[Editor's note by Bryce's dad: My wife and I had a fun Mother's Day phone call with our son, Bryce, who has 5 more days left on his mission in the Mexico City East Mission. We are so excited to have him come home!]

[from Bryce]
Today we got our hair cut. My companion called his family (in México, Mother’s day is always on the 10th).

I also did some last minute shopping. I also started to dejunk some stuff and packed. Tomorrow is District Class, so I still have to prepare that [Bryce teaches the class]. On wednesday, we will be working hard, and on Thursday, we will work and visit all my converts to say good bye and take pictures.

Friday morning, I will go to the temple in the morning with a brother from the ward and my companion will stay here with the Assistants. All of my generation [missionaries going home Saturday] will enter the temple for a session, and [afterwards] we will have some activities and a class on the perpetual education fund. Then in the evening [with the mission president] we will go eat tacos at La Onda! mmm… TACOS!!! I probably won’t sleep at night, and early Saturday — like around 5:45 AM — we will head to the airport.

I know that this week is just going to fly by so I am going to work harder than ever to do all I can while I’m still here, and in my last few days of full-time service!

Have a great week! I love you all and I will see you are talk to you soon!

-Elder Packer

Hello Family!

Well, just to update on the video last week… [See last week's email Fun Stuff about having their computer editing program crash while creating a training video. ] …It was lost and we tried until the night to recover it, however no luck. Oh well, we did all we could!

Yesterday was nice because of Margarita’s baptism she is a sweet, dear hearted lady who reminds me of mom! It was Elder Fernandez’s first baptism and he preformed the ordinance perfect. I also had him confirm Luis who we baptized a few weeks ago… so now he is getting more confidence and experience. I have been trying hard to teach him how to be a leader, accepting responsibility and participating in every aspect of the work.

I spoke in Sacrament meeting about Missionary work, of course, with an emphasis on the importance of members. It went alright; I was about 12 min. into my talk and about 2/3 of the way finished when the bishop said I’d gone over time. So… I guess I’ll be able to use the 20 min. Bishop Abbot is giving me to talk on ‘Obedience to God’s commandments’ just fine. I really can’t believe its coming to an end. I’ve just been working hard to keep finding investigators and trying to help them to overcome their fears, etc. to come to church and prepare them for baptism and teaching my kid how to do the same. We got some good investigators, and with lots of help from the Lord, they’ll soon be converted. Please keep praying for me, my companion and our investigators these next few weeks!

Dad, I’m super excited that they changed the date for the father and sons campout! About a party, you can invite whomever you want, and either Saturday or Sunday would be fine for me. If you want to put some photos on a slide show, that great, but I don’t want to stand and narrate anything.

Emily, you are just looking huge… and just to let you know I’ve gotten real fat the past few months! I’ve been suckin’ my gut in to the pictures J.

Have a great week! I love you!

Elder Packer

…by the way, just kidding, I’m not fat!

Mom, about the money, that should be great. Thank you so much!

¡Hola mi querida familia! [Hello my dear family!]

It has been a nutty week. My new companion is Elder Miguel David Fernandez Perez, He’s from Chetumal, Quintana Roo. It’s super far from here! [in the Yucatán Peninsula] This week was a bit of a trial at first since my companion is a greeny, but he is really humble and not afraid of working + he has learned really fast. The Lord couldn’t have blessed me with a greater companion! Funny story: I talked him into waxing his unibrow today… tell you all about it later. Oh, yea another funny story last week with Elder Padget: we were sharing the [story of the] first vision, when all four of the legs of the chair our investigator was sitting on flew out from under her. It’s been said that all sorts of distractions will always come up in the first vision, but this was a funny first.

I was reviewing my notes on General Conference again and noticing how a big part of the theme was doing our duty to God.

This week we had a family of 9, 6 in baptismal age who were going to get baptized, however the father decided that he doesn’t want to get married so that was a hard blow! However we had an interesting fast and testimony meeting… because we share the ward with the assistants and it was General Conference last week we had 12 confirmations, then 2 baby blessings, one of which was the child of one of the families that was confirmed. So in the end there were only 4 or 5 very brief testimonies shared before the service ended. Plus there are a few other pending confirmations and if they would have come like planned, I’m sure that it would have only been a confirmations and baby blessings meeting. I hope our investigators who came for the first time don’t get weirded out by their first experience!

Well, I’ve got to run!

I love you all so much! Take care and make the best decisions this week!

-Elder Packer

P.S. ¡¡¡¡Attached is the new mission photo!!!!

¡Bienvenidos al campo misional! [Welcome to the mission field!]

Hola Familia,

Here I am, very happy out in Bautizaluca (Ixtapaluca)! [Pronounced eextapalooka. South-east of Mexico City.]

San Francisco is the name of my area which is a soon to be branch of the ward Los Heroes (which is the Assistants area). And it is amazing here! My companion, Elder Alacantar, and I are working harder than I have ever worked in my whole mission! It is his last cycle in the mission. He is a really exceptional missionary, we’ve been running in the mornings, studying hard together and have contacted thousands! Really I feel great and can say with 100% there is nothing more I could have done! I love being able to give that type of an accounting to the Lord at the end of every evening! And that’s what we’ll keep doing everyday!

Our district is the “dream team”; two of the best zone leaders are in my district as trainers. Ixtapaluca is the most successful part of the mission and President just wiped it clean and put in some of the best missionaries to just explode the place. It’s just nuts, nothing like this has ever happened in the mission before. Our district includes: Elder Carretero and Elder Padget in the Aylotl ward, and Elder Winters and Elder Cordova in the Izcali ward. [Bryce is the District Leader.]

“Todo por el Señor” [Everything for the Lord] is my theme for this cycle. I will stay humble and 100% focused and know that the Lord is going to support us in our goals and give us the strength and the inspiration to complete them.

Well, take care all, we’ve got to get back to working! I love you!

-Elder Packer

So, a few days ago I got a package from the young women in the ward with some very nice letters and some candies… including gummy burgers mmmm.  Please be sure to tell them all thank you. They all wrote about how great you are, mom… and how proud you are [of Bryce]. Amanda Arnold wrote her testimony in Spanish which was impressive! Here are a few of the questions they asked, if you would be so kind to reply to them:

1. How is Mexico? — Mexico is great, there are a lot of people and they are very open and social. Most of them live very humbly. The food is delicious… well not all of it
2. What is it like this time of year? — Hot during the afternoon (like I’m sweating) and cold at night (like I use a coat); very strange. It’s a little drier because it hasn’t rained in a few weeks but it’s still quite green. The leaves don’t change color here.
3. What was your favorite talk from General Conference? — see my letter from that week.

This week we have a conference with Elder Johnson, who is the Area President. And as you can imagine, I am very excited for that! Things are going well with Elder Lauterio and we are continuing to learn together.

In our area, we are trying to focus more on working with the members. We have been praying to know how we can help the members get excited and participate in missionary work and how we can help our converts and the youth of the ward to have the desire and preparation to serve a full time mission. The idea we’ve come up with is to divide our area into sections and to assign ward missionaries to each section. They will have a list of part member families and less actives that live in their section and we will accompany them on visits. We’re also planning to have a meeting once a week to teach and practice principles from Preach My Gospel, and review the needs of the families being visited. It’s going to be work to prepare everything, but I know it’s going to pay off. We’ve also shared these plans with the Bishop and he is working on calling ward missionaries to help us.

I am excited to have more member participation, and know that it will help the members participating and being visited to be nourished by the good word, to have a friend, and to have a responsibility. (The three needs for retention and a lasting conversion.)

I love the Lord, I love the church and the brethren, I love the people where I serve, and I love my family!

Have a great week!
-Elder Packer

Do you have any more ideas on how we can work more with the members?

Hola,

Well, another interesting week. Last Saturday we went to the National Anthropology Museum which was amazing! They have artifacts from all over Mexico and it was very intriguing to see just how diverse the Mexican culture is.

This week we were supposed to have our zone conference, however President Bulloch had a kidney stone, :/ so he was several days in the hospital and they eventually had to remove it surgically. Not very fun I imagine.Later he showed us the stone (he had it in a little plastic bag, it was funny shaped and quite large). The other thing that happened was that he couldn’t leave the hospital until the medical bill was paid, so we had to make a forum and bring it upstairs to the [Church's] General Financier for all of Mexico to sign it.

Our area is starting to improve drastically…I don’t know if I explained that when I came here the President changed our area so we started the cycle without investigators and we didn’t know anyone in the ward. So we created a member based mission plan for the area and it is going great; we have one family, a part member family, and a young adult who are all progressing, as well as various other. The young adult’s name is Vicky and is going to get baptized next week. She has had some form of abuse in her past and it has been amazing how quickly and thoroughly the Gospel of Jesus Christ heal people emotional and spiritually. I love being a missionary!

Have and amazing week! I love you!

-Elder Packer