January 30, 2017 Service & Fatima's family

Hello, hello!

Chopped a whole bunch of wood on Saturday, 

makes for some sore forearms.

It's been a good week out here in Warrenton! We had a couple of really nice days around 50 degrees this week and a couple of much colder, windy days. This winter hasn't been nearly as bad as last year so far. But it snowed a lot last night and it's a beautiful day today!

A beautiful site to wake up to this morning! This is in the backyard of our house.

"Spiderman Sippert"

A video of our morning with the Sippert's.

 German pancakes, snowball fight, and swinging around!

We had a snowball fight with Blake and the Sippert's. He's their little boy (the awesome members that we live with). He's in kindergarten, and is such a fun kid! Then we went with Brother Sippert to go play some racquetball. Now we are at the church building playing basketball with a group of nonmembers that come play at the church every week!

We had a worldwide Missionary broadcast last week where we were able to hear from a few different leaders of the church and the missionary department. They had a lot of great counsel! Many of the things they discussed were similar to last year’s worldwide broadcast but it was good nonetheless. One thing they discussed were some changes regarding our daily missionary schedule, which is going to take some getting used to, but we're excited for it.

This was at lunch with Brother and Sister North 

after we worked at the community food bank. 

He is our Stake patriarch and he just turned 90 years old!

 They are such a great couple!

The last couple of weeks we have been able to do a lot of service in the community. We have volunteered at a few different local food banks and food distribution centers where we help hand out food to people in need. We were also able to volunteer at the United Methodist Church here in Warrenton that does a monthly food distribution to families in the area that aren't currently making enough to provide for the entire family. It's always fun to do some interfaith service and seeing people come together to help those in need.

This picture was with Fatima, her husband Solomon,
and her son Nelson. Jackie wasn't in the room for the picture.
And then Christian, the Member in our ward joined us for the lesson.

A week or two ago we were tracting (in one of the only set of townhomes in our huge ward) and we met a kind Hispanic woman, named Fatima. We were able to schedule a lesson with Fatima, and her two kids, Jackie (8) and Nelson (9) for this past Friday night! She is from El Salvador, but she speaks English pretty well. We taught her a lesson on the Restoration of the gospel and they loved every bit of it. Christian, a member of our ward from Peru came along with us and was able to bear his testimony in Spanish to Fatima, and clarify a couple points in our lesson in Spanish, which was awesome! Her two kids absolutely loved having us there to teach them. They loved reading through some if the pamphlet with us and had a lot of great questions and some funny comments to make. Before we left she gave us some hot chocolate from El Salvador that was pretty good! Her husband was able to join us towards the end of our visit as well, he's from Mexico. The two kids were so excited when we invited them to come to church. They weren't able to make it this past week, but hopefully we can help them to come soon!

Elder Gerrit W. Gong, who is in the presidency of the Seventy, visited our mission a couple weeks ago. So I decided to read through some of his previous conference talks. He gave a great conference talk last year about always remembering the Savior. In his talk there is a portion that really stuck out to me. He said "To be worthy does not mean to be perfect. Heavenly Father’s plan of happiness invites us to be humbly at peace on our life’s journey to someday become perfected in Christ, not constantly worried, frustrated, or unhappy in our imperfections today. Remember, He knows all the things we don’t want anyone else to know about us--and loves us still."

Sometimes I think we naturally tend to dwell too much on our imperfections and inadequacies, taking us to the point where we feel like if we aren't perfect, we aren't good enough. I find comfort in this quote in knowing that to be worthy really means that we are constantly striving to improve. We will always fall short and make mistakes, but nothing we do will ever take us beyond the reach of the Savior's atonement. Now obviously that doesn't mean we can rationalize our sin, knowing we will always be forgiven, but it does mean that we will one day be perfected in Christ.

I love you all! Hope you have an amazing week! :)

Elder Jeremy Duvall
Washington DC South Mission

And this is in the small town The Plains, population 382. Our ward covers a few different small towns. From here I'm 2,585 miles from Los Angeles!