We had a cool experience and met a new potential investigator!

Dear Everyone, I hope you are all doing well. I am doing pretty well. My finger is doing good and I only need the splint for one more week, so I am excited to be able to take it off soon because I am sick of it already! Our week was pretty busy, and we were hardly in our own area. It is kind of hard when we don't even get to work where we are assigned to! I am hoping that this week we will have a lot more time in our own area and that we can find some more people to teach and follow up with several others! Yesterday we had a cool experience. We went to try to visit Erick who we haven't found for like three weeks and he again was unavailable. We decided to head to look for another investigator and about four or five houses down from where Erick lives, my companion saw a young lady outside working in her yard. We offered to help and as always she declined. We did, however talk to her about the Gospel and how it could bless her and her family. We asked her if she had time to listen to us in that moment and she said yes. Her husband was sick so he didn't listen, but we taught her the message of the Restoration. She listened intently and seemed to understand all that we explained. At the end of the lesson she prayed and asked for more faith to know if the message we shared was true! We have a return appointment with her on Saturday. I really hope that she will read in the Book of Mormon! Please pray for her by name for us, so that she will be able to progress towards being baptized. Her name is Carla! Really other than that we have few investigators that we have been able to see lately, so we are looking for new people and trying to contact those that have pretty much disappeared. That is frustrating sometimes, but we have been doing a lot better on talking to everyone we see in the street, so I am sure that we will find some new people soon! I just want to share with you my testimony of the power of the Book of Mormon and the Holy Ghost. Our message is incredibly important and when meditated upon it makes a lot of sense, but can leave one with doubts and questions. I am positive that these doubts and questions can be answered most effectively through reading the Book of Mormon and praying sincerely to our Heavenly Father in the name of Jesus Christ. I have received many answers to prayers in that way and I am certain that this is the way established by the Lord to receive a lasting testimony of the Gospel. I testify that The Spirit can teach us of all truth, but we must first seek it. I hope you will all remember the importance of reading and studying the scriptures diligently, especially the Book of Mormon; as well as praying constantly and sincerely. Every question can be answered if we trust in Faith in God and the Lord Jesus Christ. I love all of you and I hope you have a marvelous week! Love, Elder Mitchell J Condie

I had a crazy hectic week with a Broken Pinkie and a Happy Birthday!

Hey everyone, How are you all doing? I hope all is going well for you! I have though about many of you this past week and I truly hope that you are enjoying life and finding happiness in every day! Our week this last week was pretty crazy and hectic. It felt like we were hardly even in our own area. On Monday I fractured my left pinkie playing basketball as part of our zone activity so we were in the emergency room until after midnight. It was quite an adventure, thankfully though my finger is doing well and it is not nearly as bruised or swollen as it was. I have a check up with the doctor on Wednesday so we will see what he says about it! Tuesday was practically the only day that we had in our area because all of the other days were occupied with at least one other meeting or appointment. It was nice because the Rodriguez family, who are like my favorite members in the ward, made me a birthday cake and it was nice to celebrate a little bit with them! They pretty much put a firework on the cake for my candle which surprised me a ton! It was super fun! As for our work as missionaries we don't have many investigators that seem very interested at the moment. We are still trying to look for more and follow up with a couple of others, but at the moment no one is really progressing. Please just pray for us to find people that are ready to receive the gospel and us as missionaries! On Friday it was my birthday and we had interviews with the mission president and they went really well. He made me feel super special and encouraged me to keep trying to be a good missionary and a good companion. He pretty much told me I am one of his favorite missionaries (even though he doesn't have favorites!) and I felt super unworthy of such a comment, but it made me want to be a better missionary! After the interviews my companion and I went out to eat Pizza Hut and it was super yummy! I loved it and I missed it (I hadn't eaten there since I came on the mission!) It was a good birthday! Saturday we had our Zone Meeting and we talked mostly on how to become a Consecrated Missionary. It was based on a talk given by Elder Tad R. Callister in the Provo MTC in 2008. I absolutely loved the talk and it inspired me to work harder everday to be more diligent and obedient so that we have greater success. I have set many goals including talking to more people everday so that we can find new people to teach! Really this week was great and I learned many lessons. If we want to be happy we need to work for it. We have to live the commandments of God if we want His blessings and His strength in our lives. Even though I have made many mistakes in my life one thing remains clear to me, God will and does always love us. He wants us to be successful and happy. He does everything in His power to lift us up and help us to continue on. He never gives us a trial or temptation too big to overcome and He is always there to listen when we need Him or just want to talk. I feel like I know Him much better now than I ever did before and I hope to continue to grow closer to Him day by day for the rest of my life! I know that He know each one of us and He is always here for us. Trust in Him and turn to Him always and we will have nothing to fear! I love each one of you and I hope your week is wonderful! Take care! Love, Elder Mitchell J Condie

I loved General Conference and I am thankful for our living prophet, President Thomas S. Monson

Dear Everyone and my beloved Family, Sorry this is short today we had very little time to write due to our zone activity. I would just like you all to know how much I love each and every one of you and how thankful I am for all of you! I hope that all is well with you and I want you all to know that I am doing well. This week was kind of hard because we did not teach much, we couldn't find hardly anyone. Hopefully this week it is easier to find those we have been trying to teach! I absolutely loved General Conference this weekend. It was full of inspiration and heaven inspired direction. My favorite talks were many and it is hard to choose just one or two, but of all of them I really enjoyed the talk by Elder Dallin H. Oaks. He spoke of the importance of an opposition in all things. I really felt impressed by the importance of an opposition because without it we cannot grow and choose for ourselves. I have faced much opposition in the past months as a missionary and I know that it has been for my good. Even though it has been probably the hardest thing I have ever done in my life I know that it is to help me learn and grow. I feel incredibly thankful to the Lord for having helped me overcome many trials and obstacles that have come to me in my journey. I know that there will yet be many but I look forward to the lessons learned and being able to look back and say that I overcame. I know that the Lord loves each and every single one of us. He is very aware of our unique and individual trials, situations, challenges, joys, pains, and sufferings. He is our greatest strength and will always be our hope in all difficulty. I am thankful for His loving hand that has guided me through many trials and His continued guidance for me in my current struggles. I hope that all of you know how much He loves you and wants you to succeed. If we will turn to Him, He will always lift us up and dust us off. I know that He suffered for us so that we do not have to suffer such great pain and suffering. I am thankful for a living prophet, President Thomas S. Monson. I am so thankful that God has given His Priesthood authority once again to man on earth and that we can be blessed and guided through that divine power. I know that as we strive to follow the counsel given by His chosen servants we will be blessed and given strength to continue on. I am thankful to have received His divine guide through his servants and I hope to continue to improve daily by living their teachings. I love each and every one of you and I hope you all have a wonderful week! Take care! Love, Elder Mitchell J Condie

We focused on finding new people to teach.

Hey Everyone, I hope you all had a good week this week. Our week went pretty well. This week we pretty much focused on looking for new people to teach because we really have very few people to teach as of right now. All of the investigators that we had that were progressing all got baptized. We had a wonderful activity on Saturday night that was an open house in the chapel. We invited all of the members and asked that they all invite someone to come and see the open house to get to know more about the church. It went really pretty well. We started the activity, my companion and I, with the introduction in the Chapel. We sang a hymn and said a prayer and then talked a little bit about Jesus Christ and His importance. We showed the new video #Aleluya that was made by the church for this Easter Season. It went quite well and we gave our testimony of Jesus Christ and God´s Plan of Salvation for each one of us. Following our part the groups went to other sections of the chapel to listen to the auxiliary organizations. They listened to the Relief Society, the Priesthood, The Young Men and Young Women, the Primary. and also the Bishopric. We got about six or seven referrals from the activity. Two of them came back to church yesterday. Honestly we didn´t have as many people as we would have hoped, but we still were able to find new investigators through the activity. Last week we found a total of nine new investigators and there are still a few referrals we haven´t contacted yet. Hopefully we can contact them and have some more new investigators. Of all the new investigators we found three were from our activity and the rest were from other situations. Hopefully we can keep teaching them a lot about the church and that they can progress towards being baptized! So far I don´t know much about any of them because we have only visited them once each one. Other than that the work is going pretty well. Hopefully we can find some more investigators this coming week and also find those that are being prepared to receive our message! I just want to share my testimony with you that I know that this is the Lord´s work! I know that He is the Great and Eternal Head of this Church. I know that as we put our faith and trust fully in Him there is no need to fear or to worry because he will guide and direct each of us to that which will bless us the most! I know that He has a perfect plan for us and our eternal happiness. We need but follow His commandments and we will find great happiness and joy. I testify that this is His work and His church. I love Him and I am so thankful for His perfect redeeming sacrifice for me. I love all of you and I hope this is a great week for you all! Take care! Love, Elder Mitchell J Condie

We found two new investigators!

Hey Everyone, I hope you all had a wonderful week this week! We had a good one. We found two new investigators and hopefully as we continue to work with them we can help them to progress towards baptism! I am excited because we have been finding a lot of investigators lately. The hardest part has been that we haven't been able to find a lot of them to visit after the first time. But this week was the Holy Week and here in Mexico everyone has these two weeks off of school and many off of work, so a lot of people went to the beach and other things like that. Our only new investigator that we have seen more than the rest is Erick. I don't know if I have said much about him, but anyway he is a recovering drug addict. He hasn't smoked marijuana since March 7th. We have only visited a couple of times. He accepted a baptism date, but it fell through because he hasn't come to church. He works on Sundays so we have to teach him about keeping the sabbath day holy. Hopefully as we continue to teach him he will start to come and progress to baptism. He has read in the Book of Mormon though so that is a good start. All of the others we have only seen once or twice and haven't taught much so we are going to try to do that this week! It is all going pretty good though for the most part. I really enjoyed our Zone Conference this week. We talked about helping others to endure to the end and also a lot on the importance of having faith in missionary work. I hope to increase my faith everyday in the Lord and confess His hand in our work! I want you to all know that I have a strong testimony of the Savior Jesus Christ. I know that He suffered and died for our sins. I know that He rose from the dead to never taste of death again on Easter Sunday. I know that as we strive to follow Him we will be blessed by His mercy and grace. I know that God has a perfect plan for us and that as we live His commandments we will find true happiness. I love all of you and hope that you all have a great week! Take care, Love, Elder Mitchell J Condie

We had a great week and we had another baptism!

Hey Everyone, I hope you all had a wonderful week this week! And if it wasn't so wonderful I hope that this week is better! My week was really pretty great! There are always ups and downs, but I have learned that focusing on the ups instead of the downs helps us to be happier people! Well this last week we were able to have another baptism. This week Hno. Ignacio got baptized on Saturday. My companion, Elder Hernandez, baptized him. When we were asking him who he wanted to baptize him he looked at Elder Hernandez and said, "well, I want you to baptize me because you are big!" it was super funny, but super true. It seems like the investigators almost always choose the largest person available because they don't want them to drop them while they are being baptized. The baptism went pretty well. Elder Hernandez did have to baptize Hno. Ignacio two times because his foot came up out of the water. I was acting as witness so I said they had to do it again. The second time it was super funny because Elder Hernandez pushed him way deep under the water so that he wouldn't have to do it a third time. The Spirit was strong in the baptism. My companion and I sang "Lead Kindly Light" together and I also spoke on the Holy Ghost. On Sunday in Sacrament Meeting I confirmed him a member of the church. It went well and I felt as if the Spirit was really guiding every word I spoke during the blessing. I was really content knowing that we had helped another person be baptized and confirmed part of the true church of Jesus Christ on the Earth. I also got to speak in Church on Sunday again already. I spoke about Jesus Christ and His Atonement with a focus on the Resurrection, Easter being so close. I also spoke about missionary work and invited all of the members to come to and invite friends to our Ward Mission Activity this Saturday. We are going to have an open house and have different groups touring the chapel and listening about the different organizations like the Relief Society, Young Men and Young Women, Primary, Sunday School, etc. We are also going to show the new video for Easter called #Hallelujah put out by the church! It is wonderful and I am so excited to share it! You can watch it here. Anyway that is all of the exciting news of the week. Oh also I am excited because my trainee, Elder Muñoa, got transferred to my district. I am super excited to see him and have him close by again. It will be kind of weird being his district leader though. Haha. Anyway the work is going well all we have to do now is just find a bunch of new people to teach because all of them got baptized! I just want you to all know that I have a strong testimony of the Savior Jesus Christ. I know that He lives. I know that after He was crucified that He was resurrected on the third day and that because of His infinite sacrifice for us we will all one day rise from the grave to new life just as He did. He is our Redeemer. If we will follow Him and live His commandments we can return to live in His presence and with the Father. I love Him. I am so thankful to be a missionary to share this testimony with everyone, that Jesus Christ lives and that He loves each and every single one of us! I love each of you and hope you all are well. I hope you have an amazing week! Take care of yourselves! Love, Elder Mitchell J Condie

The biggest and happiest thing that happened was that we had another baptism!

Hey Everyone, Sorry that I didn't write very good last week we ran out of time! I will try to fill you all in a little bit on what has happened lately! Well a lot has happened in the last two weeks. Well I am now with my new companion only because Elder Tzub left like two weeks ago. It has been kind of a hard change and I am still trying to get used to it. Elder Hernandez who is my new companion is a great kid, it has just been a struggle getting used to him. Well this last week the biggest and happiest happening was that we had another baptism. We baptized Hno. Ruben who I have told you all about in previous emails. He got baptized on the first date we gave to him and it was really neat to be able to work with him to help him be baptized. We really did not do much for him, pretty much just taught the missionary lessons. The biggest help was the Gutierrez, Rodriguez, and Yañez family (they are all the same family just sisters so the last names change a bit). It was cool because about a week and a half ago we realized that he had a smoking problem. He didn't smoke a lot, but he did like to smoke every once in a while. We taught him the Word of Wisdom and told him that he couldn't be baptized unless he quit smoking. That same lesson he let us throw away his cigarettes and ash tray and since that moment he hasn't smoked again. It was great because we were worried that we wouldn't be able to baptize him. In his baptism it was quite amazing. We didn't do hardly anything, actually the member family is who made the program and baptized and confirmed him and everything. The hardest part was that because he doesn't have half of his right foot (he lost it to diabetes) it made baptizing him hard. He became really tense while the brother tried to baptize him. The first time his foot came out of the water and we decided it would be easier to baptize him if he was kneeling and facing forward. We still ended up having to repeat it three more times because his clothing and all of his body didn't go under the water. Actually the last time they told me to hurry and change into an overall and get into the font to help make sure that all of the clothing went under, and it did finally. Even though we had to submerge him four times afterward he was smiling like crazy and really enjoyed it. His student who started the whole process finished the service with a talk on the Gift of the Holy Ghost and Ruben got up and hugged him as he was speaking and then told everyone thank you for all they had done for him! Sunday was amazing too because in testimony meeting the whole family got up to share their testimonies and Ruben accompanied them to share as well. He told us (the missionaries) thanks and made me cry in his testimony and then Hna. Rodriguez (who is like my favorite sister in the ward) made me cry more by saying that she thinks that President Egginton really loves their ward because he sent them the best missionaries in the mission. I felt super special even though we hardly did anything for him. I feel so priviledged to be a missionary. Well the other fun and good and happy news is that also this Saturday we will be having another baptism. Hno. Ignacio will be getting baptized. I don't know if I have told you all about him or not, but he has been an investigator for a long time now and wasn't really progressing because he wasn't married. It was cool though because since I have gotten here he has been telling us about his efforts to get married and then about two weeks ago he told us unexpectedly that he had gotten married. We had his interview the other day and now he will be getting baptized. I am super excited! Now the only bad thing is that we don't have any other investigators that are really progressing. I guess that just means we have to find some new ones then! Well I just want you to all know that I have a firm testimony of the truthfulness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I know that this is His Church restored to the earth. I know that He chose Joseph Smith as His Prophet so that we could all have the fulness of the truth in our lives. I know that if we will be obedient to His commandments that we will find the greatest happiness! I hope that you all can find that happiness as you work to live His commandments every day! I love Him and I am so thankful that He has called me to declare His word that His people might have everlasting life! (3 Nephi 5:13) I love you all and I hope you all have a wonderful week! Take care! Love, Elder Mitchell J Condie