A Special VIP Visitor

What's good everyone! 

First off it's my mom's bday on Wednesday September 30th! So everyone say Happy Birthday to her!

😁👍🏼 She's been a huge example to me of Christlike love. Her testimony has really helped my testimony grow and she's just amazing. Love her! 

This past week we had we had a General Authority from the Area Seventy come to our mission. His name was Elder Whiting. He talked to us 3 times this week and it was amazing. He was hyping us up so much just saying we are the pioneer missionaries for this period of time with Covid and all. 

One of the key things he talked about was The Book of Mormon. He asked us to answer the question, "What has The Book of Mormon done for me?" by writing on a sheet of paper what it's personally done for us. I loved the challenge. It definitely made me think. 

The Book of Mormon has truly changed my life and has given me a sense of hope in my darkest moments. It has helped me know that Heavenly Father does truly love all of us. It doesn't matter how far we think we are from Him. It doesn't matter what we've done. It certainly doesn't matter who we are! Heavenly Father will always be there for us and if we diligently read His words from The Book of  Mormon we can witness it for ourselves!

We had another exchange this week. I went with Elder Parker. He's another reassigned missionary from Brazil. We've been out on our missions for about the same amount of time so it was good to talk to each other about our different experiences. 

I went to his area and both our companions went to mine. Both our companions are still training so when we saw them leaving we were a little worried. But they did great! They worked hard and found a couple of new people to teach! So hopefully I'll have an update on our new friends! 

I love you all so much! Thanks for your support hope everyone has a great week!

-Elder Espiritu 

Our Apartment

Exchanges

Went on a hike this morning!

A Lesson in Humility

Hey everyone! 

First off shout out to my brother, Derek, and his wife, Katie, for having their first baby! Happy to say I'm an uncle again! So excited to meet baby Iris! 

Pretty fast week filled with amazing things! We had zone conference this week. It's still virtual but it was really good to see other missionaries and receive some counsel from our mission president, President Cordon. 🙏🏽  

He's really pushing all the missionaries to studying the missionary lessons. So each week we are studying one principle. This week was "The Gospel blesses individuals and families" I was so happy to study this principle more in depth and it really had me thinking. I thought in my life, how has the gospel of Jesus Christ personally blessed me and my family? There were numerous ways it has, but the biggest one I realized is how close my family and I are! I really love my family and they mean so much to me! It's a comforting feeling to know I'm going to be with them for time and all eternity if we just follow the simple things our Savior Jesus Christ taught us! 😁

This week we were allowed to do in person exchanges! I did exchanges with my zone leader, Elder Adolpho. He's from Hawaii and been on his mission for probably 10 months now. He's awesome I learned so much. I experienced a really cool and humbling thing during our exchange. 

In the morning as missionaries we do a daily planning session and we say a prayer right before we plan. We prayed and right after our prayer Elder Adolpho looked at me and asked "Do you Elders have a friend you're teaching named Michael?" I said "Yes but he went by Mike. We used to teach him but sadly we stopped teaching him a couple weeks ago." 

He told me to call him so I did twice but he didn't pick up. Later that day he called us back and was telling us he missed meeting with us and he soon realized how much structure was missing in his life when we didn't meet! So right then and there we taught him a lesson about how we can prepare to meet God! 

During the lesson he said something we could do to prepare to meet God. He said "We can truly humble ourselves" and at that moment I realized that was exactly for me. The reason we dropped Mike was  because of my stubbornness in thinking Mike wasn't progressing and that he was the problem. 

I realized, how can we be teaching someone about the Gospel of Jesus Christ if we're not living it ourselves? If we want to become like Jesus Christ we  need to develop His perfect attributes such as humility or becoming humble. We should each other as God would, as one of His children. 

I wasn't really doing that with Mike so I'm excited to start teaching Mike again. I will focus on really listening to him and looking at him as God would! 

If we do this with everyone we will all become so much happier and become more like Christ every day. 😁👍🏼 Hope everyone has a great week! 

-Elder Espiritu

Threw some steaks on the grill

Service

Go big or go home!

 Kobe 

Exchanges

COVID Can't Stop Us

This week was unique! It all started last pday when we were at a store.  We were walking around the store when we heard some dude peel out then we heard a ton of crashes. Apparently this guy had a trailer hooked to his car and was just smashing into other cars in the parking lot. He hit about 14 cars. Our car was pretty far from the entrance so we thought it was okay.... nahh he hit our bumper and wrecked it. (See pics) crazy day. 

Elder Owens and I also moved apartments for a couple days because they thought we had Covid. We both had tiny sore throats. So we moved to some apartments close to the Los Angeles temple, but we got cleared to go back to our original apartment today. So super happy that we can see other missionaries again! 

Awesome miracle this week! I haven't talked about Jann and Diane in a couple weeks, because we haven't had contact with them in awhile. They've been super busy....but this week we met with them! Friday we met with just Jann and taught him the whole first lesson and it was amazing. Then yesterday we met with both of them and retaught the first lesson about The Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. 

The Spirit was so strong and it was amazing. They said they were going to read every day and really pray about it. Awesome how the Spirit can help people find motivation to talk to our Heavenly Father through prayer and actively listen to Heavenly Father's words through sincere scripture study. 

One of my favorites quotes I heard from John Bytheway "If you want to speak with God you pray. If you want God to speak with you you read your scriptures." I love it. It's that simple!

There was one thing I was studying this week in the teachings of President Hinckley that really stood out to me. I read "There is a sad tendency in our world today for persons to cut one another down. Did you ever realize that it does not take very much in the way of brainpower to make remarks that may wound another? Try the opposite of that. Try handing out compliments. …" 

It's a sad thing but it's so true. I've seen it in my own life. Instead of putting others down with harsh words and letting satan cause conflict between others let's try to compliment and uplift others. Everyone's struggling with something in their lives so let's be a little more Christlike. Compliment someone. I promise it'll not only brighten their day but it will brighten your day as well. It will make our Heavenly Father so happy!

 🙏🏽🤙🏼

-Elder Espiritu 

This is for you dad! Ya boy!

Made some steaks

Mosiah 2:17

Hi everyone! Here in Woodland Hills we had a lot of opportunities to serve people in our ward! We also served people in the ward of the other missionaries in our apartment. We set up times to do service every morning. It is a huge blessing to serve others.

Here is one story that happened when we were doing service this week. We went to this older lady's house to trim some of her hedges in her yard. A lot of them were really big but she didn't have a hedger. She bought some brand new trimmers for us to use! So we got right to it. We came to a hedge that was really tall. We got a ladder so we could reach it. 

Elder Plaisted was standing on the ladder but the ground underneath him wasn't the most stable so he lost his balance and landed on a gas gauge that was attached to the house. Luckily he was okay and had scrapes on his arm and back. When he fell on the gas gauge he cracked one of the pipes. 

Immediately we started to smell gas because it was leaking so we had to call 911. The fire department came and turned it off. They told the Sister that lived there that luckily Elder Plaisted landed on the perfect spot where she wouldn't have to pay to fix it! (Probably a good thing because she was less active in their ward and they are trying to come back) That was a huge blessing! While everything was happening so many emotions were going on and it was really serious. But when everything settled down I started to bust out laughing and we all had a good laugh about it.

We started teaching this young man named Sibo! He's 17 years old and so prepared. For only being 17 he's very respectful and understands everything we teach him. Sadly he lives in another mission's boundary so we're probably going to have to pass him (and his mom Judy) off soon. I'm so grateful we've helped him so far in his journey with the Gospel. 

The Lord continues to bless us with prepared people!

Yesterday we received a referral and we called her immediately. Her name is Kaylee and she is already a member of our church but has been inactive for 5 years. She told us she always wanted to come back to church but just never got around to it. When we called her we asked her if we could teach a lesson right then on Zoom and she said yes. 

We got to know her and her background. She just moved here from San Diego and we asked where she lived in our area and she said Woodland Hill! We told her where we lived and she said "Wait do you mean the apartment complex right across the street from me?!" 

Little did we know we live right by her! So we hopped off Zoom and dropped of a Book of Mormon to her! We're going to start meeting with her and help her come back to the church! Maybe soon we can start teaching her boyfriend as well? 🤷🏾‍♂️🤙🏼

Grateful for the Lord and Him helping this area to continue to move forward even with everything going on! The work continues! 

Shout out to all my boys serving. Everyone's killing it! 

I hope everyone has a good week! 

Elder Espiritu 

It's been hot!!

I love the Bible and the Book of Mormon!

pictures from the story 

Funny sign at the Los Angeles temple