Ah my family!! :)

What a relief to be able to sit back and hear from you all, thank you so very much for all that you share and for the spirit that you bring into my life. I have been thinking a lot this week about families and thought a lot about what Elder Packer said, "The ultimate end to the Gospel of Jesus Christ is to see a family happily united and sealed in the everlasting covenant." When I think of this I am grateful for the many memories that I have of home! :) I hope that I never loose sight of what the Gospel has done for me. This week has been fantastic, we´ve had several days of being with church authorities and that comes with a lot of new things to learn and a great new spirit to help us reach our potential. We were able to meet with Elder De Giovanni, Elder Ceballos, and a couple other area 70. It has been a fantastic week!! I am realizing again how much I love being a missionary and how much I don´t want to stop this work. It has been such a rewarding experience for me and to help me understand what is it that I need to work for in my life in order to be happy! I had a great experience today reading back through my journal. Hermana De Giovanni in our meeting that we had on Thursday shared with us the many times that we are going to down or discouraged or when we just need a spiritual boost, that we should always "return to our tree of life!" In 1 Nefi 8 Lehi describes how precious and how unexplainably delicious the fruit that he partook of was and how it literally was able to fill him with joy. Así es when we have the Church in our lives we can literally think back to experiences where we have felt like Lehi and "return" to that happiness that we desire. Last Sunday I wrote in my journal that I just felt in a rut.. not really knowing what Heavenly Father had next for me. As I continued to read the following days i noticed that each day the Lord had done something to help me find my way back to His love! In the end I was able to learn a great great lesson, that was needed, to seek His will over mine! When we live a Christ-Centered life, we seek to know what He knows, love as He loves, and we will find that more and more we will be following in His footsteps.

20 Wherefore, ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all men. Wherefore, if ye shall press forward, feasting upon the word of Christ, and endure to the end, behold, thus saith the Father: Ye shall have eternal life.

I am beyond grateful for all that we are given from our loving Savior! Although it doesn´t seem anything like Christmas, I trust the calendar. It will be a great gift that we can give to Him this year to comprehend in each of our lives how we can seek His will and then in love follow the way that He marks.

Right now Elder Villalba and I are being greatly blessed to be able to find new investigators in Villa Elvira!! Surely (leave out the slowly) we are finding new people who we are praying hard will continue to progress. Oh we had a super great lesson with Javier this week! We went with an Hermano in our ward and were able to help Javier understand the importance of reading, praying, and attending church. Javier has been through some pretty rough situations lately and to help him focus on 3 things that would help him to get closer to God in his life I believe really helped him! It was great too being with Elder Villalba, I am very grateful for the example that he sets for me, with an inspired question we were able to not just teach "lesson" but we were really able to teach Javier so that those things would be meaningful to him! Unfortunately all our investigators bailed on us Domingo in the morning so we felt a little bit alone in the reunion.

Super sorry but we´re late on time today and it´s time to get to the work! I love you all and thanks for the updates that I get! :)

Have a great week and we´ll talk with ya soon!

Elder Jolley