The Sons of Thunder: Ozone Leaders

And..........¨BANG!¨ went my back bike tire.

I tell ya, these bikes are a big blessing, but very hard to maintain. They are constantly losing air and stuff. Yesterday, we were just cruising along the ¨ruta¨ (highway-busy road-thingy) and my back tire very rudely and loudly exploded. So we started walking our big area instead.

Early this week we had a GREAT experience with our investigator, Adriana. She told us she dreamed a strange dream. We were back in the Chapel, where she came to that activity last last week. We were talking to her and kept saying ¨Dont forget about Alma 22. Don´t forget about Alma 22.¨ That was WEIRD to hear. She is still barely in first Nephi! So she woke up and read Alma 22, where Aaron converts the Lamanite king. She said it talked about the same things we had talked about earlier and was very interesting. I was sitting there dumbfounded. Astounded. Amazed. We then had a very unique lesson about spiritual gifts. Sometimes God communicates with us through dreams. VERY cool experience!

This week I´ve learned even more what it means to be humble. We had interviews and trainings with President Robertson on wed. I think both me and Elder Siale were expecting to march in there and be congradulated on our hard work, no más. Well, President let us know that we need to ALWAYS stive for more, no matter how much ¨outward success¨ we may have. He also came to our branch yesterday and told the branch to NEVER be satisfied, always looking for more. More service and missionary opportunities. More ways to improve. Like the Anti-Nefi-Lehitas, BURY your weapons of war. And leave them buried. If something holds us back, get rid of that thing. I loved the talk in priesthood session, how we need to be leaders AND followers, no matter the calling we have. Leading by example is definitely the best way.

That goes along a lot with what me and my comp have focused on a lot. My new brother-in-law (that always feels weird to me.....I have a brother in law??) won last weeks ¨Most Inspiring email Contest¨. We are NOT here to ¨maintain¨ the work, we are here to ¨HASTEN¨ the work. Extra mile! That is what it´s all about. We have definitely tried to implement that into daily work.

Haha the subject of this email really has no other significance other than it is a funny pun that Elder Siale thought of this week!

Remember that a coach will only criticize and try his best players. God will only try us because he knows our full potential. Be NOT weary in well doing!

Love from Elder Wilcon

Pic: Just your regular P-day mold off the wall cleaning!
Pic: Elder Nuñez has a selfe stick, so..........
Pic: we ordered out the other night! Empanadas and ice cream. mmmmm
Pic: I fancy myself as fancy for breakfast.
Pic:Recent converts, Edgardo and Graciela!

Sons of Thunder

I was gonna call my email this week ¨Rain? Please: Part 3¨ but I decided to save everyone from the monotony. Just know that we are thoroughly enjoying riding creaky bikes in the pouring rain and howling wind! The ¨guardabarro¨ (mud guard thingy) on the back tire is broken in half on both our bikes, so literally EVERY DAY we have to scrub our shirts that have been spattered over and over with mud from the bike. Either the shirt or this nerdy long black missionary/detective coat that I have.

Anyway. Why the name ¨sons of thunder¨, you ask? Well because that is our new companionship name. I came across it while reading Jesus El Cristo, so we are literally scripturally backed up here. It´s in Mark 3:17. Jesus called two of his original apostles the Sons of Thunder. JESUS HIMSELF. And with all this rain, we deserve the name. We have a handshake, theme song (Thunderstruck), and the non-believers flee before us when we are glimpsed in the street. Watch yourselves, residents of G. Rod! The other Elders in the pench are desperately trying to find a cooler scriptural name without much success, hehe.

I finally got to listen to the address of President Nelson about his two heart victims. WHAT an incredible story. Let´s rise to the challenge, fellow Priesthood brethren, or there won´t be any Priesthood power for us!

We have found a wonderful couple named Adriana y Hector. I don´t know if I´ve said anything about them or not. But they are AWESOME. A member that lives right next to them, Tamára Rodríguez is coming to our lessons. (She is AWESOME. Served in columbia. AND she just got home from a 5 month trip to Utah, she even went to conference! She helped tour the provo city center open house, and no one even knew about it. She actually would´ve been my one hope to getting a package to Argentina.) Anyway, Adriana is incredible and is reading the LDM like crazy. We invited her to a baptism of an 8 year old on saturday, and then an activity right after. We thought it was for the whole family. Turns out it was a youth activity. But she had her ten year old son Mauro with her and he wanted to play. It was a mini game thing activityin small teams. So she (way too old) went around with her team and Mauro (way too young) went around with his. After everything she was there for like 3 or more hours! But they are progressing fast and doing so well! Love this place!

Hey RM´s: Did everyone and their mother on your mission boast about knowing tons of english and then you asked them to speak to you....and they caved? HAHA happens all the time to me. They know NOTHING. Also, everyone wears t shirts with seriously ¨cualquier cosa¨ on it. The randomest weirdest stuff slapped on to a shirt. So funny.

Not much time, but keep M and E in your sincere prayers! M and E (whom you interviewed that one time) are not doing too great. I´m not sure if he´s still gone, but he ¨moved out¨ last week. He´s still around though, he came to church. M is not baptized, but we now know her big duda is the church. Just churches in general. She believes in Christ, but doesn´t want to go to a church. We are praying for them. I love those two, they need the Gospel!

No pics, sorry. Forgot my cámara.

Love from the armpit of all of Argentina! And what an armpit it is.

Elder Parker Wilcon (how everyone reads my name)

Rain? Please: Part 2

Things are booming as usual down in the Arg! I realized this week that about last month in March was a full year that I hadn´t had any cold weather at all. I just went straight from one summer to the next. Now, FINALLY, we are enjoying being somewhat cold sometimes. I am loving it. It feels like a fall/christmas type spirit in the air. I have to remind myself it´s just Abril.

Does anyone remember about the rain that we had last week? Well it continued....EVERY day this week. Lovely. Just think of the church history movies, and the scenes in miserable Winter Quarters. How all the streets are knee deep in mud and the teamsters and struggling to get through. Well that perfectly describes us, barely moving on the bike as we struggle through crazy mud. It´s exhilarating.

BUT had a fantastic week nonetheless. Me and Siale are loving life out here. The work is moving, just sometimes not at the pace we would like. But then again, when does it? We gotta count our blessings! We were gonna have FOUR baptisms this week. But due to different things, we have moved all baptismal dates a little later. Mrs G, an AWESOME grandma lady is soooo close! She just needs to stop smoking completely. She is so converted and happy. It´s awesome to watch. This week I pulled the stunt I´ve always wanted to. I confiscated all the cigarettes she had in the house and we gave her 3 and said those were the last three EVER. She´s been true to that goal so far!

I know that this next statement will mean almost nothing to you, but we had zone conference last week and in the zone is Elders Wihongi and Campos! WOOOT. I would move to Chile just to be the eternal best friend of Elder Campos. Such a stud. He greeted me and was like ¨Haaay deeewwd.¨ In his hilarious Chileno accent. He used to say that all the time when we were together. Teaching latinos English is hilarious.

Nuff said. Y´all need Jesus. He is our eternal exemplar and FRIEND. This is pretty much the best thing to do ever, the mission! Let´s make miracles!

¨Don´t stop thinking about tomorrow! Don´t stop, it´ll soon be here!...Yesterday´s gone.....¨ -Fleetwood Mac

Love from Elder Wilcox

Rain? Please.

Hello my fellow disciples. How was your week? Mine was bastante interesting! But first here are some Fun Facts about G Conference here in Arg:

• We watched it in Spanish obviously. So it we didn´t ask questions like ¨Which talk did you like best?¨ more like ¨Which talk did you understand best?¨ My poor new comp´s answer was usually, ¨Well, none of them....¨
• It was still AMAZING. The music still remains in english, so HA. Deonne Stott, you looked incredible. And it was really cool, listening to the translater dudes. THEY even get choked up sometimes whilst dictating the talk. It´s cool when they do that. (Fun Fact: Elder Christofferson does his own translations. Like it´s a recording of him speaking spanish. He does really well.)
• I have a hard time looking right at the person. If I watched them directly, I found myself looking for english. It´s easier just to not look and listen to the spanish. So I looked like at the wall right next to the TV the whole time or something like that.
• We were going to have it in our chapel here in G. Rod. But the internet went down last minute. So we watched three sessions at a member´s house, and one in the neighboring city, Luján. We didn´t watch the priesthood session :( because of the time difference, it´s broadcasted at 9-11 PM. 

It was a great conference. Aren´t they all? I´m sure I wasn´t the only one worrying, when conference almost ended ¨Where is Elder Holland???¨ But he ended with a wonderful talk as well. I got some whisperings of the Spirit and learned a lot. Someone said on Saturday that the simple things of the Gospel may seem common, but are really profound truths. Like that we have a loving Heavenly Father who wants to forgive and bless us. I loved that, and used that fact in a lesson in between sessions on Sunday. Well, in that BEAUTIFUL lesson, we committed a Adriana y Hector to be baptized! ¨Gospel is true, book is blue.¨ I LOVE THE SPIRIT. Well, duh. But being on a mission makes you appreciate that. You KNOW when you do and when you don´t have the spirit in a lesson.

But FRIDAY. Let me tell you. From the outside in, it may appear as the worst day on my whole mission. But it was so ridiculously hard, it just became comical, and we were happy. Friday was the biggest rain storm ever. It POURED, but POURED. Somehow, on bikes, I´ve been ok with rain thus far. A little wet, but not too bad. So I didn´t wear a poncho or nothing. Well, I´ll skip to the end of the day.......we were walking the bikes home, mine wheel guard being bad due to a fall in the mud. Both of us were wetter than we have ever been, with or without a swimming pool. The water had long since infiltrated my ¨boots fit for the rain¨, so each foot had a wonderful little personal puddle to enjoy. Our bags and the contents contained therein were totally trashed and weeeeeeeet. BUT, we walked in to do damage control to our clothes and stuff with massive smiles 😁, having taught 5 lessons that day notwithstanding! We just decided to chuckle about it after a while, pondering at how big of a win God had this year on April Fool´s.

Other than that, just a week of miracles and awesomeness. We should be having the baptism of Walter y Graciela on saturday! Possibly those of Andrea y Kiara as well! So many MIRACLES. I love the work :) Have a wonderful week!

Love Elder Wilcox

(sometimes I get lazy I guess.....didn´t have any new pics this week. Here are some older ones!)
ONE from district mtg, and the OTHER from the Familia Juarez!

Feliz Pasua! (email from Mar 28)

So, this week. Sometimes here, or I guess in any foreign country, you see someone, and think ¨Gee, you look JUST like someone I know, but Argentine!¨ Well long story short, this week I met Argentine Kenny Loggins, Argentine Mozart, and Argentine Sally Baird.

BUT. This has been quite the week. If any of you are wondering, I have now put it on my list of ¨What every missionary needs at least once on the mission¨ is a polynesian companion! Elder Siale is a really awesome, HARD-WORKING elder! And this has been a ¨bonus¨ week together because we switched before transfers, so we are going to be together for at least 7 weeks! We are really focusing on our language studies, because he´s only got 3.5 ish months on the mission and I´ve been adjusting to being the one that is supposed to actually ¨know¨ spanish ha. It was a fun week though!

Obviously, as missionaries we would love the work to progress faster than it is. Like Elder Holland said once, ¨Why isn´t the only risk from missionary work from pnemonia, just soaking wet all day in the baptismal font?¨ Elder Cortes and I were able to baptize Exequil together. We had had these huge baptism goals and it was going to be great. But, like Whitney tells me, and like Elder Cortes told me, ¨We need to be grateful.¨ GRATEFUL. A baptism is SO much more than what it seems. We are able to participate in someone making ETERNAL covenants and moving along in their path towards exaltation. Quite the miracle, oportunity, and privilege. I´m grateful for that more and more. Especially in this last week of the ¨Pascua¨ (Easter).

Argentina is really Catholic, right? They take the pascua serious. They eat fish and weird bread that friday and saturday. We had something called ¨Guiso¨, which is just normal noodles and meat and tomatoes, but apparently has some Messianic significance. Also, this week Obama visited Argentina, and literally EVERYONE told us all about it. Kind of annoying after the 30th time. ¨Hey your President is here this week.¨ ¨Yes, we know.¨

Not anything too crazy, just loving life :) can´t wait for conference! Spanish version, yay!

Love Elder Wilcox

Pic: Service this week, building a house
Pic: ¨Prácticas¨ in the morning. I think we´ve got Thomas S. Monson converted!