April 11, 2016 Letter...

Teej is home..?! How good for him! What a boss. And that sucks about the rooming situation... they're all gonna live like kings.. but hey that's cool. I'll prolly be hanging out there a lot anyways soo I ain't worried. No worrrriess. I went to the office today cuz we had to do a million things for our Pday instead of things we wanted (that's okay) and it wasn't there yet.. So idk when it'll be there. And cool.. I like ties always :) I always need more. I also hope Diego is doing alright. He is a good kid. I hope he keeps figuring it all out! Threeee months. That's true. It's going to be crazy. Everything good though.. we are working hard.. I'm very aware of my departure date and all is well, but I feel like the time is starting to finish.. and that's okay.

This week has been absolutely hectic. We literally had about zero time to proselyte because there were so many other administrative things we had to go do. It has been a rather pain in the rear but that’s okay. We’re in the work of the Lord! Anyways I’ll run ya’ll through the week. On Monday after writing we went and ate at KFC and it was delicious. I miss American food. Plates of pure rice and a little piece of chicken with the side of boiled potatoes are starting to take their toll. Anyways later that night we had an appointment with one of our investigators who is progressing really nice. His name is Jose Luis. He is a single guy who lives separated from his ex girlfriend and kid (thank goodness it’s not together). He’s about 50 years old and had listened to missionaries about 8 years ago before his mom, who lived with him, had passed away. He took that event to be one of the hardest things for him to deal with and still thinks about it often. His dad, who is a member and lives by Cuzco, came to visit and went to our ward for about 2 months, and while there he passed us the referral. So we went and visited and we have been working with him ever since. He is progressing a lot and the good thing is that he understands everything we explain him. The only thing that he’s missing is the spiritual witness that it’s all true. He’s a had a lot of questions that we’ve had to answer, but the answer we give him from the scriptures always seems to leave him satisfied. His biggest iceberg right now is the fact that he was born and raised catholic by his mother, and even though he KNOWS it’s not true, it pains him to change because that is one of the only things still keeping him and his dead mom connected, he doesn’t want to betray her. (Even though the funny thing is that his dad who is a member already did his mom’s temple work and she is now a member. LOL.) To him we explained recently the Plan of Salvation…… finish what happened.

On Tuesday we had an absolutely hectic day. As Zone Leaders we have the opportunity every month to get together with the AP’s and President and Sister Larson and have a council, talking about problems and challenges in our zones and things we have done good and things we can do better. It’s always a great opportunity. I absolutely love working close to President and Sister Larson. I love them so much and I’m so grateful that they are hear in this time to help this work move forward. I’ve formed such a great relationship with the two of them and it’s something I’m always going to honor and cherish. Anyways, something we talked about in this council was that there is an Elder very sick in my zone with active tuberculosis (our zone has a had a load of random problems this week) and that every Elder that has had contact with him would also need to be tested. GREAT. So, afterwards, because I had lived with this Elder when he first got here to the zone (his comp still hadn’t come yet so he was with us for 2 weeks) I had to go get my chest X-Rayed. It was fun. It was about 12 hours of doing non-stop stuff. We got home from all those shenanigans at like 8:00 PM and we worked until the end of the night. But yeah, turns out I don’t have TB, but to be safe we had the whole mission do the TB phlegm tests on Friday. Oh was that fun… hahaha. Like no one had phlegm, so we had 24 missionaries just coughing as hard as they could to muster up phlegm to fill a small fluid collector up. It was hilarious.

If you think that Tuesday was hectic, Wednesday and Thursday were possibly worse. On Wednesday we had to round two of our districts up, with the medical secretaries orders, and travel after the district meetings to a clinic in San Isidro. It’s a clinic inside of our zone, but with traffic and all that it takes a good while to get there. So we all got there at like 3:00 PM only for them to tell us that no, they couldn’t do the phlegm TB tests because it was closed. Okay.. sweet. We had very little time to work that night because we ended up getting home later than we thought. We did have a great appointment though that night with our investigator Carmen. After like two weeks, we were finally able to teach her! She is doing good and knows that our message is true, it’s just that she has a little trouble accepting one of the commandments. She isn’t currently breaking it, but due to the fact that the situation she is in could lead her to break it, she has the fear and doesn’t want to commit to anything she won’t be able to complete. We spoke with boldness to her and we were very direct. We told her straight up the consequences of sin and also what happens when we don’t keep the commandments. The spirit testified of our words and she accepted the invite to pray and ask God if she really need to keep this commandment.

Something that I’ve realized towards the end of my mission, is that I’ve become very direct with people. Elder McPhie and I are very direct with the people we teach and sometimes they take it to be hard, but it’s the truth and the guilty sometimes take the truth to be hard, but also they realize the importance of what we teach, that it’s not some pretty message we’re sharing, but rather something their eternal happiness depends on. I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but more time in the mission has given me a lot less patience with evil and lies and people who don’t want to progress.

This week ended very normally. We were able to finish strong. Sadly we didn’t get to work on Sunday because finally the whole country voted on who will be their new president (thank goodness, now the annoying campaigns can end haha). We weren’t allowed to leave the house unless we had fixed appointments, due to the high rate of public disturbance, and all ours fell through and no one would answer their phone so we had to stay in. We ended up playing Phase 10.. great game. If I remember correctly we used to play it as a family in the camp trailer.

Today has also been a bit hectic, we had to get the zone gathered again to do a second phlegm spit test.. then we had to run all the samples outside of the mission, then we had a meeting with President and Sister Larson and the secretaries to come to an agreement on what we’re going to do with the Elder that’s sick. WEEHOO.

Good week tho... love y'all...

Elder Cluff