9.24.12 La Chala, Ecuador

Family,

The football team smashed my car?  Okay I guess I can accept that.  Even though I had been praying that somehow when I got home, it would be sitting there, all brand new and ready for another ten years of use.  But smashed into tiny bits in the courtyard at Liberty is a good 2^nd, I guess.  So- not much happening here either.  My new companion is Elder Pereyra.  He is from Argentina.  We had a good talk about obedience and stuff like that.  It was actually really good because he taught me a lot.  He told me that there are two types of leaders - spiritual leaders, and temporal leaders.  A temporal leader is someone who is called to be a leader.  A spiritual leader is someone who you actually have a desire to follow.  I had never thought about that but it is totally true.  But I think I can help him a lot to be a little more obedient.  He made me reflect on my own life though.  It isn´t important what other people think. I can defiantly apply that in my own life.  What matters is if I actually am a good missionary, not whether or not everyone else thinks I am or not. Anyways, it has been a long week; a lot of contacting and trying to start a new program.  I forgot how wicked this place is.  It is very different than Cuenca. No one is married but everyone is living together.  All the females at the age of 15 are already living with their boyfriends and have a kid.  The hardest part of contacting here is not finding people who are interested.  It is finding people who can actually progress and get baptized.  But we keep praying hard that we can find some good people to teach.  

I feel like I have nothing to do now that I am not zone leader.  That is the most difficult part right now.  But I learned that President has confidence in me.  He calls me a lot lately.  I called him because a lady that was going to get baptized had a past sin.  I called him and told him the situation like normal. Then he asked me how she looked and what I thought.  I said she looked fine and repentant.  He just said, ‘okay, I trust you, she can get baptized.’  It is nice to have that kind of trust between your leaders.  

That´s just about everything new here.  Everything is going great.

Love,

Elder McRae