Date: May 5,2014
Subject:  Talk to you soon!

To answer your questions. We have zone conference once every 2 months. We should have one coming up again pretty soon... or maybe interviews, I'm not really sure because they haven't given us the May calendar yet. Yes I still study Spanish every day. Actually I do all my studies in Spanish so I basically have 3 hours of Spanish study each day. I will call on Sunday at about 10 or 11. It'll be a call via FaceTime from an iPad... I've been gone too long though and don't really know how that'll work out. We'll see. Just make sure you're at McDonald's or somewhere with WiFi or else you won't get to see me ;) Yeah I've still got about 3 weeks of Lialda left. No worries.

 

Oh. So transfers was this week. I lost Elder Javeloza but I got Elder Parry, who is learning Spanish, so I am pretty excited. Elder Parry is from... Can you guess? Provo, UT and his house is right across the street from BYU campus. Pretty cool kid. We are getting along well and working hard so it's pretty good. I think this will be a pretty fantastic transfer. The bummer part is that Elder Manusauloa finished his mission and went home. It's great but it's a bummer because he was one of my favorite missionaries out here :/

 

We went to the Samoan Community Mother's Day Celebration on Saturday (lots of the members of Samoan Community are members, active and less-active). Well we get there and we go around saying Hi to everyone and then they tell us that we gotta eat. So we go to the food table and they have a big old pig on the table and the servers just keep trowing tons of meat on our plate. I think I have dinner for about 3 nights left over. Anyways, we go and sit down by the Tauiliili's to eat and after a little bit Puka gives his plate to his wife and says "Man you gotta get one of these (motioning to his wife). Just eat 'till you're full and pass it off". The look on Sister Tauiliili's face was absolutely priceless. On a side note, mom said that we must spend lots of time with the Tauiliili's. We usually see them about once a week because we are trying to help them prepare to be sealed in the Temple.

 

Quick thought I got during studies. I was studying how to develop and receive a Testimony and I came across Ether 12:6. The part that I loved from it is "dispute not because ye see not, for ye receive no witness until after the trial of your faith". The thing that stuck out to me is that we will never gain a testimony until after our faith has been tried, until someone has challenged that which we believe and tried their hardest to crush it. It was pretty cool to me because there are so many times when we come across people that are totally against our religion and just tell us that everything is a lie and stuff like that. It's amazing though because every time I start walking away from people like that, I feel so much stronger in my testimony after I have defended my faith. So I guess the thing to remember is not to complain about trials that we may have, but instead to welcome them and face them with faith so that we can come out of them stronger than we were before.

 

That's about it for the week. Everything here is going great and I'm looking forward to another great week. Hope everything is going well for everyone at home. Love You All!

    Love

       -Elder Nyholm