hey all you guys on the other side of the planet!! i only have a little bit to write this week (again..ugh) so ill give you guys a little update on what i have been doing this whole week! so this last sunday was the dedication of the conception temple! no, i didnt get to fly all the way down to the south of chile and watch the dedication, but we had the blessing to watch the temple dedication in a broadcast in our stake center! they were pretty hard core about it. we had to get recommendation from our bishops to even get into the sessions, and we had to get white handkerchiefs, the whole shpeel. (by the way, trying to find 130 handkerchiefs for your mission in santiago is probably one o the hardest things in the world next to like splitting an atom). we showed up to the session and we were able to listen to the prophet speak to us about the importance of temples and why we need more in chile! at one point, the temple sector that chile was apart of was the Arizona temple....PEOPLE LITERALLY FLEW FROM CHILE TO ARIZONA TO GET SEALED IN THE TEMPLE. now, we have two in chile!! what a blessing! after the dedication, we sang "we thank thee o god for a prophet" and i started crying in the middle of the hymn because the spirit was so strong! just the thought that chile now has a little bit more of a chance to make covenants with God made me feel so happy. last night while we were finishing up some work, there was a huge power outage in san bernardo. our electricity was off for like 4 hours straight and it was the worst thing in the whole world. office elders without internet is like fish without water....#dead. we stayed in the office because our front gates are powered by electricity, and literally anyone can open them. we didnt want anybody getting in and robbing us again. it was a pretty boring period of time, but we got home and slept for a while, so that was good. also one cool random thing. we were going to the temple in santiago because we had a small problem with the cell service that we use for the mission. we were walking from the car to the temple, and this old guy literally COLLAPSES. like straight eats it on the side of the road. my mind went completely to...."brain hemorrhage, heart attack, diabetes, low blood sugar, osteoporosis, maybe its a ruptured patella, or maybe it he literally had a stroke and i need to asses the situation like" and then we went up to him and turns out he was doing an endowment session without his oxygen tank and he got light headed. he also hadnt eaten that day, so he was just super dizzy and stuff. i was kind of sad that i didnt get to do CPR on him or inject him with epi, but none of the less i was happy that this guy was ok, and I could at least pretend like i knew what i was doing. thats it for this week! i love all of you so much! ekw us with a candle and a spoon during a power outage this fried fish looks like the country im serving in and i thought it was cool i made a friend while i was working! he then walked on to my cactus and got impaled (i dont want to put pics animal carnage on my blog because my blog is G rated dang it)
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hey all you loons on the other side of the hemisphere!! this week was SO MUCH BETTER. less stress, with some new policies that the president is giving us! so we were in a meeting with the president and hermana gwilliam this past thursday. we were talking about how sometimes the office life is kind of stressful and we kind of just want to find a way to relieve a little bit of the stress while we work. he said that the only way to relieve stress is to teach and serve other people. so he is making a new policy for the office elders to leave and teach and visit members starting at 6PM!! its honestly going to help us so much because then we dont have to be staying up until like the wee hours of the morning finishing up all the stuff we got to do, and then we can have a little bit more work and find people to baptize while we work with the missionaries. a miracle happened though while we were out teaching though! so we are basically going into a whitewash primarily because the hermanas dont want to give us any references, (stingy?) nor investigators to work with, so we have been starting visiting the members. we went to a members house who just got married to a recent convert. we were talking it up with her, and we told her that our purpose as missionaries is to strengthen the family and help them progress together. she looked at us with sad eyes and said that she has been recently having marriage problems and that she wants to have us come by on a weekly basis to help her and her husband out with the more spiritual side of things so that they can become closer and in christ!! we are literally so excited to be able to help her our, and to help the ward out a little more as we gain there trust! while we were doing the visits with members, they invited us to go to the temple with them to help them do baptisms. we asked pres if we could go, he said yes. we were promptly told that it started at 6 in the morning. with a 20 minute drive from our house to the temple, we got up at FLIPPING 4:30 IN THE MORNING TO GO TO THE TEMPLE. needless to say, i was falling asleep at the wheel (only for a second, dont worry mom). the baptisms were awesome, but silvaggio and i literally showed up back to the office DEAD. we took naps for a sec to try and recuperate from the damage that we did, but oh man never again am i going to the temple at 6 IN THE MORNING. other cool things that we did this week was go to centro in santiago and we explored to try and find a bike shop. we kind of got lost, but it was so cool to get lost in a city and rome around and see all the cool little hole in the wall hipster shops and to see all the different people that walk through the city. we didnt end up finding the bike shop, but it was cool to wander for a a little while and forget about stress for a second! we also had to go to a dealership to get the car examined, and apparently none of the office elders have done that inspection for like 2 years, so there were A LOT of things wrong with the car that should have been fixed forever ago. #tendermercy #wedidntloseouraxelwhileweweredriving #blezzup here are some pics of us climbing cerro chena at 7 in the morning! love you guys!! ekw pics from our pday hike. everyone in this pic has less than 8 months left on their mission
after mission transfers day last week, we were literally THRASHED. it pushed us back kind of a lot here in the office. i didnt get to do much studying, nor time to just chill out. it was a week of "hey i forgot this at change meeting, can you bring this clear across the mission for me?" or "oh crap i got lost in centro when i was grabbing the visa where the heck do i go??". you can say that i kind of got some gray hairs coming in for me while in this change. there were some cool things that i did find out this week, as well as some spiritual experiences! whilst studying for the two seconds that i had one day, i was in doctrine and covenants. i normally listen to the spanish version and take some notes while im on my computer. i was walking through section 18, and i stumbled across a verse that really struck me. ...if he shall be diligent in keeping my commandments he shall be blessed unto eternal life... this is verse 8, and i completely love it! the whole idea of having to be blessed in order to live in eternal life that god gives us is astounding. if you think about it, you have to be sanctified in some way in order to be in the presence of god, and the only power that is known to man to cleanse our sins in that high of a degree is through Jesus Christ. This verse is saying that if you (in this particular sense, Oliver Cowdry is being spoken to, but applies to all of us) are diligent in keeping the commandments and obeying the demands of repentance, you will be blessed to the degree of perfection that will enable you to have this eternal life that is frequently spoken of in the scriptures, as well as desired for after this life in the life to come. i thought that was amazing! literally, the only way that we are going to be able to be cleansed is through our lord, Jesus Christ! AHHHH, YES, I KNOW THIS CHURCH IS TRUE! another cool thing that happened this week was Jeremy and Stephany were able to be baptized this week! i had the opportunity to baptize them and it was so cool! they were all dressed in white, we opened the font door to the baptismal font, and steam came out of it! but....then i got in and it was about as cold as the arctic tundra. oh my heck!!! jeremy went in first and he almost couldnt get in all the way. Jeremy: "c´mon we just got to do this thing fast i am going to lose my legs" me: "jeremy this is a spiritual experience we gotta do it a little slow." Jeremy: "um i want my legs so lets get this done fast please and thank" stephany did the same thing when she got in. she literally screeched from how cold it was. "ELDER WATTLES I DESPISE YOU AND THIS WATER AND THE HYPOTHERMIA I AM ABOUT TO GET" it was so dang funny jajajaja. sorry for the small email this week...i am going to get some cool pics this week so that you guys can see what i do and so i can give some inspiration to those who need a little! love you guys to the moon and back! ekw we dem bois new specs and trousers jeremy and stephany newest plant child
hey you guys! i only have a little second to write, but oh my goodness this week was PSYCHO. let me explain
im just going to say that this conference was probably one of my favorite general conferences ive ever had. i felt the sprit so much during these talks! i wrote down like 7 questions and they were all answered in the first session. the talks were that good. im thankful to have apostles and a prophet to look out for us while we are walking through the world! so there were changes this week. we were getting all prepped for the new houses we were going to open up, we were organizing routes so that we could drop people off and all that stuff. i went with elder payne to the airport to drop off the dead elders, everything was super chill. we were waiting at the airport for president and we got a call from him. he was asking if we were still in the airport. we replied with a very unsure yes, and he released the biggest sigh of relief. apparently, the mexico mtc changed the flight TO THE DAY BEFORE they were supposed to be there. we sprinted so hard in the airport to try and find these guys, and a couple from the east mission was watching over them in the airport just hanging out. we finally found them and we fed them some food at the airport, and took them home. until change meeting! we snagged the other guys from the mtc in chile, and they came to the change meeting. there was such a huge energy in the room, everybody was screaming and clapping and shouting when they got their new comp. the new kids were SHOOK out of their minds. after that we were running around like chickens with their heads cut off. it was kind of a nonstop day for like 9 hours in the car and getting people places. we were literally DYING by the end of the day. we crashed so hard when we got home, we were so tired. it was a good days work though. some other things that happened: !)my comp was trying to be funny and run in front of the van while it was moving and i accidentally ran over his foot (he is fine) 2) i was driving on a main road and this guy came out of nowhere and hit our van, rolled off the side, and then kept running away from a guy that was trying to kill him with a wooden rod 3) stephanie and jeremy are going to get baptized this sunday!! and i get to baptize them!! its going to be so cool! 4)RIGBY GOT PUT AS AP AND I COULD NOT BE A MORE PROUD COMPY gotta scram though kids. see you on the flip side! ekw hey all you cool cats on the other side of the planet! this week here in the office was BUSY as heck. we are getting ready for changes that are coming up here soon, so we basically have been running around like chickens with our heads cut off. but here is an inside scoop as to what we did this week. 1) so here in the office we move people in and out of houses. what normally happens is the missionaries that leave the mission leave A WHOLE bunch of stuff (clothes/shoes/stuff they bought in the ferria) so president was like,"ugh ok. you guys need to find a place to get rid of the clothes you have gathered up from the houses that you have moved." so we burned the clothes in church parking lot now i know it sounds a little weird, but the fire was really controlled and we had a fire extinguisher close by, dont freak out. my comp hasnt ever gone camping in his life, nor understood the laws of pressure, so as we were unloading the bag of stuff, we threw in an aerosol can into the fire. as the majority of you can predict, it definitely blew up. the only thing is, is that none of the shrapnel hit us. we ended up walking away ok, but all the ward members from the ward activity that was happening thought it was a gunshot and freaked out HAHA. 2)we had zone conference this past week! the only thing that is kind of a bummer is that i deal with all the sound equipment and doing all the computer stuff during the conference (power points/videos/etc.) so i couldn't really participate THAT much. it was stressful to heck trying to set up for it because i had never done it before, but it ended up being all ok in the end! i made a super hipster power point for hermana gwilliam and the mission seemed to dig it. 3) we went to go and meet the new elders in the chile mtc! it was super cool! this new batch of elders seem sick as frick! we drove to the ccm to get their pics taken and to snag their passports and set up the time for when they are going to get picked up. 4) we went to the temple for pday today and it was so cool!! the only annoying this is is that there wasnt enough space in the session that we reserved, so we ended up going to the sealing sessions and helped out with some of the names that they had. it was seriously so cool!! being there and being par of the sealings really made me feel the importance and the power that the temple gives us. there was one couple that was doing the majority of the sealings, and i could just feel the happiness in that room!! i seriously cannot wait until i can get sealed to the woman that i love and have a family with her for time and eternity! this church is the only church that does that!! i have to scram though...wish me luck. this week is changes and i have to drive to the airport and pick up the new peeps in chilean traffic #idratherswallowaweedwhacker ekw me getting attacked by toxic fumes this about sums up what the office is so it looks like the trash on the bottom right corner is burning, but i can assure you that promptly after this pic we used the fire extinguisher to put it out the train we take to get to the temple me and the main bae mate <3333 me and silvaggio
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Elder Karson Wattles
Chile Santiago South Mission apartado postal No. 544 San Bernardo, Chile Archives
May 2019
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