Friday, February 1, 2013

December 10, 2012

Family,

Hello and than you for your emails it was really good to hear from all of you.  I am so thankful for all of you and glad that Michael´s little crash didn´t end up being too bad.  Sounds like everything with the family is going well and that makes me happy.  Well to start off this email you should all know that Elder Hawks now has a drivers license and can legally drive the streets of Panama.  Wish me luck the people here drive like absolute psychos haha.  The Christmas Spirit is starting to come out a little bit but it´s just not the same without the snow, lights, hot chocolate and all the other little traditions that we have.  It´s fun though because we have a special opportunity to focus on the birth of our Savior and in doing so it should help us to get into more doors.  

This week was long and a lot of work haha.  I spent a lot of it waiting inside of external affairs trying to have papers notarized, authenticated and all that jazz.  The reason I was having to do all that waiting was to get my license but President Ward told us that was our first priority task for the week because Elder Wade is going to be leaving and neither of the assistants have theirs.  Finally after Thursday, Friday and this morning waiting in lines and doing all this Ah-Kiong (the new assistant) and I have our licenses!

Ah moving forward to my actual missionary life.  This week was tough because we ended up having long days in the office and playing catch up at night with the things we normally do in the afternoon so we couldn´t get out to our area a whole lot.  It´s amazing to see how blessed we are though when we do get out because people are willing to let us in and sit down.  Saturday was Mother´s day so instead of contacting in our normal way we went to see all of our investigators and congratulate them while setting up return appointments for this week.  Tonight we actually have two appointments.  One with a man we contacted who´s named Pedro.  He´s positive because he has lots of questions and is interested in knowing more whereas a lot of times people just let us in and don´t worry a whole lot about what we´re saying haha.  The other is with Camilla and her mom.  We are going to teach them how to give a family night lesson and she is being so kind as to cook us dinner (here in the office we eat way too much fast food).  

Ok so a fun little note is that this Sunday we had a devotional from a few pretty famous people.  Susan Black (President Ward´s sister) and her new husband George Durant came to speak to us while on their Honeymoon!  If you don´t know that may not know Sister Black is a professor of religion at BYU and her specialty is the prophet Joseph Smith.  She came and spoke to us about the last 3 days of his life and literally spent an hour breaking down every moment of those last moments of the prophets life.  It was amazing to hear her knowledge and the incredible part is that she did it all without a note.  I learned a lot of things about the Prophet Joseph but also the circumstances that he went through as he reached the end of his life.  It was impressive and inspiring to feel how learning the details only strengthened my testimony of him of the prophet of the Restoration.  It really got me thinking that deepening our knowledge of the gospel in it´s very details will only help us to strengthen our own testimonies.  Something that I could do a better job of applying is learning the specifics instead of just the general message that we teach.  I know that if I as a missionary can learn the specifics it will help me apply the gospel to those that I teach which will in turn make me a more effective teacher.  

I love this Gospel and know that it´s true.  One of the greatest blessings I have received was being born of goodly parents who taught me the ways of the Lord and how to live in a way that´s pleasing to God.  I know that this is His church and that I´m representing His son Jesus Christ.  I carry his very name over my heart but we would all do well to make more of an effort to carry him inside of our hearts.  I love you all so much and am so thankful for all the support that you share with me.  Until next week!!

Much love,

Elder Andrew Hawks   




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