Last week of the Cycle

Kumusta sa inyong tanan!!??

So this week was pretty solid once again.  We actually had one of our best weeks of the cycle finding and teaching people. We keep finding a bunch of new people and then we have to sort through who is actually potential and who is just to nice to say no.  That's mainly the challenge of missionary work in the Philippines. 

One of the best parts of the week was I went on exchanges with Elder Quirante.  He is from Texas but is Filipino so everyone is super surprised when they realize he is not fluent in Cebuano haha.  But we had a super good day and taught 9 lessons.  We should be getting like 3 or 4 baptisms in November if everything works out.  Fingers crossed.

This is the last week of the cycle and Elder Arienda might be transferring on Wednesday so I will let you know what happens. You never know with President Argana but it's always exciting. 

Sorry it wasn't a super interesting week for anything but we working hard and I am really enjoying it here in Sogod.  Also just to add I just hit the war chapters in the Book of Mormon and I realized how faithful Captain Moroni is, one of the verses is like the very powers of hell were shaken.  I know if we are righteous we can too can shake the powers of hell and the devil will have no power over us.

Question from mom and dad - How does your new washing machine work?  um I will take a picture of it next week but it basically you have to manually fill it with water and then in goes for like 10 minutes then you empty and fill it up again to rinse everything and then it has a spin dryer that gets the clothes around 90% dry so it's pretty nice.  It takes around 1 to 1 and a half hours.

Thanks for all the emails

Love you tons!!!

Elder Holmstead

Philippines Tacloban Mission

Pics of our district meeting with the Bontoc district and Me and Elder Arienda

Zone Conference October 2018

Elder Holmstead and Elder Arienda

Sogod Zone

Seated l-r: Sisters Iulai’vailua, STL, Belleza, STL, Vinculado, Amundsen, P/S Argana, Escalona,DLT, Labis, DL, Egam, Cardenio

Back row: Elders Calapit, McMullin, Quirante, DLT, Urdiales, Holmstead, ZL, Smith, Adams, Graham, Arienda, ZL, Deponio, DL

Elder Holmstead conducting the meeting

Another round of demo teaching

Who's my real companion??

This week was another great week. Mao ra gihapon (Same as usual)

One highlight was that Sister Kristine got baptized.  She has been an investigator for over 6 months and we were really happy to see her progress.  She stopped drinking coffee, and had some problems with modesty but now she is really good and we are excited for her. 

One sad note is Bro. Marlon decided he does not want to be baptized right now.  We were a little bit discouraged but then we had these investigators named Michael and Daisy who are living in but come to church every week finally decide that they want to get married.  Miracles so we gave them an IBD for the end of November.  We also got referred to the Monter Family.  Their daughter Janel is friends with a member and comes to church every week so she also has a goal to get baptized at the start of December.  Thanks about it for progressing investigators.  The family of 6, Colonia Family is not really ready right now but we will keep trying.

Some other fun stuff that happened was that we had 2 different exchanges this week.  One was with the Hilongos elders who is a training area. Elder Adams is from Cedar City so he was giving me all the updates on the happenings of Southern Utah haha.  We had a good time.

Next we had exchanges with the Libagon Elders so I was back with good old Elder Escalona.  It was fun to have exchanges with him and to be back to together.  He goes home in December so that was the last time I will get to work with him but it was fun.  We were saying it is crazy how fast the mission goes because we were companions when he hit his year mark and now he is going home.

Me and Elder Arienda are doing really good.  I am loving the Zone Leader craziness pa and it's fun.  We only had to travel once this past week so I was happy about that.  

Question from Mom & Dad: Tell us about a day in the life of your mission.  Answer from Wade:  Okay so a normal day for elder holmstead is arise at 6:30 then we exercise.  I am not super good at exercising but I try haha.  We eat breakfast which is usually oatmeal or eggs or pancit canton and then we have personal study.  I have been studying the Book of Mormon trying to highlight all the references to Christ and I am in Alma 39 right now it is really cool to see how often Christ is mentioned in the BoM, like every verse.  I have also been reading the Bible because we are encouraged to teach from the Bible a lot more lately so I have been trying to learn more.  We do finding or street contacting in the morning so wherever we go in the area depends on what we want.  This area has been a little tough to find so we have been working with members a lot.  For lunch Elder Arienda usually cooks us up some good filipino food or we eat out.  We have tons of restaurants here in Sogod so I like eating out here.  My favorite is called TexMex, Pizza, and BBQ house which serves basically all american food :) My favorite thing there is the Dutch Apple Pie, heavenly.  We spend the afternoons with comp study, language study and contacting or visiting investigators, members, las, rcs just depends on what we plan for and we are home by 8:30.  We eat dinner, usually we have been getting fed by the members for dinners so this is becoming one of my favorite areas haha.  So yeah that's about a normal day.

Love you tons!! Have a Great Week and Happy Birthday Dad!!!!

Elder Holmstead

Philippines Tacloban Mission

Sister Kristine's baptism with Elder Arienda

Exchanges

District Training Meeting

Conference Weekend

Well I was way excited for Conference and as usual I loved it.    I am having a really hard time choosing a favorite and I have forgotten a lot but here is just some of my favorites:

I really loved the story about the temple from Bishop Davies and listening to a prophet.  It was just a theme for me that Prophets really know better than we do and blessings come as we follow.

Also the story of the Sheep Dog with the sheep on the Mountains in the cold.  Really good reminder to care for people especially all the missionaries in my zone.

The funniest joke for me was when President Nelson said he was the mother of 10 children.  I was laughing really hard.

Some of my favorites were also Elder Holland of course and I really liked Elder Renlund's talk as well.  

As I was taking notes during the first session my pen exploded and I was a little disappointed but then I got a thought  "Don't write what you hear, remember what you feel" and as I applied this I got some cool promptings that answered questions I had that weren't directly said.  

One note as well, Me and Elder Arienda have been working really hard to use the full name of the Church because the people here only know our church as the mormons and I have seen that as we have been doing it people are more interested or they ask more questions so it's true for sure.

Aside from Conference we also had more exchanges and I went with another new missionary and had to rely almost entirely on my cebuano.  A trike driver told me my cebuano was really good so I was pretty happy, lots to improve pa.  We also had interviews with President Argana and he challenged us to have more faith and to really encourage our zone as well.  As I have been taking this challenge I have learned and seen more miracles in our work.

Question from mom & dad: What do your STL's do and what responsibilities do you have as a Zone Leader?

So as the zone leaders we are responsible for the whole zone the STL's don't really do anything, because we only have 2 companionships of sisters.  We have to do exchanges every cycle with every district leader(we have 4) and training companionships and give a training at all of their district meetings so we get pretty busy traveling and preparing trainings and doing exchanges but it keeps us really busy which I like.

Love you tons!!

Sorry no pics this week :(

Elder Holmstead

Philippines Tacloban Mission

Faith to Find the Elect

Hey Y'all

This week has been another crazy week.  Lots of stuff going on but I enjoyed it a lot. 

I had two exchanges with new missionaries this week including one who is just out of the MTC.  It was really fun to feel their enthusiasm and to see the fire of new missionaries.  Not to say my fire has gone down of anything you can just see the excitement.  But one thing was I had to rely almost entirely on my Cebuano and I was again reminded about the truthfulness of the Gift of Tongues and how important it is to bring the Spirit to lessons.  One of my favorite quotes from Preach My Gospel says something to this effect  The language of the Spirit can communicate with anyone regardless of language barriers. 

We also had our zone conference this week.  It was a really good time to see a bunch of missionaries from around the mission and to hear the revelation from President Argana.  He challenged us to always have the faith to find the elect.  They are being prepared by the lord and we just have to do our best to find them.  Good reminder for me.

Me and Elder Arienda have been working a lot with Sister Kristine this week and we ended up needing to push her baptism until October 20.  She has been making a lot of changes in her life and is doing really well but we decided to really make sure she has a strong testimony before she is baptized.  She is doing really well and I am excited for her.  Yesterday we also had a little miracle as we were finding.  We were looking for a potential investigator we taught last week and approached a house and found out it was a less active sister with 6 kids that have the potential to get baptized so we are going to try to help them out.

Also shout out for a new temple in Davao!!!! and Washington County!!!!  I am super excited to watch general conference next week and will look out for all the favorites you told me :)

Love you tons!!! The church is true!!!

Elder Holmstead

Philippines Tacloban Mission

Saints and MLC

Another super good week.  Mao ra gihapon

We started off the week in Tacloban for MLC and it was a super good time.  Most of my batch is now zone leaders so I got to see almost all of them so that was a great time.  We had an outdoor FHE because the weather was really good and then we ended with a big boodle fight.  The next day we had a really good MLC and President Argana gave a really good training about recognizing patterns from the scriptures and in our lives.  Really powerful.

Me and Elder Arienda organized a Member Missionary Fireside for our branch and we gave a training to the members about how to overcome the fears of missionary work and we gave them challenge to all give us a referral so I am hoping we get some good member participation this next week.

Our investigators are all progressing really well.  On Saturday Kristine has her baptismal interview so keep her in your prayers.  We have finally had some time to do some finding and it was successful.  We contacted a former investigator family of 5 and they were super interested and have come to church before so we are going to see if we can get them to start progressing.  We should have 2 baptisms for sure in October and the whole mission hit 129 baptisms this past month so we are super excited.

Oh and this last week I ordered the new Saints History of the Church book and I already finished it.  It was super good and I definitely recommend it.  I learned a bunch of new stuff about church history and it was amazing to see how strong and faithful some of the first members were.  

That's about it for this week.  Congrats to Brock for his baptism!!

Amping kamo.  Naghigugma ko so injo!!!

Elder Holmstead

Philippines Tacloban Mission