Oh no! It´s almost December!

Hey guys, thanks for all of the emails and the information! I had no idea that Jeremy was leaving on his mission this week to Argentina, that´s pretty crazy. I have been trying to think about all of the lessons and the things that I have learned on the mission, there have been a lot of awesome experiences that will change my life forever and will change my vision of a lot of things. The more I learn, the more I find out that I know nothing. Funny how that works out. The Lord wants us to be humble though so that we can be teachable, and I know that I still have a long way to go to be able to learn and have knowledge.

This week was really cool though, we had interviews with President and I asked him how he deals with stress and how he is able to concentrate on one thing when so many things are happening in his life. He taught me an awesome lesson. He made a comparison talking about what happens when we shake a bottle of soda and open it and what happens when we shake a bottle of water and open it. Then he shared a cool scripture of when Christ says, ``I am the Living Water.`` I had never looked at it that way.  President told me that with everything happening in our lives, we decide how we are going to deal with it and how we will react to stress and how we will control our thoughts.

There weren´t too many other things that happened this week, not a whole lot of news. I´m still really nervous and scared to come home though, but it´s normal....probably haha. I can´t believe that we are already entering into December this week, such a weird thought. I don´t know where time has gone, seriously.

Well, I hope that you all have a great week. It is nice and rainy here so that keeps the heat down, but it is still really humid. I just can´t win seems like. I love our Zone, I´m grateful for the missionaries that I have met here on the mission and all of the lessons that I have learned from them. I love you all and hope that you have a great week.

Love, Elder McDonald

Hey Family,

How are you all doing? Hope that everything is going great for everyone there. Thanks for all of the emails and the flight plans.....you want me to be trunky, don´t you? :) It´s not going to work though, sorry. I still have time on the mission and I´m going to enjoy it haha. This last week was incredible!!! The conference that we had with Elder Bednar was so amazing!! We had front row seats basically so that just made it that much better. At first, I thought it was going to just be Elder Bednar, but low and behold, he was walking in with Elder R. M. Costa who was in the Presidency of the Seventy but is now the President of the Area Brasil. That was really cool. As you can imagine, the Spirit was amazingly strong during the whole conference. Elder Bednar is really funny, really direct, and really inspired. I learned a ton from him.

He came up to the pulpit and was like, “Alright, first of all I want to teach you all about how to take notes. Don´t write down what I say. Write down what the Spirit tells you.”
 He kept talking about false church traditions which I thought was pretty funny. He talked about how people always pray in church, “Please bless all of the people who weren´t here this week that they can be here next week.´´

He´s like, ``I don´t ever want to see any of you saying that prayer in Sacrament meeting! You should be praying, telling the Lord that you are going to go get the people who aren´t there in that VERY second. The only thing you need to ask the Lord is for inspiration so that not everybody in the congregation, when they leave to get the people, don´t all go to the same house!”

 Haha, I thought that was so awesome. He taught about how we need to pray and act, not just pray to express and then do nothing about it; we need to make our prayers happen.

He also talked a lot about how we are all agents and not objects. I loved how he taught because he didn´t give a talk at the pulpit. He got up there, and the whole three hour conference, he was asking us questions and we were asking him questions, it was really cool. There were a lot of missionaries who asked some really good questions. Going back to the agents and the objects, he said that we should never ask people questions that we are looking for a specific answer. He said that is playing the game, ``try to guess what is in my head`` and that turns these people from agents to objects. That was really cool I thought. I decided that I need two more years on my mission to do it the right way now haha. It was funny talking to my ward mission leader because he said that it wasn´t until the end of his mission that he learned how to serve a mission the right way, and by that time it was already over; but he said that his mission was for the future now. That was something that really hit me. During my whole mission, I was trying to learn what I needed to do, basically how to be a missionary, and at the end, I finally found out how to do everything, but then it´s over. Funny how that works, huh?

President Bezerra said that at a conference once. ``It´s funny how at the end of the mission, we finally learn how to teach right, but it´s too bad that we don´t have two more years to stay and work like that.`` It´s interesting how the Lord works, but it´s all part of the plan and part of the process.

I love the mission so much. I can´t imagine how my life would be without the mission. It changed everything. I learned and grew so much, and I still have time to learn and grow more. I know that the Book of Mormon is true now without a doubt. I know that the Atonement is real and that Christ lives and he did everything that he needed to for our Salvation. I am grateful for agency and the learning experiences that I have had here in these last months of my life. The Gospel is Perfect. I love all of you, hope that you all have a great week.

Love, Elder McDonald