"The Bauang Missionary"

Wow thanks for all those great pics and the great news from all of you! it truly helps my week with all your support. Well this was a good week, for conference i felt like a little kid waiting on christmas to open his presents, haha i loved it! it was absolutly amazing! it's so hard to narrow it down to what my favorite was but i really like the talks from President Uchtdorf those ones hit home for me! What great messages we can learn from the apostles and our beloved prophet, i think me and elder taught so many lessons these last two weeks about follow the prophet we had it down haha. it was great. well this week for us was a pretty good one, i get jokes from other missionaries from around the mission that i am the official "Bauang Missionary"haha so this week again struggles with investigators haha man i love it when people hide from us haha i've just learned to laugh it off. People made up some good excuses not to listen to us this week but all is well, i realized i had been putting a ton of presure on myself for not having too much success with investigators when i was missing all the blessings we were recieving with the less active work, me being here so long has given me the opportunity to see people slowly, 8 months slowly changes their life, become closer to our Heavenly Father, one thing from conference this week that stuck out to me is how much they talked about being a disciple of Christ and how to become converted, well it's a life long process and these people are making the changes they need! wow i was struck back this week about all the great things that have happened over the last 8 months, truly blessings from the lord that i'm so grateful for! one scary but turned out ok story was this less active we have the Ladaga family have not been progressing for the past 8 months and i was getting tired of teaching them, we almost dropped them but we felt we shouldn't, well it's probably a good thing we didn't cause these week we went over there on tuesday and she opened up to us after the lesson and told us she almost committed suicide cause she can't take all the problems they have, i was shocked i couldn't believe it! luckly her husband got home just in time to stop her, she thanked us for the lessons and this family has been slowly coming back to church and reading the scriptures, this is a family of 7 that lives in a house smaller than my bedroom at home and barely has enough money to but a small amount of rice for their kids. well we told them if they are faithful in following the commandments they would be blessed, I testify God loves us and we are blessed through obedience, her kid won two huge bags of rice in a raffle at school!!! it was a miracle. they reconginzed the blessing and that helped sister out a lot, they still have a long way to go but are making the steps! This work we are doing is amazing and how grateful i am to be a part of it! i would encourage everybody to follow the prophets council and GO! it will be the best thing they ever do! well family you keep "staying Golden" know that i love you and am so proud to have a family as wonderful as you thank you! Mahal kita Elder Machen