Hey everyone! I hope you've all had a fantastic week:) thanks for all of your thoughts and prayers, the Lord gives those with faith blessings and I can feel how strong all of your faith is from your prayers and love!
We are already in September!! That is a wild thought. I am pretty sure that everyone back at home has started school now or is about to so I hope your first weeks have been super great! The kids here are going to start school this next week! That is one of my favorite things to ask is what grade they are going into especially if they look either Ashlynn or Analees age because then I get to brag about my sister's and how great they are haha! I just love getting to talk about my family to people. Anytime somebody says they are from Mexico the first thing I say is that my younger brother Carson is serving a mission in Mexico City! And people who are pretty newly married I get to talk about Braeden and his wife. And the Hispanic moms here are some of the sweetest woman and so I get to talk about my mom a lot because she is like my best friend from home and I tell them how much I love my mom and that they are doing a great job with their children too! And whenever I talk to somebody about work I get to talk to them about my dad and tell him how great it is to be able to have such a hard working dad! I sure did get the greatest family and I love getting to talk about how families can be together forever because I am so glad I am sealed to my family and get to live with them forever!!
It's so cool looking back on times earlier in my mission and think about how far I have come as a person and especially with my Spanish! Yesterday in the Spanish class we have at church we were talking about los dones espírituales that the Lord gives us and it is so apparent how much the Lord has been in my life with helping me learn Spanish!
There is 1 super active Hispanic family here, the De La Rosa's and they are from the Dominican Republic. One of the sons just got back from his mission in March and he has had 2 of his cousins here from the Dominican Republic working over the summer and making money so that they can go on missions too! Such a humbling experience, but they have definitely become some of my best friends here in Janesville and in the mission. They had to go back to the Dominican Republic for school though and I am so sad! They had great testimonies and helped with my Spanish and were just great friends and great people and they made a huge impact on my life! That's probably one of the hardest things as a missionary is saying bye to someone if you're leaving the area or they leave, but they said they would visit me and I definitely want to visit them after the mission!
We had zone conference this week which was awesomeeeeee. Our new mission president has so much energy its so funny haha. But a lot of the trainings were focused on setting goals and making plans to achieve those goals and then doing it! One of my favorite quotes was "without plans, goals are just hopes". And that's so true! It really made me want to set goals that are achievable and plans to achieve all the goals that I set.
We have still been able to talk to a lot more people in Spanish than the first couple weeks I was here but still not teaching many of them! There was a full family that came to sports night with us on Tuesday and we are hoping to give them a church tour and invite them to come to church with us next week because they asked a little bit about it last week! We have seen lots of little blessings through the past 2 weeks of just being able to talk to people and share the light of Christ with them and it is so awesome and fun being able to just talk to people in Spanish! I love getting to share something that makes me so happy with others!
'It is the Holy Ghost who helps us to recognize what God has done for us and it is the one who helps those we serve recognize what God has done for them.' Because we all need the Holy Ghost in our lives to help protect us from the things of the world. We need to live in a way that we can ALWAYS have the Spirit to be with us wherever we go!
Thanks for your great examples to me!! I love you all!
DO GOOD BE GOOD
Love,
Elder T. Ricks
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