Letter #99 (June 26th, 2013)

Hey all,

Last week was great! The mission conference was great, even though I was so sick. I was suffering through 2 days feeling like my head would explode. I had a fever and whatnot on Tuesday, and with a throat infection, and swollen lymph glands, and upset stomach and it eased up after a blessing from my wonderful companion so we could travel to Cebu that night, only for it to pick up again that night and to ease off until just last Saturday or so. It was good. But all is good now, and Elder G and I strived with all our might to catch up last week on our lessons and managed to succeed in achieving 24 lessons for last week. We were so proud of ourselves and excited for what more we can accomplish this coming week. We are having great success in Casoy, where we are getting most of our lessons, being able to teach straight for 4 hours to lots of different people. It is a great experience there. You really have to push yourself but at the same time the Spirit is so strong there too.

Yesterday we went on exchanges with the Balamban elders. They are doing well. I was with Elder M in Balamban and Elder T worked with Elder G in Toledo 2. Elder M is a great missionary and we had fun talking about our first area... Loon. We were both trained in Loon, he being my puli in the area, being trained by Elder O.
 
Other than that things are doing well for us. We are pushing ourselves to keep up with the 12 week program and to keep up with the work in our area. This past Sunday we tried out having sacrament in Casoy and the result was amazing. All the strong members from Bagakay came to church in Casoy and we had our investigators from Casoy come to church as well. We had an attendance of 29 and we were able to hold it in a house, rather than outside under a tin roof only. We are still struggling with the priesthood in the area, but the progression is slow and steady... at least its steady, now? We are working with Brother R to encourage him to live the Word of Wisdom... the only real problem he has is with "tuba", the local wine made from the coconut juice, but he seemed to start to understand when we taught him on Sunday that it is just as bad as any other alcoholic drink. His family is doing really well,  trying to start doing family prayer, family scripture study and FHE. It has been great working with these members to see them really start to see how much of a blessing it is to actually "live" the gospel in our lives and reap the blessings of such. They are beginning to see the great plan of salvation in action now and don't want to go back to what was before. I love this gospel!

My personal study is great.... I am in Alma 38 in "overcoming/withstanding temptation" and in Omni in "Faith". I am also studying about the seven angels in Revelations in trying to figure out who they all are... very tricky... but fun and exciting! I am so excited for the day I can start to order books from Deseret books when I get home...

 

So yeah, we got that broadcast thingo this coming Sunday. We are all excited, especially since I just read the broadcast to all the Elders here and most of us are going home in the next two transfers and are all disappointed that we didn't get to do that on our missions... not really actually... cause we served "real" missions... hahaha

 

So about me getting home, people can just visit or we go out to catch up.

So that's it for now... let me know how Reilly's kwan goes... send photos.

miss you

Love you tons

Elder Taylor Addison Cox

 

 

Terri here: Sorry this week looks funny, but I think he "copied and pasted" the same letter to a couple of people, then forgot to unclick after he had pasted!!  :D