James’ Mission Sept ‘24 - Sept ‘26 San Pablo Philippines

Im with you Gavin these intros are always a little awkward😅 but hey welcome to another weekly email! Its pretty crazy to me that this is my 50th week out here time is flying by. This week was great we had zone con and exchanges and... rats. Freaking rats.🐀 First off on the more spiritual side, Zone con was amazing. Probably the best zone con that I have had yet. we sang as a whole zone, which was so fun. It was so good our mission president made us sing it twice for the senior couples. The spirit was so strong all zone cone I love the holy ghost👻 Literal Chills🥶🧊 Ill throw the video in the google photos later👍 I don't have much else to talk about this week besides the freaking rats😭 I dont know what happened because my apartment is super nice but there is this one rat that keeps getting into our apartment and it keeps freaking me out😹💀 for a little bit of context, the rats here are not normal rats. This dude is the size of a cat and its terrifying 😹 I do not mess with ...

👋 hello! I hope everone is doing amazing and had a great week. My week was awesome. So many cool things happened that I forgot every single one of them😅 Exept one, Hence the title☝️😁😁😁 Holy fetch I am so excited🤗 This is all I have been thinking about for the whole past week but first here's some context. So In the Philippines, if you wanna go golfing you have to buy a membership and Its crazy expensive. (pretty much only for the Mayaman, or rich) The only golf here thats public is the range... But God is soooo good🙏🤗 Me and my comp were doing some finding and we saw this super nice house with some golf clubs so we figured why not try and teach him. This dude is so awesome. You can tell hes so rich but he is so humble and let us in his house right away and then gave us a ride to our next area🙏😆 In the car we were chattin it up and me and him have like the same story w/ basketball and injuries and he said he just picked up golf because of his injury. Then HE INVITED US T...

This week was great!! Heres some stats for you all Stats: •Lessons: too many to count •Times working out: 0 •Pictures with random Filipinos: 7 •Baptisms: 1!! We had the baptism of Shyla!!! Ill put pics in the bottom! God is so good. Her family from Bolacan also wants to be baptized and follow her which is a huge miracle.😇 Reason for the title is because I still feel like a celebrity when all of these little filipinos are asking for pics and staring and pointing saying "Americano ba iyan" or "is that an american" I cant wait to get humbled when I come home and none of the girls wanna take a pic w me or stare at me as I walk past them🤣🤣 anywayss 😅 on the more spiritual side I wanna share something I learned about covenants during our baptism. In D&C 82:10 it says "I the Lord am bound when ye do what I say." When we make covenants with Go, he👆 is bound to give us the blessings that he promised us. Which are soooo many. Basic lang iyan haha My...

Manandang umaga po😆🤌🏻 Life is so good right now and this cycle is definitely gonna be a big one for me. Me and my comp are learning so much and having so much fun so yeah life is good over here in the pines. This week was a week that I will always remember and hopefully change me, my mission, and my whole life. I pretty much had a moment where God told me I need to be better and Im excited to see what happens and how I can improve and become more consecrated for the rest of my mission and life. About the baptsim... We ended up having to push that back to this next sunday Aug 3, Because her parents are coming to witness her baptism!! hopefully they can also gain a testimony and start being taught as well! Other than that nothing much is new. Just got a care package from home and opening that felt like the best christmas ever haha. Thanks mom love you😁❤️ Love you all and miss you! next week ulit. lab² Broke a chair while teaching😭😂 If any of you were wondering if I was getti...

Hey everyone, how are you guys doing?? This week has flown by so fast and has been an amazing week. I've had so many crazy experiences and I never would have thought that I would love the MTC as much as I do, hence the title. Like I say every week, every day is the exact same but it's the small things every week that get me through it. Me and Elder Smith have been grinding the push ups during each of our breaks. We get 4 breaks a day so I do 50 pushups a break and 50 at night which is 250 a day. One day I was just mad because I wasn't getting the language so I did 100 a break and ended up doing 500 that day. Our schedule has finally started slowing down so I've had a lot more time to do fun stuff like play volleyball and basketball which is soooo nice. This week went by super fast because we had a lot of service opportunities. We helped the new missionaries arrive at the MTC and we did a MTC cleanse because that's what they do every year right before general confere...