Elder Joseph Espiritu: The Elect and Sweat

The time just seems to be flying by here in my life as a missionary, and I'm enjoying every minute of it. Not easy sometimes. Definitely not dry (I legit sweat 24/7) and tiring, but worth it.

What things happened this week? Late/early traveling to distant places by bike and by bus, taught a lot of good people, have lots of food fed to us, attending baptisms, and good spiritual experiences.

Right after I emailed on Monday we left for Laoag for our Missionary Leadership Council. The fun part of this trip was 1) we tried to leave at 12 but had the bus pass right by as we were walking to the highway, so we waited for another hour. 2) The 2nd one was so full we ended up having to stand for most of the 5 hour ride. We survived though and made it to Laoag safety.

MLC was another great experience. Our mission had 94 baptisms this month which is pretty great! We're slowly but surely improving every month. One thing I really liked from this meeting was this: as a leader, you can't please everyone. You just gotta do your best, and try your best to help everyone. People may not like you, but everyone has different opinions and personalities. Just do your best!

It was a really good meeting, and we will be having another one this May before the cycle ends.

Part 2 of the fun trip: we were supposed to leave at 8:00 on Tuesday night, but there was no bus, so we had to wake up at 3AM and take the 4:30AM bus. We got home at 9:30, and Elder Ballan and I crashed. Once we woke up, we dragged our tired bodies out of bed and biked to our area to teach. We taught some good lessons and came back.

This week most of my life as a missionary has been filled with sweat and exhaustion. The bikes are really nice, but it can be tiring. It's all worth it! It may be far at times, but there isn't a soul that needs saving that is too far for us. So we do it.

Elder Ballan and I have been teaching a lot of great people and finding more to teach. Let me tell/update you about 2 of them now.

The first is Olive. We met her awhile ago when I was with Elder Nichols. She was a referral of another recent convert, and for the past couple of weeks she's been awesome. The first time we gave her a book of Mormon, she didn't read. The 2nd time, she read about 70 pages. Now, she's in Jacob, around 162ish in the Tagalog version.

She's awesome, really wants to become a member, and the Spirit is always really strong when we teach her. We taught her sister this last Sunday with her, and they were both thankful after we taught them. I was with 7 members when we taught, and at first I thought it was going to be overwhelming, but it ended up great. There was a sweet and calm spirit.

The next is Kathlyn. I've been teaching her for awhile, and she's been great ever since we've taught her. She's really smart, top of her class actually. It's just easy to teach her.

For a couple weeks, she stopped coming to church. When we asked why, we realized her mother didn't want her to go anymore. So we challenged Kathlyn to share with her mom why she wants to become a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saings and share her testimony. The next time we followed up, she did, and her mom is okay with it now. Her baptism will be coming up on the 28th!

Elder Ballan and I are doing well! Aside from Kathlyn and Olive we had 4 others at church, and we're working on teaching them. There is so much good in this branch. It's pretty easy to get someone to come along and work with you, and lately we've been getting more people to feed us :D. It's simple, but so helpful when people feed you so I'm really grateful for the members and people here. The Filipino culture is just so friendly in general.

So again, the mission is still treating me well. It's not easy physically, mentally and spiritually, but it's all worth it. I love it.

My testimony grows stronger every day as I study the scriptures, and teach people the truth about the Gospel.

Our zone is also doing well and continuing to work hard to teach repentance and baptize converts. The zone leader life is busy, great and I love it. That's all I got for this week! Love you all!

Elder Espiritu

**you can email Elder Espiritu at joseph.espiritu@myldsmail.net