"You had 12 brothers and sisters?" "8." "Yeah 12 sounds better"

You remember that one scripture in Alma? Where king Lamoni asks "How long are you gonna be here?" to Ammon, and he says "Perhaps until the day I die".

That is like the mission. Here is what you have to understand about missionary work, you see the worst in people. That is exactly what Ammon saw in the Lamanites, he saw their killings and he saw their disputations and their problems – but the most important is he loved them enough to serve them forever. I love these people that I serve enough to serve them forever if need be. The love that a missionary experiences for the people is unexplainable but the devastation that he feels when people choose not to improve their position in life is the same way.

It is like your family. You see them do good things, you see them do bad things, and you love them. The important thing is to never let the bad things inhibit the love.

The thing almost none of you will ever understand is the love and the pain of a Filipino. They are the fastest friends in the hardest of times. They are the people that smile the most when they feel like nothing is going right. They have some of the most hard-up circumstances – but they always have a joke. I have learned more about hardships and how people deal with those hardships here than in the rest of my life combined.

In the Culture of the Philippines, people have learned to share and give even when they have nothing. It is a culture that has been affected by so many things and it is a tragedy how many hardships the people here have. In the end they deal with them well and they are great people.

We had a baptism

The zone is still kind of falling apart.

Charity is probably the most important thing.

We have a big thing going with a closed area that has a lot of people going to church we may go over there and teach the people over there a couple times and then baptize them. I will keep you updated on that. There are 10 of them.

I got some pictures.

I love you all I hope you are holding up without me, you only have like a year left....

Welp anyways good luck

Love

Elder Faulkner

That moment when you have no moments

So many things happened. I will aim to give a brief overview of the week. Sorry I couldn’t write more.

~      We started really trying to get referrals out of the ward members.

~      One of the sisters in our zone got ringworm.

~      Another says there is a ghost in the apartment.

~      We have a baptism this coming Saturday.

~      We found out some stuff about missionaries who used to be assigned here.

~      We got a 2-minute visit by President Hughes on Sunday.

~      We are changing the way that ward missionaries work.

~      God lives.

~      We revamped the Key indicators a little bit.

~      We try not to knock doors anymore.

~      I got new Glasses. (They are pretty cheap here)

~      I got an eye exam. (It was free here.)

~      We found an ok family. (Tucong Family)

~      We got a solid member referral.

~      I am gonna get a ton of my clothes retailored for like 2 dollars.

~      Spirits the best teacher.

~      Started Tagalog language learning book part 2.

I love you all.

Elder Faulkner

Can't Stop; Won't Stop

There are some things that we learned about Goals this week. In proverbs 23:7 we see:

For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.

Our mission president reiterated the importance of always thinking about goals until we achieve them. This means that you need a constant mental effort to accomplish that goal. It will not necessarily be easy, but it will be possible. We have set a goal for 28 baptisms in the month of March. We are doing everything in our power to constantly work and do things that should lead us to reaching this goal. It seems a little ridiculous, but if we are teaching enough lessons to progressing investigators and teaching the right people, it is not impossible. God does impossible things all the time. Our mission president said that most goals should catch your eye and scare you. If they don’t, you are not pushing yourself. We are striving to work differently; to work smart and to see the difference in the results. 

There is a lot that comes with goal like this. We make a constant effort to evaluate what we are doing in order to find those little things we can do to make a huge difference. Most of reaching a large goal involves starting off with a very sure start and not moving from that. It is very possible that we will not reach this goal – but we will fail forward at the very least. 

Teaching with Elder Ewing is a different experience. He is a better teacher than pretty much any other companion that I have ever had. But we realize that no matter how good the teaching is, you still don’t get anywhere without the spirit. We strive to only teach by the spirit, and hope and pray that our investigators feel it. 

We are really starting to push the members to be active in the work. We decided that it would be impossible to find 28 people by ourselves without members that are ready for baptism by march. The members will find more quality investigators. We are going to ideally make some family mission plans with some of the families in the ward. Which we will explain in the next few weeks as we understand what we are doing. 

We are trying to make the work more precise and more organized. I have always had a problem with organization in my life, but I am still pushing myself to make that into a strength. 

Yesterday we had a good experience. We were getting ready to head to a broadcast of the funeral service for prophet Thomas S. Monson. We had about 30 minutes. We prayed in the street to ask God to send us to someone we could teach in that short amount of time, who would accept the gospel. We walked down the street and didn’t really feel anything. We were just standing there for a few seconds and we start talking to the little kids coming by. One of the kids points us up the hill and tells us that his mom wants to talk to us. We looked up to see a lady that we had not noticed before, standing outside the large gate of a church. We go up to talk to her. Her name is Pearly, and she is a devout Baptist. Her cousin is the pastor of the church she was standing in the threshold of. We start a conversation about how she moved from Catholicism because of the activities and programs in her new church. We then start talking about the restoration and the Book of Mormon. She seemed to kind of understand the importance of such a book. We testified of it and she said she would read it every day. I don’t know how much will come out of that meeting, but we will follow up to see what she has learned. It was a good experience.

       

After that, we saw the broadcast of the funeral services of Thomas S. Monson. He will be remembered for his personal ministry and his love of individuals. I know that God calls living prophets and speaks through them today.

Culture: If you don’t speak the language correctly here, almost no one will correct you. As it generally works – the more correctly you speak, the more people correct you. I think it is because it is much easier to correct just the one mistake than many. Before Elder Bromley and I split up, I told him about this – the more correctly he spoke, the more people would help him learn the language. I saw him the other day, and he said that people were starting to correct him – so he must be making great progress in learning the language. I am proud of him.

Tagalesson: Some nouns made from verbs:

Prayer: Pagdarasal

Church attendance: Pagsisimba

Repentance: Pagsisisi

The act of Reading: Pagbabasa

Speech: Pagsasalita.

Alrighty everyone, keep up the amazing. I love you all and look forward to seeing what you all have to say next week ;)

Love

Elder Faulkner

Welp Transfers

Well that transfer came and went very quickly.

We are having a lot of people moving out of the zone. And as the zone leaders, we have to make sure that everyone has adequate travel arrangements. This will be nothing tho to some of the other stuff we have to do.

I don’t really miss being a district leader. Being a zone leader carries a similar stress level, but it makes me feel like I have a lot more influence in the work of others.

This coming 6 weeks, we are going to focus on getting out and working with the different companionships throughout the zone. We are going to do a lot of exchanges – where we exchange companions with another companionship for a short period of time.

       

Elder Ewing and I are doing pretty well in the work. We are working with people to overcome stumbling blocks. That is pretty much the life of a missionary, you find a problem, you find a way to fix it, and then God fixes it.

We really have to trust God a lot more than we normally do. We have to put all the faith in Him that we can. Almost every problem in the world can be broken down into a problem with our faith. If we think about God as one who loves us, he doesn’t want us to struggle and he doesn’t want life to be overwhelming, He wants us to improve. If we are always relying on Him, and doing everything that we possibly can, we will always have enough faith to make our lives great.

        

The now deceased President Monson (The prophet of the whole world died, and nothing bad happened to the world. God has a pretty good program going here) said something about our futures. He said: "The future is as bright as your faith". That can be applied in a lot of ways. A lot of people go through life with very little hope; we need to trust in our Father and do all we can along the way.

       

I fall very short every day, but I trust God. The most important part of consistent faith is that it allows God to trust us. If you can have God's trust, I am pretty sure that you can do anything.

We are on the downward slope but this really just means I have to try twice as hard right?

My mother said something very interesting that I think can be applied, (it was originally about hiking mountains.) She said: "You have to be twice as careful on the way down, it is harder on your knees and you might slip." In the position that I am in now, I have great opportunities to immerse myself in the work and take a slow ride down the mountain. I am trying to be solidly footed on this path. The mission kind of sets the track for the rest of your life. Also, even in just the last one year I have learned more than the last ten years.

        

Well I have like one million things to do and I am hoping I can even fit in a nap today, so I better go and do before I go and sleep.

Culture: Pabahay. There are these huge structures that are kind of like apartments in America, they are relocation centers. One of these is in our area and we sometimes work there. It is called Disciplina Village. These relocation centers are called Pabahays and that just means someone gives you a house. It is not exactly free but it is like 2 very small rooms you pay off over 10 years. Most of the payments in a month are around 100-300 pesos, which is about 2-6 dollars. A lot of the people that come into these places are moved from very hard situations and placed here for a better life. Because they are so cheap, a lot of the kids that live here don’t have a lot to do during the day. Some of them don’t even go to school because they figure their living space for their whole life is already worked out...

Tagalesson:

Words you will probably never need:

Rainbow: Bahaghari

Sunset: Takipsilim

Sky: Himpapawid

Cloud: Ulap

Yay we made it through another week.

I love you all.

If you want a story when I get home (That I might never have time to type out in email) ask me about the hardest fast I have ever done.

Love

Elder Faulkner

Pictures this time

This week was not nearly as busy as last week. We had a lot to do, but most of that doing was in the field missionary work – which is normally much better than meetings. We have a lot going on in our area. We have dropped most of the people that the previous missionaries were teaching. We are finding a lot and we have found a few really awesome people.

One of the people that we are teaching right now is Ramon. He is a chain smoker, but he has been slowly decreasing the amount that he smokes every day. We made a plan for him so that he would be able to be baptized and work more towards his goal of quitting smoking. One thing that is important with people is that you have to put the standard somewhere that is achievable. With Ramon, we are working little-by-little and he is quite receptive to it.

Other than that, we have a huge compound that we teach in. It is a relocation center called “Disciplina”. We have a lot of people there that we have taught. We also have a lot of less actives that get relocated there. It is a very interesting place to work, as it is very, very loud. Working there can be a test on patience. There are always screaming kids and loud music. But we have some progressing investigators there, so we have to do what we have to do.

       

Elder Ewing and I are working pretty well together. We get along just fine. We are working together to see what we can do to be effective and useful.

      

Elder Ewing and I have been giving really small commitments to try and build people's faith very slowly. We have seen a little bit of progress with that.

       

We had a great time on New years eve. It was very, very loud – much louder than any celebration I have heard in America. We tried to go to sleep early, but we both woke up a lot throughout the night.

Culture: People have two celebrations here close together. Christmas and New years, as is customary in a lot of cultures. They mostly do the same thing on both nights (drink, sit around, and play music.). Everything is louder on New Years, and there are a lot more fireworks. Fireworks right now are against the law without a permit. I don’t think that stopped a whole lot of people.

Tagalesson:

Mga Hayop:

Aso- Dog

Pusa- Cat

Kambing- Goat

Lamok- Mosquito

isda- Fish

Well there you go now you know some animals. Keep on keeping on everyone. I will see you all in a while

Love

Elder Faulkner