A Fitting Conclusion... And He's on His Way HOME...

What a crazy week, but I´ll have time to talk about that later. Thank you for all the birthday wishes as well.

Really I just want to share my testimony that I know the church is true. It was restored by Joseph Smith, a true prophet called of God. He translated the Book of Mormon by the power of God and the priesthood is real and governs the church today on the earth. I know there is power in prayer and that our Heavenly Father loves us and wants each one of us to return to live with him and his son Jesus Christ, who died to save us all. We can become clean through his atoning sacrifice. 

I loved being a missionary for these two years, I´m happy with what I´ve done, who I am and what I have to do now and in the future. I not only have the truth and know the truth, but I really love the truth. 

Thank you everybody for helping me and supporting me in these two years. 

Love you all, see you soon,

Elder Webber

Old Area Visit...

Thanks for the emails and the advice, and sorry for not writting yesterday. 
Lemme tell ya what happened. So one of our last two p-days we are allowed to travel anywhere within two hours of our area to visit prior areas or other things. So I decided to go back to El Pinar. Where I started the mission. About an hour and fifteen away. Ughhh. That was pretty hard. Obviously I was excited and happy to see all the members and converts there, but I was pretty sad that I was only there to say goodbye... I was surprised that everybody still remembered me, even some old investigators I visited. I´ll have to show you all the photos and explain stuff in a a week or so. Its too much to write into one email. I´m just really grateful for that oppurtunity to visit them and to see how they´re all doing. Mirta, the first person I baptized is still going really strong. She´s such a saint. I also recieved news that Felix, an old man I baptized in Bella Italia died this last week. That kind of put a damper on everything, but we all know where he is, he was a champion. Also, Santiago, an investigator I was teaching in Bella Italia got baptized and the missionaries there sent me a photo. That was nice. This week was pretty rough, lots of rain, pretty cold and Luana´s family is against her getting baptized. Soooo that is more than likely going to have to wait a while. Which is a bummer. But I hope to get some news over email or something like that saying that she was baptized. All in the Lords time. Well that´s about all for now. 

Love,

Elder Webber

photos of Mirta, and last p-day when a member invited us to go play tennis with them. 

Time's Winding Down But Zach's not...

ahh what schmeags england. haha oh well. Sounds like a fun trip. I haven´t heard too much about the world cup this week. With so much stuff to do this week we had hardly any time to do anything really. This wednesday we got up early and headed off to montevideo for the leadership council. My last one... so all the missionaries who are going home this change gave thier "testimonio del valiente" just our last testimony to the zone leaders and sister trainer leaders. That was pretty rough.  We only had thursday to prepare all of the information and plans for zone conference so that was a pretty busy day. Zone conference was good, the zone is great, of course we have a few problems or difficulties but that´s normal. This whole week I was just anxious for general conference. Just recieving revelation like a mad man. ahhh so nice. I wish I could just summerize all the stuff I learned but that would take too  long. We also helped a drunkard man who crashed his motorbike outside the stake center. He was pretty crazy, we all got a good laugh out of that. Luana showed up with a friend, its just a race against time here. Her mom has the baptismal form and just needs to sign it and that´s basically it. We´ll just dunk her in the water. Luana is feeling pretty good with what we are teaching her. We had a REALLY spiritual lesson with her this week. Lemme tell ya. We started the lesson like normal and started to review the restauration of the gospel because we figured she could use some strengthening in her testimony of Jose Smith. But we felt something wasn´t right, "descerning" her thoughts and observing that she wasn´t ok we asked what´s up. she said she was fine, but we knew she wasn´t. So we asked again and she broke down. She hadn´t been living the commandments as well as she knew she should have, especially after we had taught her them. Specifically she was having trouble with the law of chastity. Now its gets tricky as missionaries because we want to help them according to their needs, but we cannot have people confessing their sins to us. That´s not our job. So we got the information we needed including how she felt and what she understood about repentance and we reviewed the atonement of Jesus Christ and baptism. I can say that it was the most spiritual talk about the law of chastity I have ever seen. We´ll see what her mom says about baptism and then we´ll do everything we can to get her dunked before I go. 

This week was crazy, too much zone leader junk. Sometimes I wish I could just leave all that and just work. Luckily, these next couple weeks dont have too much to keep us out of our area. that´s about it for now. I think.

love,

Elder Webber

zone photo. 

Gettin' "Swoll"...

Even the Uruguayos are watching alittle bit of the world cup down here. So every once in a while I´ll get an update. Even if they dont know anything and their info is totally wrong. Like New Zealand losing to Japan. I hope that´s not true. haha. I think it was australia or south africa who lost? I dont know. That just shows the quality of info that I´m getting. ughhh. oh well. Sounds all good at home. I remember when I was going to BYU for josh and I had that astronomy class the teacher talked about the eclipse, and I remember thinking, hmmm yeah I´m not going to be here for that. long time ago. 

Anyways. This week was pretty normal. Nothing new really. We´re just teaching Luana all of the lessons, this week we covered tithing and the word of wisdom. No problems there. If she keeps progressing like she is she´ll be baptized mid-october. After general conference. The only thing that could stop that would be her family. Ignacio is doing well. He wants to get married and baptized just his wife doesnt want to. Ugh so complicated. So she fasted this last week and had an interview with the bishop. She said she dreamed a dream, or in other words saw a vision (1 nefi 8 haha) that she was married. Well of course! what do you think? that God is going to tell you to keep living in sin? duhhhh. We already knew that she would get an answer so now is the time to strike. This week we´re going in strong and getting them started. 

It rained most of this week, which made things hard, and I ended up getting sick on thursday just in time for divisions that we had with one of our district leaders. Ugh. Just a sore throat. Its just bothersome, because I can still work, but can´t speak. Sooooo I feel like just dead weight, spending my time and energy just walking around acompanying my companion. But I got my voice back sunday so I´m back in the game baby! 

During the sacrement the bishop sent his messanger to tell me to give a talk in the meeting. Ive actually been secretly hoping that they would surprise call on me. Ive been reading and thinking about that talk I have for my homecoming talk and it was a good practice run, even though it was in spanish. Good stuff. A member gave us that home made bar bell weight last week, a rebar with two blocks of cement on it, to work out. Getting big. Some of the perks of being in the richest city in uruguay is that we have most of the first-world comforts. Dry cleaners, fast food, and we recently discovered a small gym in our area. 50 pesos for a day pass. That´s about a dollar fity. So guess who´s going to get swoll today after we clean our house. 

That´s about it for now, this next week is going to be pretty hectic. But thats better. Keeps my mind focused. 

Love,

Elder Webber

Walked 12 miles...

sounds like bunches of good stuff going on back home. This week was pretty hectic. Preparation for the multi-zone conference on thursday started early tuesday morning. We knew we would be walking allllll over the city of Maldonado buying stuff and making orders, so we grabbed my ipod that mom sent, that has an application on it called nike-plus. Its supposed to track how much you walk, like your steps then it takes your height and calculates how far you walk. So we turned it on and put in my pocket and went out. We didn´t sit down once the whole day, except for lunch. Ugh it was tough one physically. We took out half of the money, about 7000 pesos because there is a daily limit on the machines here. So we were able to buy all the stuff that we needed to before hand. At the end of the day, we take out the ipod and it says that we had walked 12 miles. I dont know how accurate that is. I hope its over, because that´s pretty ridiculous. haha. Thursday morning rolls around and we are making our way into the center of maldonado for some last minute prep for the conference. We still had about 6000 pesos in my account to take out. So we go and try and the machine goes all wonky and says "take your money" but no money comes out and then the screen tells us that it cant process our request. Well..... there goes 6000 pesos.... we still have about 3000 left over from the other day but we still need about 6000 more for the burgers. This is where it got interesting, I have been keeping a really tight budget for the last year and half and I´ve managed to save up about 7000 pesos that I was planning on spending on pizza and junk food my last couple months. So I grab that dough from the house and payed for the burgers with that. I´m sure the offices will pay me back. I hope so. In the end, big success. Everybody was happy, and we even had to get some gluten free junk for some missionaries who like to complicate things. Other than the conference we had a few lessons with Luana. She´s progressing pretty nicely. We talked to her about having a lesson with her mom to see if we can get her involved as well. We taught the ten commandments this week with a focus on the sabbath day and the law of chastity. she´s inteligent so that lesson was pretty easy. Ignacio still isn´t going anywhere with his marriage. We told them to fast this weekend and that we would be fasting with them. They came to church fasting and so did we, so we´ll have a lesson with them maybe tomorrow to see how things are. That´s about it for now. Maldonado is all good. 

Love,

Elder Webber

VERY Busy...

Ah well we just have so much planned for these weeks its pretty ridiculous. This week we had changes, it was good, like always. Get to see all the elders from my group, see what´s good. President like always, shared an inspired message. Its really just a testimony that he´s called of God, the things he says are always right on the dot. Anyways, so I´m really happy I didn´t get changed out of here. Most of the  members were pretty surprised because I´ve been here a relatively long time. I´m so excited. So much to do. But the changes were on wednesday, thrusday and friday flew by. We had a lesson with Luana, the young mother, in the church. Ahhh it was so legit. We weren´t too sure about her because she has been falling through on coming to our appointments but we went and she had read all of 2 nephi 31 and had so many GOOD questions. Then she expressed some concerns about some things and starting spitting out quoted scriptures from the bible. Este.... como era? But in the end it was pretty good. We got through all of the plan of salvation which is one of the longer lessons. I´m pretty confident that she´ll be baptized before the end of this transfer. The only thing I could see stopping her would be her mom, because she is still a minor she needs her moms permision. We´ll see. Ignacio is "llevandola" as they say. We couldn´t have a good sit-down appointment with him this week, but we have plans to talk to him this next week. He just needs to get his marriage moving or he´ll never get married or baptized. Oh well. Saturday morning we did a service project with the stake, we all got those cool "mormon helping hands" vests and painted some fences at a local school and made some other repairs. Good fun. Really not a whole lot more happened this week, it was all just blurred into one big mush. This next week we are hosting another multi-zone conference. This will be the biggest one yet, with four zones, Maldonado (us), la costa, minas, and rocha. Looks like we´re gunna be buying lots of giant burgers again. Woohoo. These multi-zone conferences kinda stress me out. but that´s ok. Healthy stress. 

That´s about all for now. 

Love,

Elder Webber

Say hello for good ole winston for me.

Staying "Put" for his last Transfer...

Sounds like good stuff with the camping trip. good fun good fun. This week was quite possibly the fastest week of my entire life, lemme tell ya. So monday was p-day and we did that giant bbq/sausage sizzle, Im not gunna lie, there are some pretty mean sausages to sizzle down here. Then on tuesday we got up early to go to montevideo for our leadership council. That was fun, president assigned me and my companion to direct part of the council, that was fun, I always enjoy doing stuff like that. There wasnt really a whole lot to talk about, the mission did alright this last month, but we can do better, so we got alittle bit of the cane for that. We set the new goal, which was just a total of the zone goals, we got our zone goal last month, but we didnt get the mission goal because alot of zones didnt get their own goals, so we made sure that EVERY zone was committed to getting their zone goals. They all said yes.... so we will see. Anyways, we got back late tuesday night and wednesday I had to go out to a little village to do a few baptismal interviews. They lived in some pretty humble circumstances. Their house didnt have more than one room, so I couldnt find a place to be alone to do the interviews so we just used a make shift curtain to divide the room in half and that gave me enough privacy to get through the interview. I try to always make the interview a sacred experience, and that candidates feel the spirit. Its a really sacred covenant and they need to feel that in their interviews. The rest of that day was spent preparing for the zone conference which we did on friday, we had a pretty good zone conference. Get thems emotions going. Saturday we participated in the baptismal service of some elders in the zone, my companion and I were the witnesses. Sunday rolls around and I feel like we had no time. Luana showed up, which was a miracle because we didnt really have a good firm lesson with her this week, Ignacio also showed up, and another un married member and non member coulple we are working with. We had another lesson with Ignacio yesterday, we actually had lunch with him. We showed him a mormon message that has to do with procrastination. I think we got our point across, next charla, its game time, we are just going to go in strong and challenge them to go next week to start the marriage process. Monday night we got the changes, I was prepared for whatever, to leave and train or to stay and die here. Turns out that Im staying here for my last 6 weeks. Im pretty happy. I like my house, my companion, my house-mates and the ward is so legit. 

Thats about it, we had dinner with a man who is investigating, but cant be baptized because he isn{t divorced from his ex wife, and he lives with his new wife, but hes what we call a dry-member, because he knows everything but just isnt baptized. He reminds me alot of dad, just a latin version. haha. he made us a secret sauce for these hamburgers, which was pretty easy to guess what was in it, kinda like dads secret recepies. haha, we also did a service project this week, we made a roof for a house, the houses are all cement here, the roof too, so we made a cement roof on a second story house, with a bunch of buckets and shovels to get it from ground level up to the roof, It was ridiculously hard, the states are so much better with our wooden roofs.Oh well. 

Love,

Elder Webber

our bbq, l and the bretheren from the ward (the one in the red and white is our ward mission leader)