ANOTHA ONE

Another crazy week everyone.  Full of ups and downs as is life, but hey, let's enjoy the good times right?!?!

I decided this week that I am sick and tired of letting everything get to me so much.  I know that eventually I am going to look back and be sad that I wasted so many good times worrying.  I realized this when I looked back on my MTC experience.  In the MTC, all I could think was man I cannot wait to get into the field, I hate it here.  And now that I am in the field, all I want to do is go back to the days with everyone talking English, messing around all of the time, and having a buffet for every meal hahaha, good times.  Oh and balling everyday because nobody here plays ball and the hoops are absolute trash.

What is the message that I am getting at?  How many times do we hate something when we are in it but then look back at what a good time we had and how many things there were to be grateful for?  WHAT A TERRIBLE ATTITUDE!!!  Let's enjoy those things now while we are in them not constantly looking back or forward but enjoying NOWWWWW!!!  My cousin, Riley, shared a quote with me today that I really like...

Not everyday is good but we can always find a little good in everyday.

Keep this mindset and enjoy the moment now while you are in it, do your best and the Savior will take the rest.  Stop wasting these precious small moments worrying and go and enjoy today.  Everything is going to be GREAT in the end.

With much Love,

Elder Traveller

PS Sorry if I did not get to email you back today!  I will get ya next week. hahaha

Just a happy guy with the Golden Arches

Stockings hung boiii (HAVE A GREAT CHRISTMAS)

Stay Humble or be Humbled!!

This week was a crazy, humbling week to say the least hahaha.

I was feeling sky high last week and because I was feeling so good I stopped turning to the Lord and stopped working on my habits that help me fight things like anxiety!!  Needless to say because of this it was a little bit of a harder week, but I know it is all in my control!!  I stopped turning to the Lord so things got hard.  I stopped doing the things that I have learned do help me. But I can change...through the Savior!!

I encourage all of you this week to stay HUMBLE and continue turning to the Lord.  Avoid the Pride Cycle that is so clearly in the Book of Mormon.  As you are learning this, I will be too!!  Love you all and have an amazing week!! (Sorry, kind of short this week.  not a ton of time haha)

Elder Traveller

In a letter sent home:

"As far as our investigators go it has been a very hard and humbling week as well.  We had 4 baptism dates fall through because they did not attend church.  We didn't get one person to attend this week, it was pretty bad, now we cannot reach some of them because they won't answer their phones.  We basically got wrecked this week.  It was probably because we thought we were doing so good, but this is the Lord's work and He wants us to remember that.  So hopefully He will show his hand in the end of this month."

"Even though this has been a humbling week I hope you can see how much I am changing and my attitude has changed. I know I've got to turn to the Lord and continually turn to Him."

Grandma coming in clutch!

Carls Jr....AGAIN!!

THE ATTITUDE OF GRATITUDE

Alrighty, so for all of you who read my email last week, you know that I was not doing so hot haha.

So this week I decided to take action, I created a plan (with help from my Dad) and I presented it to the Lord.  I know the plan was not perfect but I know that with His help, it could be.

THE ATTITUDE OF GRATITUDE was a huge part of this plan.  Since arriving here, the first thing that I think about in the morning is what I was worrying about the day before.  And then throughout the day all I can think about is what else there is to be worried about.  This has been my thought pattern since arriving in Mexico, so I decided to change that!

Whenever I start worrying about ANYTHING, I snap a rubber band on my wrist. Then I immediately begin looking for everything and anything that I can be grateful for in that very moment...whether it is a nice looking car, or a cool sign, or just the fact that I have shoes and I am not walking in my bare feet.  Thoughts of gratitude consume my mind and worries start to go away and I no longer focus on them.  Do I still worry, yes.  Am I ever going to be perfect, no.  But I am SOOOOO much better.

So what do I want you to learn from all of this?  If you have a problem in your life, create a plan, present it to the Lord, and take action.  Think of the Brother of Jared and the stones.  Create a plan and the Lord will make it shine, when you present it to HIM.

On the topic of our investigators.  I feel awful for Sara and Jose.  They have some things they are going to have to work really hard to get over.  We have also been teaching this couple and their names are Ariel and Suyri.  I want to help them so so so bad and help them to overcome their challenges and addictions but they are not progressing.  My companion wanted to drop them, so we did.  I never ever want to drop anyone but he is the Senior comp, so I listened.  Everyone here lives in the tiniest apartments with a bunch of stuff crammed into it.  I feel awful for them.  People here like to teach in a way they call "Planchar", which basically means wrecking the investigator when they do something wrong.  I do not like it one bit.  I want to be so loving and helpful to everyone.  That is my style of teaching.  Sure it is good to stick it to them sometimes, but that is just not me.  I will leave that to the other missionaries.  We have 7 baptismal dates right now and we are working hard to baptize them.  I hate talking numbers, but that is pretty exciting!  We committed somebody to baptism that we just met in the streets yesterday!  Kind of crazy.

Thank you so much for all of your prayers and fasting, it TRULY BLESSED me this week.  I love you all and have a wonderful week!!

Elder Traveller

In a letter sent home:

"Last week on Wednesday, I dropped to my knees and said a make or break prayer, I was dying.  I felt really nothing during or after the prayer besides an impression to read D&C 6.  D&C is tough love and it can be hard to read sometimes.  So I started in D&C 6....I want you to read this chapter and think of me...replace Oliver with Tyler and I want you to know that it hit me like a runaway train.

I have never learned how to truly pray until my mission.  Now I pray to the Lord every single night, like I am talking to my mission president, and it has brought miracles.  I am no longer praying to just someone in heaven, I am praying to my friend, I am talking things out with my Father in Heaven.  I don't worry as much, because He knows my desires.  I take everything to him and every single night I feel 10x better.

Mom and Dad, things are still hard but I am looking up, and I am learning and growing!!  This week was definitely better than last!!!! THE PRAYERS AND FASTS HAVE HELPED SO MUCH, THANK EVERYONE FOR ME!"

"Just some meals with the dawgs"

(All of Tyler's pictures seem to be about food!)

"Temple Square (Mexico City Style)"

Mexico City Temple during the Christmas Season

This tree sits in the mission home.  All of the 

missionaries have an ornament with their picture on it.

An angel named Stephanie Kemp went to Tyler's mission last week to travel through the mission with her son, who had served in the Mexico City East Mission.  She took Tyler's Christmas gifts for me and gifts for several other missionaries!! (She packed an extra suitcase, and she wouldn't let us pay her!) She posted this picture of the suitcase sitting in the mission home.  This was a tender mercy for Jon and I. The Lord is very aware of all of us!

Quite honestly everyone I am giving this all I have got, and I am struggling.  I am fighting, I promise, but I could really use your prayers this week.

I want to write you all an amazing, uplifting, and spiritual letter but I just don't know how I can.  This is the hardest thing I have ever done and I feel so alone.

We are fighters and this life was not meant to be easy, learn from your mistakes and learn from your trials.  We are not here for an easy life but for a fulfilling one, remember that.  I will try to remember that as well.  Give this life everything you have got and I mean EVERYTHING, DON'T YOU QUIT.  If any of you have seen Facing our Giants, you know what part I am referring to.  If not, I encourage you to look it up on YouTube.

DON'T YOU QUIT ON ME.

https://youtu.be/-sUKoKQlEC4

Let us press forward in Faith in Christ, for He is our Savior and our Redeemer.  There are better days ahead.

I love you all so much and I hope Thanksgiving was amazing.

Elder Traveller

Ya boy TTRAV!!

Hola mi amigos!!!

This week has been crazy, beginning of the week I thought for sure I was going home and now I am loving it.  Do not get me wrong, there are still times I wanna jump in front of the metro or sucker punch my companion but overall things are very slowly getting better.  I wouldn't say I love everything yet but I am beginning to find things to enjoy haha.

I wanna share with you my secret to having joy this week.  I have two...

1.)  Jesus the Christ
2.)  Living in the moment.

Look, I know Jesus the Christ is a MASSIVE book but wow, I have started reading it this week and it truly puts everything into perspective.  I have only read 30 pages and I already feel Christ more in my life through His peace.  And I realize our purpose on earth from an ETERNAL point of view.  I would invite you to read this amazing book.

Living in the moment has allowed so much more happiness in my life.  I wanna share a quote by Dale Carnegie, "Let the dead past bury its dead. Shut off the future as tightly as the past. The future is today. The weight of yesterday carried with the worries of tomorrow have made the strongest falter, live each day in day-tight compartments."

This quote hit me hard, and it was shared with me by my amazing Dad.  LIVE IN TODAY.  IT IS ALL WE HAVE.  Stop worrying about your past, move on.  Stop worrying about future events or things.  When we do worry,  precious moments of the present slip right through our fingers.

DON'T WASTE A SINGLE DAY!!

I love you all so much, have a great week (day by day)

Love

Elder Traveller

Just a bike chillin' in the church

Elder Castro (AKA freeloader) Ha!

The City Boiii

Packin heat in the mall

Temple Work in honor of our missionaries!

(Elder Dean, Elder Traveller, Elder Taylor)

Hola my dear family and friends,

This week has been crazy, crazy.  Full of so many ups and downs.  I want to share another amazing experience I had with you all...

So this week I have been struggling so bad with allowing my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to take on my sins, doubts, thoughts, worries, anxieties, everything.

What the heck, not this week only but my whole life I have struggled to do this!

It has been a real challenge and trial for me.

So last night we were talking with a family about faith and how it is a seed that must be planted in your heart so that it can grow.  We read in Alma together, when he is talking about this, and the whole time I felt the spirit just pounding me to talk about my struggles with faith and how I have to pray for faith everyday!  SO, I tried in my crappy Spanish to talk about it, and then the lady we were teaching started talking to me in English and I was soooo happy!  So I expressed to her that I doubt a lot and it is really hard for me to have this kind of faith in my Savior and His Atonement, but that I pray for it every day.  She said...WOW, I really needed to hear that.  The entire time that I have been working with the missionaries I have wondered how they know so much and I know so little, it is nice to know you struggle too.  She said that no other missionary had ever shared their struggles with her and it just felt so much more real when I did.  AMAZING!!  I attribute this experience to the spirit...and definitely not myself!!  In the Lord's strength, I am strong.

So, I would encourage all of you this week to get REAL with people, life becomes so much better when we can really share how we feel without worry of judgement.  And little do we usually know how much it helps everyone else!

Love you all, have a great week!

Elder Traveller

In a letter to his parents, Tyler shared the following.

"The people are awesome!  Sara and Jose are getting baptized this week, and we baptized 5 people last week.  I had the opportunity to baptize one of them.  When I pulled him up out of the water, I just felt happy and peace."

Alejandro!!

Familia Pocheco

Area Conference with President and Sister Naumann

November 9, 2018

 "The good stuff"

Elder Smith and Elder Traveller

(Dallin Price's cousin)

Wow, this has been the hardest week of my life and to be completely honest with all of you, I am really struggling.

This has been quite the test.

We have been teaching this amazing family and I really do love them.  We got to go to the Visitors Center by the Mexico City Temple with them and wow, what a great experience.

I want to share with you a very special experience that happened to me.  I do not take my spiritual experiences lightly but I feel that this may help some of you.  This past week I have been having panic attacks.  They have been pretty severe so I called the Mission President.  I cried and cried and told him about my panic attacks and how hard it has been.  He helped me and talked to me.  I then ended the phone call and finally got it pulled together, so that we could leave for an appointment.  We then went to the home of the investigators, that I mentioned above, and we began talking with them.  The wife then went on to tell us that her husband struggles immensely with anxiety and panic attacks.  I was shocked.  I was then able to relate so well with him and help him a lot from what I could see.  I shared some experiences and some scriptures that help me when I am panicking.  It was a great lesson.  After the lesson, my companion looked at me and said in the little English that he knows...I now know why me and my old companion could not baptize this family, they needed to meet you.  The family committed to baptism while we were in the visitors center earlier that week.  It was an amazing experience.

I love you all and I encourage you to look for ways to allow our Savior Jesus Christ more fully into our lives.  Make it a great week.

Love
Elder Traveller

The Mexico City Visitors Center

We had the opportunity to do Baptisms with a recent convert

Little Caesars Pizza and Valentine

Mexico City Baby!

This week has been crazy!!

My companion and I taught lessons yesterday in Spanish and to be honest I had no idea what the heck was going on haha!  I was no help.  Sorry, but it is going to be a short email today because I do not have much time but know that I love you all and I am sorry for the short email, I will write a good one next week!

Elder Traveller

Tyler sent the following to his family.  This gives much more insight!

The Mission Field in Mexico City:

The field is crazy.  There are a ton of people and I have no idea what is going on almost all of the time.  I really like the food.  The food is amazing and the Sangria here is great.  I had tacos last night and they were incredible.  I am pretty much downtown in the city and it is crazy.  There is always something going on and there are buildings everywhere.  In my first meeting with my Mission President, he told me that I would be going downtown, so I thought oh nice...big buildings maybe the apartment with be pretty nice...but no I am not near the big buildings or the nice apartments.  That is where the sisters are because are really nice.  The part of the city where I live is definitely not as nice, ha!

You would be proud of me Mom.  When I got here everything was a mess and so dirty, so today we deep cleaned everything and I cleaned the heck out the nastiest fridge I have ever seen.  The cupboards were also soooo gross so I cleaned them too!

My companion is from Ecuador and he is so hard to understand. I don't know what he is saying most of the time.  He is a great guy but I cannot understand his Spanish and he speaks very little English.  We went to the store today and I had no idea where to find anything, so I had to follow him around.  I really wanted to buy cinnamon for Dad's rice recipe so I kept saying we needed cinnamon and he had no idea what the heck I was talking about. Pretty frustrating.

I am in a new place with new people that can not even understand me and I can not understand them.  It causes me to think, what is my purpose here, I feel like I'm doing nothing, helping no one, and it is hard.  But I believe my faith in Jesus Christ and my ability to push through hard things is what is keeping me going right now.  Without those attributes, I probably would have told the mission president that I wanted to go home.

I know in the end it will be alright, it always is.  Do not worry about me,  I will be fine, and I know that Jesus Christ is looking out for me.

Love,
Elder Traveller

The following is a letter from President Naumann.

Dear family of Elder Traveller,

I send you Greetings from Mexico City!  I would like you to know that Elder Traveller arrived safely in the field this morning.  The group left the MTC early this morning and arrived at the mission home at 8:00 am.  We had a good breakfast here where we could get to know each one of them a little better.

After breakfast, we had a personal interview with each one of the missionaries in the group, where he was assigned his new area and his trainer, Elder Traveller will be serving in the Cuauhtemoc Ward in the Industrial Stake.

His new companion will be Elder Salas from Quito, Ecuador, one of the finest missionaries in the field.

Please know that all is well and Elder Traveller is very happy to begin his mission,

Sincerely,

President Naumann

                                    

Tyler at the Mexico City Temple on October 26, 2018

Tyler's district departing for the Mexico City East Mission 

on October 29, 2018

Last group picture from the CCM.

(Loving Tyler's outfit?!)

Elder Traveller at the Mexico City Mission Home with

President Siegfried A. Naumann and Sister Ritta Pyykko Naumann

The newest missionaries of the Mexico City East Mission!

Elder Traveller and Elder Salas.  Tyler's first companion in the field. 

Elder Salas is from Ecuador.

Family Room in first apartment.

Look who finally found the cinnamon! (;

 The kitchen of Tyler's first apartment.

Desk area.  You can learn a lot about Tyler from this picture...

Mexico is lit

Sorry everyone, it is gonna be short and sweet today.  Not a lot of time.

All is well and I know that the most peace and happiness we can find is by serving others and turning to the Lord and His Atonement for help.

Once again, another great quote below!!  Love you all and I hope all is well.

"Don't you quit.  You keep walking.  You keep trying.  There is help and happiness ahead.  Some blessings come soon, some come late, and some don't come until heaven; but for those who embrace the gospel of Jesus Christ, they come.  It will be all right in the end.  Trust God and believe in good things to come."  - Elder Jeffrey R. Holland

Elder Traveller

The following letter was sent to Tyler by his Mission President, President Naumann.

Dear Elder Traveller,

I hope that you are as excited to begin your service in the mission field as I am for you and your group to get here.  We have known of your call for months already, and now it is time to get started!

I want you to know all that will be happening on your first day in the field, 29 Oct 2018.  Here is the schedule of events.

(A detailed timeline was give to Tyler. He will basically leave at 6:30 am and spend the day with the Mission President and the assistants.  He will then depart to his service area at 2:30 and work until 9:00 pm)

Thank you for accepting your call to serve, especially in the Mexico City East Mission.

Sincerely,

President Naumann

The group of missionaries that entered

 the CCM the same day as Tyler.
(He is sitting on the third complete row up on the right side)

In class at the CCM.  Tyler mentioned that he can finally

 understand everything that the teacher is saying!

The lobby at the CCM

The cafeteria at the CCM

(Tyler loves the food here.  He also makes sure to eat a

 peanut butter sandwich with every meal!)

Volleyball court at the CCM

The common grounds at the CCM.  It is a 90 acre campus.

The CCM can accommodate over 1,000 missionaries.

Tyler's view at night.

Happy Birthday to Tyler in the CCM!! 

Sangria from Dad!

Tyler's Great-Grandma Paulene Boyce Greenwood passed away on Monday, October 15, 2018.  She loved being a missionary.  She served three missions in
 California, New York, and South Dakota.

"Mom, I am so sorry about Grandma, I just cried when I got your letter because I love her and I already miss her so much.  And I know how much you love Grandma.  But it is also such a blessing for her to move on from this life.  She has fulfilled her mission and she is now with Grandpa Green!"