Dear Everyone,

What a week!! It’s definitely getting very cold. Not very many things happened this past week but I’ll tell you what happened anyway. So we had some cool divisions where I went back to the city and worked with a cool Elder. Elder Bagley is his name and he is from Arizona. I was once again in the same apartment as my great friend, Elder Latteier. I can never get away from him and neither do I want to. He is a great friend of mine. When I got back with my companion, we just went around visiting people.


Plaza 1810 en Lobos

We are going to fast forward to Sunday. Sunday was horrible. It was one of those Sunday’s where you just want to be in your house snuggled up with some hot chocolate. We woke up to the wind blowing at like 30-40 mph and the temperature at 10 degrees Celsius. It was super cold. We were the only ones at church until 930. The branch president didn’t show up because he is in Paraguay and the counselors showed up late. To make a long story short, we had 10 people at church. And half of them came from the stake. A pretty depressing day.



Banco de la Nacion - sucursal Lobos

And to top it off, we went that same afternoon to go an event that we got a personal invitation. That event would be going to the church of the Jehovah’s Witness. That was something different. My companion and I sat there like fish out of water because we forgot our JW bible and Watchtower. No one told us of the materials we had to bring. And let me tell you, our hymns are much better than their’s... jajaja. So that’s how we spent our Sunday afternoon. It has been pretty hard being here but that is no excuse for us to get down. We just need to keep working hard.


Calle Buenos Aires y Salgado

I think I have already written a lot about trials and so you must all know by now that trials are necessary to grow. Well, there is something I need to learn from being here in Lobos. The people here are much more friendly than the people in the city. Being in the country is great. I wouldn’t mind living in Idaho..


Pintoresca Casona en Lobos

Since there were only 10 of us in the church, each of us had the opportunity to bare our testimonies. It was a special meeting for me because EVERYONE bore their testimony. And almost every single one was about Jesus Christ. How important is Jesus Christ in our lives. He is the center of the plan of Happiness. He is what brings about happiness. I am grateful for Him and all that He has done for me and the people that I am serving right now.

Thanks Abuelita and Grandpa for your emails. Also, thank you Dari for your email. And Thank you also Mom and Dad for your emails. I can’t wait to talk to you all this coming Sunday. I love you all!!

Love,

Elder Pickett

[Allen is still struggling to find a cyber that will allow him to post pictures. The pictures in this letter are from : InfoLobos)

Medidas

This is dad speaking...

I've been asked many times if Allen has gotten taller on his mission. The answer is yes, he has grown about an inch on his mission. He had a physical exam back in February and received a printout of his vitals, he took a picture of the printout. I forgot to post it back then so I will post it now:



Peso = Weight
Altura = Height
IMC = BMI (Body Mass Index)

Happy Easter... yesterday

Dear Everyone,

What a wonderful week we had last week! We had the opportunity to celebrate the victory over death. Since being on the mission I have come to really appreciate our Savior Jesus Christ and all that he has done for us. The one reason why we, missionaries, are serving is to apply the atonement in the lives of other people and help them to come unto Christ. It is a wonderful process to watch. I now have an idea of how our Heavenly Father feels when we change our lives and we repent. He has an immense joy when we turn our hearts to him and we try to better our lives.

Well, it’s been an interesting week this week. We lost three whole days traveling and that’s always hard. We had a scheduled baptism this weekend that fell through. That was hard. We spent all day Saturday setting up the baptismal font and filling it up. The water was cold and we tried to heat up with one of those light bulb looking heaters to put in water. Yeah, that didn’t work. And once the time was getting close to the baptism, we went to house of Ines who was going to get baptized. Well, she wasn’t there and she left her cell phone in the house so we couldn’t get a hold of her. So we left the font and everything for Sunday to see if she was going to show up and get baptized but a member of the church passed by in the morning and she still wasn’t there. So we just decided to take down the font and try another time to baptize her. And taking out the water was kind of funny. We had to suck the water out of a hose. That was quite disgusting. Kind of frustrating but what could we do?!

I also had to give the Easter message in sacrament meeting and I talked about the Atonement. I read the story of the man who went into debt to buy something he really wanted. If you want to read the story, it’s in chapter 12 of the Gospel Principles book. I love that story a lot and this time it hit me a bit harder. I think everything in life becomes more meaningful as you get older. I am just glad that I can see this change in my life. We had a total of 15 people in church yesterday. We are going to try and get it above 20 next week. Little projects at a time. The branch president was out of town this past week so we did pretty well holding our own for a week. But with the branch president next week, we are going to do a lot better.

Well, thanks to all who wrote me last week and this week. Grandpa Packard and Abuelita, thank you so much for your letters. I really appreciate hearing from everyone. I don’t have much time, so write as much as you can before I’m stepping in your front door asking why you didn’t write me. Jaja. I love you all. Until next week…

Love

Elder Pickett