May 18, 2015 Missionary Training Experience (MTE)

Hey family how are you doing??

We had a good week this week. Not a whole lot of super crazy stuff happened, but it was still a good week! 

The weather was super Washingtony this last week. There was a bunch of rainy and cloudy days and it even got pretty cold a few times! It was not typical San Diego weather. 

We had MTE's (Missionary Training Experience) on Thursday which is where the Chula Vista English and Spanish Zones and the Sweetwater English and Spanish Zones all met here in our stake center and received some training from President and his assistants. We focused a lot on planning, and how to improve our goal setting and plans for investigators, and how our plans really need to tie into our purpose or in other words how all of our plans should be focused on helping our investigators build their faith in Christ so that they can draw closer to him through baptism. We also talked a lot about teaching short and simple lessons and how they don't really grow their faith while we are there-it's more when they learn and study and feel the Holy Ghost when we aren't there. It was a great meeting. We learned a lot that we are going to put into practice. 

That afternoon and evening we had exchanges. They plan out exchanges and you can end up with anyone from the 4 zones. I went down to San Ysidro, right on the Mexican boarder, in the Chula Vista zone. It was super fun, I was with Elder Shupe for the day. We had served together in the Imperial Valley zone so it was fun working together for the day.  MTE's was great. Nothing to crazy happened on the exchange but it was good to be back in the Chula Area. We were right by the border with Tijuana, we could see Mexico like the whole time! It was pretty sweet. Taught a couple cool people and I even got to help teach an English class. It was pretty fun!  

Friday we got together again and got a little more training. Really focusing on how we can find people who are ready to come unto Christ. We talked about how the Lord is doing the preparing. Our job isn't to prepare the hearts of the people but rather to find those who are already prepared. So we talked about how we need to talk to everyone and also work hard to use the members. Missionary can't progress without the help of you who aren't full time missionaries! So don't be afraid to invite people to do little things!

Those are the main highlights of the week! We have some sweet investigators but there just isn't a whole lot to talk about with them. They are doing good. Not a whole lot has changed in the last week, but slowly I think we are getting more solid people to teach. Yesterday was kind of disappointing, we were supposed to have a bunch of people at church but only one showed up...but It is what it is! We just keep doing our best to find, teach and baptize. Really focusing on finding prepared families.  

Elder Gonzalez and I are doing great. Transfers are next week so we will see if either of us are leaving. We hope not! 

We are going to Sunset Cliffs today which is cool. It's one of the spots that all the missionaries go at least once on their mission. Should be pretty sweet! I'll have some pictures for ya next Tuesday! 

Love you! 

Elder Hansen 

May 12, 2015 Mother's Day Skype

Hey family what's up!? It was great to talk to you on Sunday! You all looked and sounded fantastic!!

This past week has been pretty sick! Juan our investigator has a date for June 6th and is pretty stoked! He came to a baptismal service last Saturday and loved it! He loves the feeling he gets when he's in the church and loves how nice and friendly the members are! He's been receiving a lot of strength to overcome his struggles as he studies and prays and is going strong! 

We were able to contact our investigator Sam yesterday for the first time in a while. Turns out she wasn't avoiding us she's just been super busy with school and her phone got disconnected. Just finding her home during all of the school craziness was a miracle of it's self! We were able to set an appointment so we will see how that goes. I'm sure she still wants to get baptized so that's great! 

This week we have MTE's. (missionary training experience) so we will receive some instruction from president and the APs and then we will do exchanges that night. What's awesome is Sweetwater Spanish, Sweetwater English. Chula Vista English and Chula Vista Spanish all meet and do it combined together so we will see each other and then I could get to do an exchange anywhere between the zones! I'm super excited to see where we go and all the great instruction we will receive. 

Next Tuesday we have the meeting with Elder Don R. Clarke of the seventy and President Lee L. Donnaldson of the missionary department. President Donnaldson was the mission president here a while ago so he has a lot of San Diego pride. He came a few weeks ago for the Leadership Council. Which has given us so much good stuff to work with, and we are already seeing more results from the things that we learned from them! So we are stoked to get the ipads and more instruction next week!   

Because of the meeting Tuesday, Monday will be P Day next week.  

Love you! Thank you for all of your love and support!

Elder Hansen

The picture is of our district doing service a couple weeks ago.