out contacting and we started talking with this guy. He said he didn´t know a lot about the church but had a lot of questions about it so we were like hey this is kind of cool. Ha well after talking to him for a while he started quoting like a ton of scriptures and we came to find out that he´s actually a preacher of another religion and he knew a ton about our church. Ha he´d read like all the pamphlets, knew about the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith and a bunch of other things. Ha he didn´t want to know more about the church he just wanted to try and find falsehoods about our church. We talked for a little bit longer and at the end we bore our testimonies about the church, the spirit was so strong as we did so, I’m pretty sure he could feel it as well. We´ll see if we go back and talk to him again.

Tomorrow we have a Christmas activity with another zone which should be pretty fun so I’m excited about that.

Well I hope everyone has a merry Christmas! Thank you all for everything

Elder Westwood