Bye Bye México Puebla South

Hey everyone! Well, it was another great week out here in Puebla, with some insane news, some new beginnings, and a brand new batch of crazy people.

So this week was the mix of Halloween and Day of the Dead! Basically Halloween is like the P-Day of Day of the Dead, but it was so cool nonetheless. Everything was decorated with flowers and ofrendas, even though it was a little less coco-ey than I thought. Something cool that I learned is that Day of the Dead is actually like a week, and everyday celebrate a different age or circumstance of how they died ex. a day of infants that died, or people that died in accidents Day. But as always, the Mexicans went HARD to celebrate.

About the title, we found out that the church is going to open 36 new missions and a new Puebla mission is one of them. So sorry for the clickbait title, but we are going to split the mission! We are going to lose about 40 missionaries in the changes and so I could finish my mission in the Puebla North, South, or East mission! Also, we may or may not have discovered that the Puebla Temple is going to be dedicated in May and it will be moved into the South Mission!! And so there will be a lot of changes happening next year in July.

As far as how the work is going: not great. I don't know, recently we've just had a really hard time getting things going. Finding, contacting, working with members, friends at church, just all slow. And to make it all worse I felt like we were just going through the motions in our missionary work. But everything changed when I read a talk by Elder Uchtdorf when he said,

"Sometimes we think of the Restoration of the gospel as something that is complete, already behind us—Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon, he received priesthood keys, the Church was organized. In reality, the Restoration is an ongoing process; we are living in it right now. It includes “all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal,” and the “many great and important things” that “He will yet reveal.” Brethren, the exciting developments of today are part of that long-foretold period of preparation that will culminate in the glorious Second Coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ."

I thought about this quote for a long time: How could I restore my area and my companionship to be the best it could be? And then I realized that we just needed to adjust some things. Not all was lost. The restoration is an ongoing process, needed to be restored to its perfectness DAILY. And so we underwent our personal restoration with new goals and plans to help us get back to where we needed to be.

So today at 6:30 we woke up and went out to a hill and we climbed it. (It was something that Elder Cook and Elder Holland did when they were missionary companions). It was a beautiful morning and we had an awesome view of the volcanoes and the city. Then, on this perfectly quiet hilltop, we offered a powerful prayer to have this rededication in our missions. We showed to God we were willing to dedicate ourselves to Him and His will.

This Daily Restoration is needed in all of our lives. I invite you all to ponder to see whether we are willing to submit ourselves to the Lord's will and what we can restore in our lives. Maybe we need to restore the principle of Daily Repentance. Or maybe we could fine tune our covenant of "comforting those who stand in need of comfort" and show more charity. Or maybe renewing our commitment to minister to those around us. There are many things we can restore. But, there are even MORE blessings that are waiting for us if we do those things. That is my promise to you all. I love you so much and have an amazing week!