Final Letter From the Mission Field

Hey everybody my time has come sadly. I do not wish to go nor am I truly happy bout it. But do not email this email anymore. As I will be returning home this week. I love you all and look forward to seeing you! This week was amazing and this transfer was a great transfer to finish off the mission. I have learned so much as a missionary and come to love and want to live the gospel so much more in my life. I know the joy and happiness that lasts only comes from the gospel and knowledge of being with our families forever. It amazes me this week as I look back and see what I have learned. My faith in Christ has strengthened so much and I know that He rose on the third day. Christ lives and God does too. They love us and know us personally. What life throws at us we can use principles of reading and praying daily to cope and deal with challenges. The time of this life is to prepare to meet God. Through our faith we can be able to overcome any challenges we face. I love families so much. I am so excited for the day when I can have my own family. I am so excited to one day enter the Temple and be sealed for time and all eternity. That is my greatest wish to be with my loved ones forever which is only possible through the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. I have felt the love that comes. I realized this week that the love I have for these people is so real. I truly do love the people in the Canada Toronto mission. I have spent the last 24 months serving them, ministering to them, and teaching them to help them in anyway I can. I will never forget these experiences nor forsake them. I could not imagine what my life would be like if I did not serve my God for two years. I have grown so much and been able to come to understand more of life. Coming back to reality will be scary. It will be hard not always having the missionary Spirit with me. Being able to go contacting or tracting haha. To go to amazing members homes to share a delight meal with them. But there will be much to be enjoyed eventually and within time. I will see you all within the next week. I love you and wish you all the best!

Transfer 17 Week 5

Well everybody for starters I know how much all of you loved emailing me and sending me letters. I thank you all for the love and appreciation and support you have shown me over these two years. I would ask that you do not send any snail mail to the mission office or to my apartment. Thank you. So this will be the 2nd last report I send home. This transfer has been wonderful and a blessing from God. I have grown so much and been able to just work so hard and be able to see miracles come to pass. Last Sunday by complete miracle from God, Shemar, Monica, and Mallory all came to church out in Peterborough. It was a great meeting and we got to bond over a nice picnic at the Peterborough zoo. It was fun to  be able to slide down a long slide there haha. Oh what it is like to be kids again. We had spent a few days taking sometime to call a lot of the members out in Peterborough and invited a ton of the YSA. Sadly we only had one show up from the area and she was aawesome! She even agreed to come out to YSA activities more! It was a great time bonding with the members and getting to know them so we can be able to help them in their own testimonies and help them to share the gospel. I have loved being able to focus more on the whole work of Salvation. A lot missionaries will get caught up with baptism but I know that that is not exactly our purpose. Our purpose is to help people to progress towards the next saving ordinance so they can continue to live and apply the gospel of Jesus Christ. That gospel being Faith in Christ and His Atonement, repentance, baptism, receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost, and enduring to the end. It has been so much fun working with members whom are trying to grow in their faith and help them to see how the gospel can really apply to them and help them overcome the challenges they face! Oh how grateful I am for the people I have met and how I have seen the Spirit and the gospel help them. Monday and Tuesday we started our week with a great start and had 4 friend present lessons! We got to teach Monica and Mallory! So Monica had been praying about a date and she wanted to tell us her experience. She had wanted to do the 20th of September! We were so happy! One neat miracle was that we had planned on last Thursday to help her work towards September 20. The Spirit is definitely inspired haha. So cool how the Spirit helped all three of us understand when she would be ready by. I am so sad that I will not get to see her and Mallory's baptism but I hope and pray that by some odd chance maybe I will be able to come back for it haha. It is so crazy how you just wanna help these people and how you come to love them. I have never loved anybody as the people that we are working with and have in the YSA ward. Donovon one of our other invs has been doing well. We seem to be finding a lot of people in very similar situations. He was supposed to be baptized but sadly did not make it. So we will continue to work with him but I find it interesting how all of the most solid people we are working with are member referrals! I know that that is the best way to do missionary work! That is how we keep people in the gospel when we help our friends receive it. A lot has happened and even yesterday we had 4 people at church. It has been a wonderful experience. I love you all talk to you later sorry bye! 

Cutest puppy at our invs place!

new tradition! When a missionary passes away we do a death photo. Elder Smith whom I came out with is going home!

Peterborough District

Oshawa YSA at a picnic in Peterborough. Such a sight for sore eyes. I love these people!

Transfer 17 Week 3

Well this week was pretty good. We saw many blessings and miracles. We were soooo busy this week we almost did not have time to weekly plan! We had about 23 lessons along along with 3 missionary meetings all back to back haha. Our preparation day was moved last week due to those funny holidays haha. Oh Canada and those random ones. On our prep day we got our car taken to do oil and emailed at the library and finished off our day with some sports. We do not get to see missionaries as often out here as back in Toronto which is a bit sad but that is okay. I will survive. We ended our preparation day early and went to have dinner with a wonderful family in the ward. I will admit now that we are not in Toronto anymore the houses get a little less expensive and so some of the members live in really beautiful houses.The Maglioli family was really kind and made a delicious super! It was like tacos but in a pan haha. For our message we shared with the family we talked and discussed the merit behind following up and talking about our missionary experiences. It was interesting thought to Elder Mangakahia and I as members get invited so oft to invite their friends to learn yet they usually move onto the next and I know speaking from mine own experience forgetting to follow up to see if the person had any questions or neat experiences with what I invited them to do. I was actually able to message one of my good friends from back home and he had not heard from me in awhile. I had given him a copy of the Book of Mormon and he had actually picked it up and was  reading it awhile ago. So it goes to show you never know what experiences you may be missing out on by not following up.

Well that was last week this is this week! We sadly were not as busy as last week well did not teach as many lessons as we hoped we taught about 20 lessons. Last sunday we had a really sweet experience. We have been being diligently obedient and working with members and doing all parts of the work of salvation. We had a member come up to us and be like Elders I got someone for you to teach just out of no where! Oh the blessings from heaven haha. That evening we also had another lesson with a new convert named Daniel. We quickly mobilized our members and we were able to teach both of those lessons as Mallory the referral girl wanted us to teach her. It was awesome be in two places at once haha. We also went on splits a couple more times and got a lot done this week. We had one of our friends that we found at the beginning of the month actually come to church! I was so happy, his name is Diego! He is from Mexico. He really enjoyed church but sadly will be going to Montreal soon. We also had some great experiences this week. This last week we got to also teach Donovan. He is a great guy from Jamaica. He is one of the friends of Daniel and Sam. It was a huge relief to be able to contact him as we had not seen him for awhile. He is planning and accept a date for the 30th of August. I pray that he will be able to make it. On Saturday night we had a member help us out and brought Diego down to the church and even one of his friends too! So we were able to do a chapel tour and find another new last week! I love how God will always make it possible to achieve the goals we have set. Overall good week :). I love you all! I know that we all face struggles in this life. I know that we may find happiness in being complacent or within worldly things. I know and stand as a witness that the world offers loneliness and only Christ offers peace. I have felt that in my life. I would invite any of you in to look at the blessings that come from following the commandments and than try them out. I promise you that you will find great peace as you seek to keep them. In church we learned about forgiveness and how we need to forgive people and how the Atonement can help us. I know the Atonement can cover anything we face. 

I hope you all have a great week!

All the zone leaders in the CTM!

My companion and I looking fresh!

We can all dance! Pickering district

This is one of our invs Diego and his sister fabiola. With our member friend Andrew.