Glad Tidings of Great Joy

Hey everybody. A quick note. We went to Coyhaique at the begging of this week. It was gorgeous. A wonderful, quick trip. Even saw flamingos out there. And a tiny bit of snow. Ricardo got the Aaronic Priesthood last Sunday and is doing super well! He is going out to visit with the other missionaries too since we have been gone a lot. The new President gets here tomorrow and then we take a tour of the mission. Time is very short but great things are happening. I hope to get some good fotos to share afterwards! Love Elder Brighton

Whelp, we just finished a meeting with a couple of guys from Salt Lake about getting the phones here in our mission. It's basically left in our hands to figure it all out. A great lesson in self-reliance. *nervous chuckle* These next couple of weeks are going to be pretty crazy for us. In 10 days the new president arrives, and the following week we will be traveling to visit all of the zones in the mission. I apologize in advance if my writing becomes scarce. We had a fun week with various intercambios and learned a lot. Had a great experience in Valdivia with setting goals and doing all the possible to complete them. We wanted to find a new person to teach in the little time we had and we had a set a goal for the number of contacts so we were contacting and knocked on a door and it opened. She invited us right in and we were able to teach about the Restoration and she was so happy and wanted to learn more. Now we gotta find more people like that in our sector here!! Ri

At the beginning of this week, we had our Consejo de Líderes and all of the Zone Leaders and Hermana Leaders from the mission traveled (by plane, bus, taxi, etc) here to Osorno. I was assigned to talk a little bit about how to achieve goals and some of the mission goals. ( I guess that is what I get for setting the goal of learning how to set and achieve goals at the beginning of this year.)  I was pretty nervous for the time I was given and I made like 3 pages of notes and outlines for it but still went into it without any real concrete idea of what would happen. I had been praying and fasting though that I could do it well and follow the Spirit. With that peace in mind, I had my time and it went really well. We were able to talk through a few things and ideas and set some new goals for the mission. Some of the ideas that Elder Anderson shared in a training recently include the idea of stair step goals. That we set small, achievable goals and slowly increase them. He said that about 1

Yesterday we had our Sunday of Fast and testimony meeting. It was the best Sunday meeting I've ever had in my life I think. It started off with a great Ward Council in the morning and I think that just kinda set the tone for the rest of the day in the chapel.  We taught Ricardo a couple of lessons this week. One of the lessons we taught about Fasting and paying tithing and fast offerings. Ricardo fasted with us, and even paid a fast offering on Sunday. During one of the lessons Elder Zamudio invited Ricardo to share his testimony in the meeting on Sunday if he wanted to. Sunday rolled around and the meeting started. I shared my testimony and others as well. There was a pause of people going up and I kinda looked over at Ricardo and he kinda gathered himself, stood up, and marched to the podium. He shared his testimony about the Book of Mormon. It was so incredible to see and hear. Two or three weeks ago he asked us what a testimony was. He also had a ton of questions about the