Pls don't send me any spoilers of conference

Malo yall! How is everybody? I hope you are all doing good. This week was a good week. We had some cool things happen and got to have some fun. 


Sadly, we were not able to watch conference. Nobody gets to watch it here on time unless they want to stay up and watch it at 3 AM. So, I was a little bummed when I knew it was going on and I couldn't watch it. So, please don't tell me any spoilers or anything. I still have to wait 2 weeks to watch it so just hold on for 2 more weeks. Anyways, I hope it was wonderful and super spiritual.

Alrighty, a little about the work right now. We are teaching a couple of people. We are still working with Gila through some things to get him baptized on the 15th. We made an action plan with him by giving him tons of gum so that he can chew on that instead of vaping whenever he gets the temptation. So, we are hoping that will help. Also, we are trying to get another one of our friends baptized. His name is Jhon, he is from Colombia. Him and his family don't speak much English. He's actually pretty good considering he has only been studying English for 5 months. So our lessons are a good mix of high school spanglish and Google translate, but he really wants to be baptized and we are going to put him on date this week! So that's hype. The work is going good out here tho. I'm loving it and I don't want to leave Levin.

On Tuesday, we had the opportunity to travel up to Whanganui for a baptismal interview. It was interesting but it was fun to go to Whanganui. It's a bit of a drive but it was good fun. Elder Ta'ala's great grandparents live in Whanganui, so we were able to surprise visit them while we were up there. It was really cool, the great grandfather was this 98 year old Samoan guy. He slept the whole time while we were there but it was super cool to see how happy they were to see him. The mission world here in New Zealand is so small. Seems like all the missionaries here have some kind of family connections.

It was a great week though. Time for the spiritual thought: At zone conference we were able to hear some powerful messages. One of the messages that I really loved was given by an RM. He talked about how we should love ourselves. I really loved that. I believe that we often get too caught up in our mistakes, faults, insecurities, etc. We are all hard on ourselves at times. The Lord does not need us to be perfect today. Obviously he wants us to be better, but that doesn't mean we have have be perfect today. We will make mistakes every day, but we need to remember that we are also God's children. God would want you to love yourself and not hate yourself for your problems. So, try to be easier on yourself. God does not expect us to be able to lift the world tomorrow, maybe some day, but not tomorrow. Improvement comes through patience, persistence, and most importantly loving ourselves!

Alright, I love you all and hope you have a good week. Stay safe

Ofa atu Elder Larson
        
                                                                            pic at a kids baptism last week

one of our youth members Reign, funniest kid I've ever met

found out we have a feijoa fruit tree in our backyard

a cool pink house

river up in Whanganui

some granny


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