February 1, 2017

We went to the temple this week, I don't remember what I already told you about that but it was way cool. It was cool to walk into the celestial room and see all the worthy missionaries asking for guidance from the Lord. Plus I did it in all Spanish and saw a video I've never seen before which was cool. Today was Sunday, and Sundays in the CCM are the best. We met with presidente machado (branch president) and he is so loving and awesome. Here's my favorite quotes from church today "the sin of omission, you can lock yourself in a box and say you lived a perfect life but you are committing the sin of omission, we are called to be in the world and to lift and serve and edify those around us. By doing nothing we might as well be doing wrong 'to whom much is given, much is required'" and "we don't magnify the priesthood, the priesthood is already magnificent, we magnify the service, we magnify the work, and the priesthood will magnify us." Also, a spiderman quote applied to the sin of omission, "when you can do what we can, it's our fault when people get hurt" and it's talking about superheroes, but knowing what we know, it is on our heads when we don't share the gospel. We have to have faith and not be afraid because fear is selfish and prideful and fear is the opposite of faith. Also, "by small and simple things are great things brought to pass", we are small and simple things. Sorry for being all weird and spiritual, I also ate like 5 corn dogs and instant mashed potatoes for dinner. I ate lunch with Presidente Bennette (CCM president) on Saturday and he hit me with all bunches of knowledge, we're getting to know each other because he really likes our district and we always ask him questions about how to be better missionaries, Saturdayy I asked him how to hit the ground running out of the MTC and he said  "The MTC isn't a landing pad, it's a launch pad into our missions which is a launch pad for our lives, the moon is 284000 miles from Earth, but they use 75% of their fuel in the first 25 miles, we need to go balls to the wall until we break out of the atmosphere and defy gravity." And then keep going hard because you are not saved until you have stayed faithful your whole life. Our mission doesn't end until we are dead and safely buried in our coffins. That last part is an elder eves quote, he's a senior missionary that works here. I also asked Presidente Bennette on Saturday what good missionaries have in common and he says they don't just believe the principle, they internalize it. He said "do you believe in Christ or do you believe Christ. It's easy to believe hell died on the cross and Yada Yada, but do you truly believe in your heart the words of Christ and that he came to the earth to save you specifically. Do you believe that in and through only Christ that your investigators change their lives and endure to the end. Today was good, I don't know anything noteworthy that happened, we went and helped some random new district and they were really obnoxious and didn't want us to teach them, every time we would try to correct them they would argue with us so we left. Hermano Barroterán left today to go to tijuana to be with his fiance, it was pretty sad and we sang "para siempre dios este con voz". We are about to put 16 people on elder starnes bed so that's cool. We played beach volleyball today and that was fun I guess, and then elder Schmidts kicked the volleyball on the roof. Today I played soccer with Latinos FINALLY and it was the most fun I've had since I've been here, it was awesome. They were so good but not way better so it was perfect. I can't wait to get in the field and play all the time with guadalajarensos  (that's not actually what they're called) we had pizza tonight and that was neat but I only got 3 pieces because we ran out.
 Also, I finished my lesson with one of our investigators and walked outside because it was raining and I saw these Hermanas with luggage so me and Elder koyle started talking to them and next thing you know she says "hey I have your retainer" we were the first people they talked to when they got here, it was awesome. Tender mercies :D Our district had a really good discussion today about how to internalize commandments and how to teach it to our kids and internalize it and be converted to Christ and not to the church. We started meditating last night and its weird but refreshing. What's going on in your neck of the woods? 

January 27, 2017

I am writing this each night, kinda like my journal, so it might be confusing and scatterbrained but here goes.

Today was really good, it was sunday and we had a super awesome lesson about the atonement.  Some of today's good quotes are "the gospel is simple but not easy" "Christ is the author of our salvation" we watched the feed my sheep video by Elder Holland and it was awesome.

 Today elder Francom sprained his ankle so we were way late to lunch and didn't get much food which was lame. We hung out with a lot of Latinos which was super fun because Latinos are a party and it's fun town to practice our Spanish. I ate cinco pieces of pizza today. It was pretty wild. We bonded super close with the Latinos at our table which was funtown. I had a pretty sweet practice lesson with elder andrus today. He's an elder from another district but I wish he was from my district because he's a stud (he wrote that part). There was also a devotional where the area seventy spoke. He asked us some deep provoking questions like how we're going to become more faithful and also how we are going to be blessed from our missions.

 I taught a book of Mormon lesson to our district and nobody said anything so it was kinda lame. I have the world's worst headache at the moment. Today we went to a broadcast to all the missionary that changed the schedule and there were a bunch of good quotes, we can now study whenever we want throughout the day, lunch is only half an hour now, and p day is longer. 

"You can't teach repentance until you practice repentance" "be humble enough to turn unto Christ and depend on him, don't be afraid to share the gospel, fear is the opposite of faith, and it is selfish" "our testimony is not what we say, it's what we are."

 I am a zone leader now so that's rad I guess. There's 6 Hermanas and only 4 elders so idk how to help them, but we'll see how it goes. Today we helped the new district learn Spanish and they are so so so lost, I feel bad and I don't really know what to teach them, but me and Elder Oldroyd taught them how to pray and some other basic stuff which was fun.  We ate dinner with the Latinos again, we've been doing it all week and we're getting pretty close which was awesome. We had a funny conversation trying to explain the difference between weed and wheat to the Latinos. They always teach us fun tongue twisters that ruin our lives. We did daily planning, next week is our last week in the CCM, so that's pretty cool, I feel like I'm going to get In the field and not know any Spanish, but right now I am trying my best to practice talking to Latinos to get ready. My p day is Wednesday next week so make sure you get on to chat, and then next Monday we roll out to guadalajara. We are flying instead of riding a bus, which means I have less time to sleep and I have to get my weight down on my bags because we have 90 pounds of books. 

What's going on around home momma? How's Owen? Totally potty trained? What are Kennedy and Andrew up to? Does Skye have a job yet? How's the addition looking? Does my truck work? Don't throw away my tannerite please. Do you know when my retainer is sposed to get here? My mouth hurts to eat and for no reason most of the time and it gives me headaches. How are you doing? Get any haircuts lately? How's dad? Tell him I think he's old, does he have Grey hair yet?  How's Andrew doing in school? Does he like working at dad's office? Did you and Kennedy make league of legends accounts yet? You should take all the cameras off my phone and put them on my computer or something please. Tell me whatever else is new.

Mom - "what happened to the elder's ankle?"

Elder francom landed wrong playing volleyball, that was on tuesday, but its always wrapped so the first time i saw it was yesterday, his foot is destroyed, his entire foot is purple and his ankle is the size of a softball. thats so dumb, you shouldve sent my retainer to ´puerta vallarta with kennedy and had her stop by a post office or something :p i was saying specific prayers that it would ship faster and get here, but i guess that wasnt working.

 I´m not sure what else you can do, 

  We eat a lot of chicken and rice in different sauces with different salsa, this morning i had some corn flower drink which was good. elder anderson is coming in a couple weeks, but we wont be here.I havent gotten any of your letters yet, I wonder if they lost the one you sent through email because they didnt see it and just did the package. 

Mom - "How is the mexican pizza?"

The pizza is from costco so its good and greasy and american. 

Mom - "give me info on living arrangements, how many missionaries arrived when you did, etc."

 There are 17 elders in my house, we came with like 26 people from the airport, and 50 new people got here the week i did. There was this random blonde lady at the airport that spoke perfect spanish and she helped us all get through customs and gave us a bunch of advice, then she asked our bus driver if she could hitch a ride, then she just got off the bus at the sketchiest part of the city by herself and walked off into the sunset, it was so weird but kind of cool. 4 ish per bedroom, its a party. yes, the first couple weeks i was too focused to pay attention, but two weeks ago 90 new kids came and this week 60 came. Our new district is all serving state side. 4 of them are going to provo

January 20, 2017

We hung out with the other Elders in our house a lot which was fun but wasn't the greatest for our sleep schedule I don't think. There's a new CCM president and he's really awesome, I would vote for him as president of the United States. In Devo he said "if God had blessed me with everything I wanted I wouldn't have half of what I've got" which I thought was super true and super awesome. He also said "in the gospel we don't care about probabilities or likelihood, we have a task at hand so we go out and we do" which was rad. Also in Devo, someone had a bop it that was going off in the middle of the meeting (no idea why someone had that at all, or brought it to devo) but he said "brother eves, take that thing and incinerate it for all I care" he was fairly unhappy, it was funny though. One of our devos was broadcast from provo and Monson Wadsworth gave the closing prayer so that was rad. I've gotten a lot more into teaching our fake investigator this week, we're helping one of them stop smoking and I have a really good time when we teach her. My Spanish is so good, and our entire district is getting so much better. I've been reading Jesus the Christ a lot this week and it's crazy awesome, everyone should read it. I coincidentally came across a lot of scriptures about secret combinations this week so I studied them a little, and it's actually super scary. We also learned to "be bold with love" which i thought was a cool quote and "never let your lack of faith be the reason someone doesn't receive promised blessings". We played volleyball with Latinos during gym time and it was super fun today. We read ether 3 today and talked about it a lot, it's a good chapter. Hermano Osorio (the boss man that always comes in our class) has been in our language study lately which is obnoxious because he doesnt let us study what we want to. This week was good though, better than last week. I'm still ready to get out of here though. My companion is still super weird but hilarious and I love him. We taught our teachers today and they pretended they didn't know Spanish and spoke in awful Spanish In super American accents to make fun of us and answered all our questions wrong, and it was so funny. And there's certain phrases that grammatically make sense when directly translated but they're slang for innuendo so they kept saying stuff like that that we have said that we didn't understand when we first got here and it was way fun. And we also try to teach our teachers English words that are hard for them to say, like fair bear beard bird, they say all of them like "bur" and it's hilarious. We're going to immigration to get our residency cards right now so I'll email more in a couple hours, let me know what's going on and ask any questions and I'll get back to you. I'll hopefully be on around 3 Mexico time, so if you get on around then we can chat.

Also, somehow our Hermanas talked a lady that's a senior missionary into baking us a cake for elder Oldroyds birthday, but we're the only other ones that know about it but our district is going to be so excited once they find out we have a cake, I can't wait.

And I love you.

I got the jerky, thanks a ton. I haven't gotten any letters or my retainer yet though. I'm not sure if I'm ready to be a real missionary, probly not. I want to get out there and learn Spanish more though, there's too many Americans in here for me to get too good.  Immigration was super fun today, we talked to a ton of latinos, that was probly the best part. The worst part was probably hermano Osorio being annoying, he treats us like they're 8. Knowing Spanish has been my biggest blessing because I can help people a lot. It took like 2 hours to get to immigration but half an hour to get home, a visa is to get here, residency card is to stay here.

January 13, 2017

This week was pretty much exactly the same as last week. They have our days to every 15 minutes planned out, there's not much new. Tomorrow we start teaching real investigators so I'm excited for that. We have role play lessons with our teachers, which is good but it's hard for me to get too into it or to pray for fake people. Yesterday my fake investigator that we've been teaching for a week told us she has drug problems and is in a custody battle for her daughter, which shook things up pretty good, especially because my companion didn't understand what was going on and I was changing the lesson plan. That makes lessons difficult sometimes. We're going to the temple today, it's closed so that's lame but they said the visitor center will be fun town. It's fun to be outside the walls. My district is still fun and we are still learning cool stuff. Last Sunday we talked about the light of Christ and the Holy Ghost and the difference and it didn't make a ton of sense, but this week our district talked about it some and it was really cool. The light of Christ is the inherent goodness in people, because Christ's grace is so perfect it is in everyone. We compared Christ's light to real light, it helps stuff grow and brings warmth and makes you happier and stuff, idk. But the light of Christ is you realizing that you maybe shouldn't touch the stove, and the Holy Ghost is like your mom telling you not to touch the stove. As a district we couldn't find anywhere in the scriptures where it mentions the holy ghost in the preexistence or where the holy ghost comes from, but we know he took Adam to get baptized and the beginning of the world, but then he wasn't on the earth again until after Christ died. We didn't have a teacher for any of this so maybe we're wrong, but that's what we figured out as a district. Also we learned that when the money changers are in the temple and Jesus goes and chastises them, but the head priest was making money off of the money changers by renting out plots in the temple so he gets mad and threatens Jesus,  and Jesus says "destroy my temple and i will raise it up in 3 days" and     you think he is talking about the temple until you realize your body is a temple and he was talking about the resurrection. Not much new is going on, we play soccer and volleyball a lot which is fun. One of the bosses is in one of our classes most of the time, and our teacher is like our age so he gets really uptight when his boss is sitting in our classes which makes things really boring. Idk what else to say.  Does my truck work?  Tell Andrew I'm mad he didn't email again. What's going on with life in fallon? Is everything still frozen? I should've brought a better jacket. Are you gonna get my retainer here? I love you. Let me know what's new, and tell Baylee to email me please.

It is fun here, i feel unproductive which isnt my favorite but im having fun. Thanks for the videos. I hope my retainer gets here too. Its going to wreck my mouth when i wear it after having not worn it for a month

Mom: Why don't you feel productive?

because i am not learning much spanish, ive plateaud a lot. we arent shceduled to learn present regular verbs until day 30, and thats what you learn first week of freshman year. I try to practice speaking, but i feel like sitting in a classroom isnt the best way for me to learn at this point

Also, everyone in my district thinks you hate me because you havent sent me any packages ;) i wouldnt complain if you sent me some jerky or something through that website :p

January 6, 2017

So we didn't get to the CCM until like 7:00 last Tuesday but it was pizza night so we got a good dinner. Wednesday was quite possibly the longest day of my life, it sucked. The first week was pretty rough, I haven't been home sick or anything, the days were just so long and you work so hard, it's exhausting. This last week was good though. It's pretty wild down here, new years everyone was shooting fireworks like crazy all day and all night, all over the city. In the morning there were lanterns and dud fireworks all over the lawns here. We joked about it being like a prison in here because we aren't allowed to leave and there's a ten foot fence all around that's topped with razor wire. We were supposed to go to the temple today but they're rioting in the streets about gas prices so the roads are all blocked off. I guess thats what the fences are for. But the riots mean we can't go to the temple, so that's stupid. Theres no news in here so we didnt know what was going on, but there were alarms going off like crazy, and sirens, and helicopters with spotlights, and we had to wait until we saw our teacher the next day to ask what was going on. Also, it's Elder Oldroyds birthday on the 22 (he's one of my roommates, he's also the kicker for BYU). So we were trying to get someone to bring us in a cake if we paid them, we asked like 4 people, but the aren't allowed to take anything in or out  (again prison). They said the closest thing to cake they've ever seen in here is donuts. Then last night these two elders knock on our window at like  10:455 which is after everyone is sposed to be in bed, and the gave us a death by chocolate cake. We have no idea how they got it, but we were soooo excited. And my companion got 2 dozen donuts yesterday so we were pumped. There's like 8 guys here, including my companion, that are going to guadalajara and they are super fun. We call ourselves the guadalahomies or the guadsquad and have a handshake and everything, they're fun. They left a note in our classroom that said "roses are red, violets are blue, don't tell the mission president that I love you" and our teacher saw it and was concerned, it was super awkward. My district is so awesome, there are 6 elders and 2 Hermanas and we're all pretty close. My companion is elder koyle and he is so weird I love it, he isn't like socially awkward weird, but the way he views the world is ridiculous, and he always shares his weird observations and they are so funny. I write his funny quotes in my journal. He worked as an electrician and he talks about it all the time, one of my favorite quotes is "if I got sent home for an injury my dad would say 'welcome home you stupid idiot, I hope you remember how to wire a switch. Your but better be in the truck at 6. If not, you're sleeping in the truck tomorrow night. Oh, and it's cold'" and he talks like napoleon dynamite. Everything he says is like a 6 funny, but elder Oldroyds laugh is so funny  that it makes everything way more funny. We also have elder Whiteman in our room, he is super smart and knows a bunch of stuff. Our district is the only intermediate Spanish district right now, so we all have the best Spanish in here, and we have ipads while we're in the CCM.  I'm the district leader so that's cool I guess. They spelled my name tag wrong, I have new ones now but by the time I got them everyone already knew me as elder koening. There's green parakeets flying get around like pigeons here. Our Casita is next to the road so we always here gunshots at night but we just pretend they're fireworks. We have a Latino friend and all he knows how to say in English is "high five" and then after you high five him he says "don't touch me". It's pretty funny. It's crazy how spiritual it is here, I am speaking Spanish so well, I can hold full conversations in our lessons, it's like I can remember all the Spanish I've ever learned. But one night our zone leaders told us to go over to their room during language study and we asked our teacher if we could go over there and he said it was okay. So we went over and they were being super crazy and out of control so we left, then we were trying to do language study and it's like I forgot all my Spanish because I didn't have the spirit. It was weird. My district is super focused and spiritual and on topic. We hardly ever goof off, we have a good time but we still have sweet spiritual discussions all the time. It's pretty cold in the morning, like 50 maybe, but it gets up to 80 during the day. The food is alright, I just eat everything. Everyone always complains about the food, but I think they're going to die when they get out in the field.  And tell Andrew I'm angry he didn't email me. What's going on around home? Tell me things.  Hope it's all going well. Much love.

Elder Koenig Mexico Guadalajara Mission December 27, 2016

December 27, 2016
Hey, im here and I am alive. I am also very hungry. My P-day wont be until next friday. My district in the mtc gets iPads. I have met a lot of cool guys from my mission but still havent got into my room. I leave this MTC February 6th.  sorry, theres not much time

Welcome Owen!

On Tuesday, October 7, 2014 Owen Andrew arrived to K and A!  I, arrived just twenty minutes or so before he did.  It took him a bit longer, but I had a longer drive.  Everyone is doing great, and K and A are going to be such good parents, I can already tell.  I was able to capture a few moments of their happiness.  Owen weighed 7 lbs 6 oz and is 19 inches long