Temple Trip

Hello Friends and Family,

Sorry that I didn't give ya'll the heads up last week, but we went to the temple this week and so they changed the preparation day for this Tuesday instead of Monday. Yea, my mom already rebuked me for that one;)

Other than that, it has been a super cool week! I don't have a ton of time, but I do want to share a few cool experiences and thoughts from this last week.

First of all, our mission has been approved to use online proselyting and so on Thursday, we headed to the library so that we could make some facebook pages. That was probably the first time that I have used a computer like that in public since I've been a missionary and to be honest, it felt a little bit like I was jumping back into the world a little bit. I did not like it. To make things worse, for some reason this dark feeling came over me and the spirit left. I felt this empty pit in my stomach and felt super weak and scared. I have no idea why that happened, but the first thing I saw was a Book of Mormon that I had brought with me into the library. I snatched it up and as soon as I opened it (I hadn't even read anything yet) those feeling fled and the Spirit came back full force. It was such a huge testimony to me of the Book of Mormon and how no matter what we are doing, it can bring the Spirit into our lives. Even though Elder Buttars gave me a weird look when it happened, we promised eachother that we would always have a Book of Mormon with us when we were on the internet and I'm stickin to that!

We also had a goal a couple weeks ago of talking to 15 white people every day (we were scared to talk to them and had to get over our fear because our area is literally puros gueros) and we decided that if we did it, we would have a camp-out on our porch. We even made a little campfire (see pictures below). It was great fun and I told myself that at least it was "almost camping".

Finally, we were able to go to the temple this morning and it was fantastic. It has been a year almost to the day since I've been and I felt so much peace and comfort that I can't even describe. GO TO THE TEMPLE!!!

Love you all so much, thanks for still stickin with me for over a year and if you want to be facebook friends and follow my online prostelyting adventures, my username is still Samuel John Arkoudas. Thanks Love you!

Elder Arkoudas

Pic.1: went to a Jewish deli inbetween conference sessions. It was actually pretty good; just a weird picture.

pic.2: Campout

pic.3-5: Temple trip with the zone