Birthday was just a normal day.

My week went very well this week.

We have been spending a lot of time teaching two great families. One of them, the father was baptized about 35 years ago and his children are not baptized, so we have been going to their house and teaching them. Tony is 13 years old and his little sister, Milka, is 8 years old they are really great and they love the lessons and going to church. They are both preparing for a baptism this saturday. So that should keep us busy. We have also been talking to a kid of 15 years, Bryan, and his family when they are there and he as well loves listening to us and is excited for a baptism. he has problems with attending church and we have not quite figured out why. this week when we passed by his house at 12 he was very excited for church, but when we went by to pick him up at 2:45 he was not there. So we are planing on passing by his house tonight to find out what happens and see if he really does have desires to be baptized. but we have been teaching them and helping them progress, but more than that we are having difficulties finding other people, but i feel that this next week should be better. It is always fun teaching these families. Tony and Milka are always very excited and teaching them is also helping the father come back to church because he has had a lot of trials in his life. And Bryan is pretty cool as well, he is always waiting we we come by in the week and he has desires to keep learning. I hope he will start coming to church, i would love to see him be baptized.

But this week in my studies i have almost finished the book of Mosiah. and there was a scripture that i loved a lot in Mosiah 27:35 and 28:3 the first is talking about alma and the sons of mosiah that after they had seen the angel and repented they showed the lord how much they had repented and went around doing the best they could to repare the damages they did to the church. the second talks about the sons of mosiah and the desires they had to help there bretheren, the lamanites, know the gospel as well and just the thought of a soul not being saved made them sad. These five people had a testimony so strong that they were willing to do whatever it took to edify the church of god and i would love to be there with them and i am doing the best i can to strengthen the testimony of the church as well as i hope those of you reading are. This is the true church and we all need to do our part for the church becuase we are a part of the church.

Yo espero Que todos van a disfrutar esta semana

i got to go love you chao beso y abrazo (bye, kiss and hug)

Elder McCammon

PS no birthday package yet, but birthday was a normal day here nothing too extravagant.  ( I feel sad no one made him a cake! Even worse that I got my package off late...I need to get moving on his Christmas package!!!)

Happy Halloween!! And Happy Birthday Jesse!!!

Jesse will turn 20 this Sunday...its so hard to believe he's that old.  I also have to say I am not so good with the missionary packages...so all you mothers out there who do them and they are on time...basically you make the rest of us look bad!!!  I didn't get Jesse's birthday package sent until last Tuesday it needs at least 3 weeks...it will be late...Story of my life!!!  I should get his Christmas package sent this week!!!  I haven't even thought about Christmas!!! OH BOY!!!

Here's his letter for this week!


First I will say that I hate Halloween here it is crap. The actual day of Halloween nobody does anything, but on Sunday everybody goes to visit the graves of their family members, which means that we did not end up having very many people in the church this week because everybody left. We have been finding new people this week though which was really nice and finally we have somebody who I am almost 100 percent sure will be baptized. His father is a member of the church for a long time but he has not been around for a while and now he is back he would like both of his children to be baptized, one age 8 and the other 13. So I am pretty sure they will get baptized. but this week has been pretty well my companion and I have been getting a long a little bit better especially because we are starting to find more people so that is good. but this week was an ordinary week.

In my studies I have been reading in Mosiah about Abinadi and him talking to King Noah and his priests. I love that we can see that the spirit touches the hearts of everyone, but sometimes we give in to the world and peer pressure and do not listen to the spirit. After Abinadi was talking to King Noah it talks about Noah having fear of the truthfulness of his words and he does not end up listening because his priests are telling him not to listen to Abinadi. We all need to do better at listening to the spirit, because he can help us in the times that we need it the most.

I have to go love you lots mom

love your boy Jess

He didn't send any explanations for these pictures???
[Diego is leaving for his mission and got everyone ward mission shirts]

Goal setting...no pictures :(

This week has been an okay week, all of the progress that we have worked at this week has not been that good. The people that we have been teaching did not end up going to church, we did have some people that ended up going and we will start up work with them, but i am hoping that we can find someone who will actually progress. I am just hoping we will find them soon. The work is pretty irritating when you think that you have found someone who will progress, but they do not show up on Sunday. I have found that as Ecuador that is one of the biggest problems, that people have a hard time committing to going to church, so i hope that we can start finding people that have Sundays free. More than that, there has not been that much to the people that we are teaching, and they are ever changing and we are hoping that we will be able to find people who will actually progress ya mismo.

But in my studies this week I have been working a lot more on studying how to set goals. Through goals is how we have success. if we set our goals so high they are unrealistic, we will never be focusing on them and never make it, but if we set our goals too low they serve no purpose because we will hit them every time. we need to set goals that are challenging, Where we have to be diligent and work hard in order to reach them. but that was my week. i hope that everyone else had a great week and will enjoy the next even more.

Cuídese 

Elder McCammon

We've been talking about fasting in our family scripture study and we asked Jesse if there was anyone that he's like us to fast for, I can tell from his letters lately that his frustration level is pretty high, his reply...I would like you to fast for all of Ecuador. Especially Machala in the ward Boyaca, but more specifically for the elders not the sisters. :)  (I think it must be pretty competitive between them!) but I am good of health, I love you whole bunches mom but I have to go, thank you so much for your help and have a great week. love your son.

Faith, don't overthink, trust The Lord

This week was not the best in teaching and finding a whole lot of people, but this week i did have two really cool experiances. on friday we were talking with a member of the church and we were talking about a friend that they had that had listened to the missionaries before but here parents were not too accepting, but me and my companion were saying that it would not hurt to try again and after about five minutes of talking to them, they started giving us the information of their friend and right as we started writing it down the friend came to the house and we were able to talk to her in person and she was really excited to talk to the missionaries again. Then kind of the same thing happened on sunday. we were passing by the house of a less active member to remind them of church and one of his neighbors passed by the house and said that she loved the church and she wanted to come today, but we needed to get permission from her mother and the less active member needed to attend. who would have guessed that the permission was easier to get the the less active member to go to church. he said he would but as we were coming around to pick them up he had left to go play soccer. i was mad. the good news is we had four people at the church today, none of which were people week had invited it was a family that a member brought to chuch and we were lucky enough to talk to them before the sisters. so this week was not bad, but i am hoping this next week will be better.

This week i was studying more about the faith. and the popular scripture that i have come to like more and more is that the faith is not a perfect knowledge in alma 32:21. there are many people who want more time to think things through to asure themselves in decisions and in the process of doingso overthink a little bit. there are times in life when we need to just run with our faith and the lord will help us with the rest, but we have to trust in him that he will help us make  the right choice.

I hope everybody enjoys the week coming.

Elder McCammon

No pictures this week :(

A New Companion

This week was a week that was full of fun. On Tuesday i got to go to Guayaquil to change my companion, that was a fun bus ride there and back. This week was a lot of work to try and rebuild a program, because the people that we have been finding have not been progressing so we have started trying to find a lot more people and we found a lot of great people this week that showed a lot of promise for future progressing investigators, but all of the work went away when none of them ended up coming to church. it is always sad to see a whole good week go to waste with just one Sunday of not coming to church. i guess we just need to go out and work harder the next week. it is also sad to see when the same thing happens to a lot of the other sectors in you zone, but i guess as missionary's there are ups and downs. witness does not come until after a trial of our faith so we will see how far our faith with works takes us this week. wish us luck. (I told him to not get down because of not baptizing...look at how much teaching and contacting and touching lives you do and feel the success in that! He said: Success in the minds of leaders comes in baptisms when your mission is in the top 5 baptizing missions in the world. The name of my new comp is Elder Cabrera we are working hard so I am hoping we can have a lot more success he is from Peru. We are working on our relationship and I believe it will come quickly.   He is our district leader and I am his junior companion to help him be a district leader because he has been struggling with it, it is a change. (We are studying fasting this week as a family so we asked for an experience from him) As for a fasting experience. The biggest result from fasting is the help of feeling the spirit more when testifying. I have fasted for things that did not happen right away, but when fasting you do end up feeling a lot closer to the spirit and it makes it so if you do not have the best day you can still leave with the excitement of the next.

Love you all

Elder McCammon

Jesse, the ward mission leader and Elder Quintero

That's a lot of Banana Stickers!!!

So i am going to start off the week with the bad news and work to the good. The baptism that we had planned for this week did not end up happening. Miguel Angel likes the church, but his wife is not as open to listening and he does not want to end up having a bad relationship with her, so he wants to take a little bit more time so he can talk it over with her and to be sure this is the decision that he wants. The good part is he will keep attending church and follow through with the things that he is supposed to do, he just wants a little bit more time to think and talk it through. We also have been finding more people this week. We ended

up having 3 people in the church on Sunday, so it was not that bad. one of them is preparing for a baptism on the 19th of October, his wife also came to church with him so we will have to find if she comes to accept the same baptismal date that he has. I was also pretty happy this week to find that i got to watch the priesthood session of General Conference. that was pretty nice. I do not remember who gave the talk, it was the first counselor in the presiding bishopric. he was talking about how when we see someone in church that we do not know, get to know them. It does not matter if they are less-active, a new convert, or someone who has recently changed wards, we in the church are one big family, make sure people get that same feeling when entering the church. you will end up making new friends in the church and give people more of a reason to preservere in the church. That is my week I hope others had weeks equally as good or better.

Elder McCammon

Definitely a lot of Banana Stickers!!!

 Jesse's Apartment

 Must be laundry day

 The pink room is Jesse's (I can tell by the suitcase under the bed!)

 Other bedroom

View from their house.

Banana Stickers and an upcoming Baptism

This week sadly we did not have too many people in church, we just had Miguel Angel Gomez, but the good thing is that he is also preparing for a baptism and confirmation for the fourth of October. So we should have a baptism this weekend. we have been working really hard this past week but it is always hard to find people who are willing to progress. I guess that is why President Torres has been focusing on getting referrals from as many houses as possible. Now that we have references we just need to make sure we get times scheduled to contact them with the member who gave us the reference. But we need to start finding a lot of new people so we can keep the baptisms coming. That is probably the biggest problem that we are having finding a large enough quantity of people that we can make sure we have at least some who are going to progress. But other than that this has been a good week, my stomach sickness is gone, my collection of banana stickers is growing, and we will be having a baptism. So that is always something good. (I am going to have to ask why he collects banana stickers!)

What I loved this week in my studies is en my readings of the book of Enos. He talks a lot about faith. When he is in the process of repenting the Lord tells him it was possible because of the amount of faith that he had. Later he is praying to the Lord and the Lord says he will give him his desires for his people because of his faith. At the end of the chapter, as he knows he is about to die, he says he is happy because he knows he will be able to live with the Lord and the Lord has a place ready for him. So I exhort everyone to work on their faith, because we can all work on having more faith, me too, but I want that we can all have enough faith that by the end of our lives that faith can be a knowledge. Good luck to everyone and I hope that you all have a great week.

Elder McCammon

My comp sleeping in a hammock

 My mickey mouse pancake