Hello all!

Today we had the great opportunity to go through the temple- I love the temple!  Not many other places on the Earth that can get you feeling like the temple does.  It's just a good source of tranquility centered in the middle of a bustling city of eight million!  Now we're writing emails home in one of the Apple stores that's pretty close to the temple- one of those cool glass box deals.  So yep!

Anywhoo, this week was pretty good!  Elder Martinez is quite the character.  He speaks English pretty well, but not quite fluently so that's been kind of a challenge trying to develop a good relationship with the semi-language barrier.  But he's a funny guy with a good testimony, so we're just going forward with the work in the South Bronx!  Instead of talking about each day, I think there were just a couple good experiences that I'll share.  First of all, we had a good lesson with an investigator named Yohanna that I only saw once last cycle (people can be kind of flaky here...).  We really just tried to understand her more, ask her questions about her expectations with us and then use the principles of the Gospel to resolve her concerns.  We were able to help her understand how the gospel will help her and now she's excited to have us meet with her more often and wants to come to church for sure this Sunday!  I know as we take the time to listen to people and really strive to care about them, the Savior leads us to be able to offer our testimonies and words of comfort to help others move forward.  Another experience was with Grace who has been working with missionaries since like November or something.  She's had a lot of health problems and emotional problems that have impeded her from progressing as would be preferred, but after some bold promises of healing and other things, she came to church for the third time and she loved it!  Things went well and now she has a testimony of not only Jesus Christ and The Book of Mormon, but of the church as well, so that was sweet!  She now wants to get baptized "pronto" so May 4th is the goal!  I know that as we're patient when things don't seem to be going well, when we're not getting the answers we're wanting, that God blesses us for our faithfulness.  She now gets to enjoy the eternal blessings that come from baptism and the companionship of the Holy Ghost and it's exciting!  I've loved working with her and am looking forward to seeing yet even more blessings come into her life!

So yep things are going well!  I had some humbling experiences this week that have helped me to be able to better have an eternal perspective.  Getting caught up in the day to day things and stressing out when things aren't going as well as they could be going is pretty easy and natural.  Sometimes it can be a pavilion, though, and make us lose sight of the things that matter.  When we really come to know who we are and where we're going- children of God with a divine inheritance- we can develop the hope to keep going through life even when things aren't perfect.  Which is all the time, right?  But yeah it's like being in a race, knowing you're going to win it all, but wanting to quit because you have a rough stumble.  I know that as we develop an eternal perspective, we'll better do the things today that will get us to that hopeful tomorrow.

Thanks for the support back home!  I love hearing about all the mission calls and how everybody is going!  Keep on going strong and have a great week!

-Elder Griffiths

Di A Luz...

Rafael!  Baptized at the Ripe Age of 77!

Hello!

Starting a new transfer- crazy!  But yep, as you were notified I will in fact be training this cycle!  I'll be training Elder Martinez and I'm excited!  He is from Puerto Rico, born and raised.  I'm a little nervous having this responsibility and getting used to a new companion is always a little different, but I know that the Lord will guide us to do what we need to do.

This week went by well!  We don't have a ton of time to write, but things went well this past week.  Friday I went to the trainers meeting and they pretty much just said to always seek to have the spirit, before everything else in your companionship, love your companion and always teach true doctrine.  Saturday was the baptism!  It all went well!  Rafael was super excited to get baptized!  I'll try to send a picture.  Sunday went well, but I was a little sick, so we stayed in after church and just got relaxed and got things ready for Elder Martinez.  Monday we had a zone potluck and then some lessons afterwards.  Tuesday Elder Longmore spent a little time packing and then we taught some more lessons.  Nothing too exciting!  But here we are on Wednesday.  We're going to do the essentials- go shopping, get stuff set up and then go to work!  He seems to be pretty excited about getting work, so hopefully we'll use that fire to pump up this area even more.

My mind is running blank right now- lots of stuff going on, but I'll try to make next week's letter great to make up for this week!  Thanks for everything!

-Elder Griffiths

Finalmente... Las Mangas Cortas!

Hello!

Time is still flying.  I hit my seven month mark last week, and although I've still got a little while left, I feel like it's just going to wiz by.  We'll see though!  Transfers are in a week, so we'll see how that mixes things up.

Things are getting beautiful!  Well the city still is the city with some trees and stuff, but the weather has been great this week!  Things were chilly and then all of a sudden Monday was nice so we all broke out our short sleeved shirts and it has been glorious.  I feel like the weather will be nice for a couple weeks and then it'll just get hot.  And hotter.  But we'll enjoy it while it lasts!  Another fun thing going on- Yankees games started last week.  We get on the Subway where Yankees Stadium is (we also run over to a field right across from the stadium to run and work out and stuff- pretty cool!) and so I think at least twice now as we've been heading up to our chapel, we've been bombarded by tons and tons of Yankee fans getting off going to the game.  There's one game in June that's on a Wednesday before 6:00, so I'm hoping we can go hit that up- we'll see!  Oh and last week we went to the Bronx Zoo.  It was pretty cool I guess.

Anyways, the weather is nice and the work of the Lord is going forward!  Thursday and Friday were good days with some good lessons.  I don't think anything out of the ordinary happened.  Saturday and Sunday we had conference and that was great!  I loved the speakers and I just felt uplifted listening to the servants of God.  We taught a couple of lessons in between each of the sessions, so that was good.  Even with General Conference, we tied our record high for number of lessons for our area.  This week we're trying to get yet even more lessons, and making them effective too.  Monday we had a long zone meeting to which President Morgan showed up.  It was really good- talked about planning and learned a lot of good insight about that.  Better planning has helped Elder Longmore and me to really make the most out of the time God has blessed us with.  After the training we had a couple of lessons, but nothing too exciting.  Tuesday I went on an exchange with Elder Richards, my District Leader who lives in the same apartment (we just pick up and switch our mattresses with the bedding and all when we do intra-apartmental exchanges).  It was great!  We were pretty much just going from lesson to lesson, being guided by the Lord to specific people to teach them the specific lessons they needed to hear. We dropped by one less active that Elder Longmore and I had been trying to get in with for a little while, and he was there and let us teach a little lesson.  He started talking and the scripture that I had felt he needed to hear went perfectly with a situation he was telling us about that had happened two days before so it was great seeing the hands of the Lord in that!  A funny thing about that visit, though, was that he has a pitbull named Olive and she just gets excited when people come over, so I think I can kind of say that I got attacked by a pitbull.  I like Olive though- she's a lot fun!  Anyways, yeah the exchange went well, I learned a lot and best part was that our investigator, Rafael, had his baptismal interview and so he's on to get baptized on Saturday!  We're excited about that, and now we're just making sure he's good to go.  Hopefully next week I'll have the opportunity to send some pictures from that.  That pretty much brings us to today.  We were going to go down and check some stuff out in Midtown (Elder Jenson, Elder Richards' Trainee hasn't been down there yet), but Elder Richards woke up with some back pain, so I'm chilling with him and Elder Longmore and Elder Jenson are going down into the city.  It's nice just having a break and now having to worry about getting back in time and stuff like that.  But yep things are going well!

I think one of my favorite things about serving this mission has been being blessed to see God's hand in the work.  As missionaries, we spend a lot of time planning, but things often times don't go according to plan.  Our plan at least.  When that happens it can be frustrating, and even depressing trying to figure out how to handle things when everything falls through.  When we look to the Lord, however, and are able to say that we gave our best efforts, he leads us to do the things that He intended us to do in the first place.  Sometimes it's not until the end of a long , frustrating day that we as missionaries can see that we happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right message, and that's how it was supposed to be.  God is involved in each and everyone of our lives and as we really look for His influence and His blessings, and then give Him the glory for such, we're so much better off!  So look for the good, even if it seems like it's a small little coincidence that made things a little nice, thank God for it and you will feel more of His love in your life.  I know He loves each one of us and is cheering us on and we keep pressing forward.

Thanks once again for all the support!  I'm looking forward to sending off a report of where I am and who I'm with next week because things could be switched up!  I'm excited to see what God's plan is for me for the next six weeks- transfers are always exciting!  But I wish you the best of luck with the upcoming week!

-Elder Griffiths

Pascua El Amor de Dios

Buenas Tardes!

Another week down, almost through the cycle.  We get training calls in about a week and calls telling us where we're going a week from Saturday.  How fast this cycle has gone by is just ridiculous, but we're still just being diligent, obedient, planning well and shooting for the stars so it's good!

A couple of cool side notes: first off, last week we found six new investigators.  Two came from talking to somebody in an elevator for about a minute and the other four came from talking to someone in a hardware store where one of our investigators works.  We invited all of them to be baptized in the first lesson and they all agreed (we're really working on setting up expectations from the get go so that's what we've got to do).  The point of that is that we should look for opportunities to share the Gospel with others whenever wherever.  You miss 100% of the shots you don't take, and if you're to scared to talk to people because of a fear of rejection, check this scripture out that Elder Longmore found this morning- Acts 5:41- good stuff!  Second off, last Saturday or something, Elder Longmore and I were walking and a rock came flying by our faces.  We don't know where it came from, but we both felt like Samuel the Lamanite.  Third off, we see lots of different license plates on the cars here, and I've seen a fair share of them from Georgia.  On the way home yesterday, though, we saw one from Gwinnett County so that was exciting.

This week had some downs but a few big ups.  We've had a couple of days where all of our plans have fallen through, back up plans have fallen through and we're just left with not a lot to do.  Yesterday was kind of like that, and instead of getting down about how things were going, we decided to seek for inspiration and look back at the experiences we did have to see how God led us to where He needed us.  We were led to our investigator who works in a hardware store whose son just so happened to be there too.  This is the second time his son has been there, the first time being the last time we went there.  He lives with his mom who won't let him read The Book of Mormon, and he really wants to do what God wants him to do so we were just able to have a really solid and inspired lesson with him that will hopefully help him to move forward.  After that, we dropped by another one of our investigators, and when we arrived she told us that she had "thought" us there because she had been thinking about her experience at church and she was having some negative feelings.  We were able to resolve her concerns and help her to overcome those negative thoughts from the adversary.  A few other cool things happened here or there, but I know that the Lord is guiding His work and can guide us as we seek to submit to His will.

Two big highlights, thought, were a specific lesson we had and church on Sunday.  Saturday we had planned a lesson with a less active with whom we had never met because he had always juked us.  We showed up at the scheduled time, and he wasn't there, but then he came walking up as we were talking on the phone.  We went up to his apartment and started talking and he just broke down.  He hasn't been doing the best of things recently and now he's without work and money and a lot of things.  He expressed his hopelessness and how he had failed.  Elder Longmore and I were both on the same page as we taught him and testified of the reality of the Atonement and how he did have hope through Jesus Christ, and that as repented and fully accepted the gospel, he would be able to feel the same joy and cleanliness he did on the day of his baptism.  He accepted our invitation to come to church and talk to the bishop.  That experience really brought things back into perspective and helped me to realize  why I was there- to help these people be able to fully utilize the Atonement, all that Christ did for us, to be able to be happy in this life and receive a fullness of glory in the life to come.  I was blessed to feel a bit of God's love for this man, and now I'm excited to move forward as he continues to grow his faith in Christ and become whole once again.  Sunday was great because he showed up for church, another less active member showed up for church, an investigator who always comes came again and then an investigator that we've been working with since before Elder Longmore came, who has a big fear of leaving, came to church finally!  It felt great and there was a special Easter spirit about the meeting.  Everybody enjoyed it and the rest of that day was just a good, uplifting day where Heavenly Father blessed us with a glimpse of what our labors had done.  I know that God loves each and every one of us, and that we all have hope in Christ.  I know that He was resurrected and that He lives today.

Things are going well!  Things aren't great every single moment, but looking back, we had a great week.  I think it's important to not get caught up in the moment, but to look at the big picture and try to see the eternal perspective.  As I've done so, I've been blessed to see my progress and move forward even when it seems like my efforts are fruitless.

Thank you for all the support back home!  I hope that you all have a good week to come!  And I hope you're enjoying good weather and not walking around in the breezy sub 40s like we are here in the Big Apple -___-

-Elder Griffiths