Elder Porter Ellis

  Aloha Minasan, I actually started this email on Tuesday because I wanted to make sure I didn't forget what had just happened. And I'm terrible at Journaling. This week's thought is on how people are people. Sounds pretty obvious but sometimes we can forget such a simple statement. This Tuesday me and my companion had scheduled a lesson with a friend  at 8pm . Looking at their timeline it seemed as though this friend had received all the lessons and earlier Elders had put down that the only thing holding them back from Baptism was their mother (this friend is 9 years old). We saw that they hadn't been taught in a while so we planned on going over and giving a mock baptismal interview to see where her knowledge was at and how ready she was for baptism. Apparently the mom had canceled a bunch of appointments before with excuses and honestly we thought the same was going to happen this week. But she didn't respond. So me and Elder Peña decided to take a chance and mad...

Aloha Minasan!! First off my fault, There was a lot I wanted to do with my last Pday in the MTC. Past two weeks have been AWESOME though. Between the last week and a half of the MTC and my first half week of the field I've been having a blast. But I digress.  This morning I had a completely different spiritual thought in mind but a funny story that happened on my call with my parents made me change what I wanted to share. So today is Pday and my new trainer was still asleep while I was on call with my parents (around 7am). My father asked me where my trainer was and I said he was still asleep. And in a kind of joking matter my Dad started making jokes about how he should be up and how he is not following the rules. (I still love you dad), but in epic missionary fashion I saw this as an opportunity to share a scripture with my Dad (and kind of make fun of him.) For background my Father was not the perfect missionary either, we all aren't perfect but the scripture I shared with h...

Aloha Minasan, This week was super long. I don't know if it was waiting for reassignments or if it was just the frustrations of the week. But time definitely slowed down. Which was a bummer because as we get closer to the MTC leave date I get more and more excited to get outta here. This week definitely had a lot more frustrations than usual. So much so that I actually had an entire email written out midweek. It was nothing crazy, please don't be worried. There are just so many different people with different personalities, experiences, and beliefs. With constant interactions with so many different people, I will certainly find people that I will not get along with as easily, and this will definitely stay consistent throughout my life. But as I wrote the email and reflected on my frustrations I realized that I needed to take a step back and just relax. Shoutout to Elder Medeiros for helping with that the next day, we just talked about our struggles and were able to reflect with...