March 14, 2016

In a separate email he commented about Dustin's prom pics, and the answer to the riddle he sent a couple emails ago:  "Tell Dustin he is too precious, and the answer is 50 because the monkeys stole them."

And here is his regular email!

¿Cómo estamos?

This week went pretty well! Got some funny stories and what not and there were spiritual experiences so that's all you can ask for I guess. 

To start off I want you guys to send me some recipes because I'm getting sick of cereal and tuna. It's great but a little old. And the catch is that I have a blender and a microwave to work with. So let's see what you got.

First, there's a funny saying in Chile when it's cold. It's "Hace helado." Which pretty much means it's making ice cream. Just thought you guys should know that and next time it's cold say "it's making ice cream."

So I know that bus drivers aren't always the best and sometimes we can be a little critical, but the bus drivers here literally have no regard for their own lives, or anyone inside the bus. It's kind of like the bus ride in Harry Potter 3 (I think). That's the best way to put it. It's a different experience every single time, but always interesting. 

Also this week we did an exchange of companions for a day because my companion had to go to Viña (which is not Olmué). I was with Elder Beard, who has been on his mission for 6 weeks longer than me. It was pretty funny because we kind of walked around and talked to people but we don´t have a lot of experience so it was interesting to not have a  Latino to fall back on. Overall it went well and we didn't ruin anything, so it was a success. 

Every night we're supposed to be back in our house at 9:30 sharp. We were talking to some people and lost track of time and it was like 9:20 so we started booking it back. We ran like 2 km all the way back. Also we passed by these people that we had promised to drop off The Family: A Proclamation to the World. So we stopped super quick threw it at them and kept running. Even with that we made it!

There should be a picture of this giant tarantula that we saw when we were walking. There's no story but it was just chilling on the road. And it was big. 

This week we watched a video from Elder David A. Bednar. In the video one of the points he talked about was praying with faith. He said "If we pray for something and then we are hesitant to act or don't act at all, that was a pray of belief, not faith." I thought that was really cool because we can pray all we want to develop some attribute, do well on a test, or whatever thing but if we don't work towards that we aren't showing any faith. We're just asking Heavenly Father to do it for us. Faith requires action and we can ask for strength to act and do, but we need to do something. This reminds me of a saying "Pray like it all depends on God, but act like it all depends on you." That pretty much sums it up, we need to do our part and then trust God. 

Love,

Elder Cheney