Gran Comienzo del mes de Abril (A Great Beginning in April!)

A new rugby jersey!  The kid will have an entire wardrobe of jerseys when he gets home!

Wow it's already April!!! That's so crazy! The time flies when you are having fun (serving a mission in another country, talking to people in another language, sharing a message about Christ).

The week really did go by fast, but as I´ve noticed as you focus on the people and their needs everything else seems to not matter, its just the missionaries and those that they teach. It's a great feeling being lost in the work of the lord. 

  

So as you all know Conference is this up coming week. So the missionaries have been preparing to bring our investigators to said conference. I´m very excited.  

Every one is doing great, Natalia is progressing very well. Me and my comp Elder Damitz are visiting less actives like crazy! there is no house unclapped in our area. (in Argentina you clap in front of peoples houses instead of knocking). We found several new less-active families to work with for this up coming week. We are going through our entire list of members. The sad thing is that after a lot of work to help inspire these less-actives to come to church, it rained Sunday, and when it rains here in Argentina nobody leaves their houses. But we have conference this week end so we will bring them to that one!!!

  

In the mission there are always firsts for everything, first Comp, Area, Baptism, transfer etc. This week was a first that I wouldn´t have preferred to have had in my mission, first robbery of my mission. This past Friday me and my comp were walking in a not-so-safe part of our area looking for less-active members. As we were walking I saw in the corner of my eye two men walking behind us. I started to walk faster and my companion took note and followed. One of the two men ran after us asking us what time is was. As we turned to look at him the other ran with their hands in the shirts (trying to make us think they had a weapon) told us "GIVE US YOUR PHONE!" I just told them we don´t have anything that we are missionaries of God and all we have is scriptures. I tried to offer him a BoM but he didn´t take it. After several minutes of denial they left. Me and my comp are super blessed to have left with all of our stuff. Just to come home and find out the other Elders next to us in the Cabaña got all of their stuff taken! Crazy haha. But all is good... although we got rejected trying to offer a copy of the BoM.hehe.

  

Also I bought a new shirt, it's the Argentine National Rugby Jersey. It's super sweet! Then right after a member gifted me a shirt of Boca. I´m rolling in cool Jerseys right now!  In the end that's all I have for you this week. I love you all, keep up the good things you do. I know the Savior is proud of all the good things that you do. 

Live long and Prosper

Love,

Elder Taylor M. Chriss

Gotta love PDays!

This is the look Lindsay got when she told him we had made his bedroom into a walk in closet!

Success Takes Hard Work!

Thanks Lilian for my newest picture of Elder Chriss and Elder Damitz! You are the best!

Well we come to that time of the week again, the missionary Emails!!! Every Monday thousands of missionaries are writing home to their families. That's a lot of testimonies being shared!

This was a very good week. It had a lot of ups and really only one down. First I´ll start off with the ups. Me and my comp are working really hard, having a lot of success talking with our less actives and bringing them to church. And as we talk with these less actives we are finding new people to talk to! 

We have a great investigator named Natalia, she is fantastic and is really willing to follow the gospel and is looking for a stronger life for her and her family. She has a lot of trials in her life, so we are helping her lift her spirits. We are working well with our Bishop to grow our ward. We had a Zone Conference with two zones and President. He focused the meeting on helping out our wards grow, and as we do that we will find new people to teach. So we are working well with him.

  

They celebrated my Birthday at the meeting... a month early is better than a month late. President gave me Starbursts and a Alfajor!!! Alfajor are these Argentino mini desserts that are just plain fantastic.

So those are some of the ups of the week. Now comes the down of the week. I have been struggling with a pretty bad in grown toenail, that the doctor says is from the amount of walking that we are doing.... so I wanted to get it checked out to clear up any problems that it could cause. I went down to the Area Offices of the church (center of the church in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay) to have Elder Smith the Doctor take a look at it. He tells me "take off your shoe and let me take a look at it" I do as he asks and he says with out hesitation "Well looks like we need to operate".... My face just sunk... and before I knew it  he was cleaning off some scissors with some alcohol haha.

He gave me five super painful injections in the foot to numb the toe and then went at it. Normally what doctors can do is dig out the ingrown toe nail, But he said it was a lot easier to just take 1/4th of my nail off. So he did, Then he killed the root so no longer will my nail grow in that part of my foot. Yeah..... But on the bright side of things we ate at Subway afterwards, so its all good. To let you all know I´m doing a lot better, and my foot feels fine.

  

I´m so glad to be a missionary and to be serving here the people of Argentina. I hope all is well!

Live long and Prosper!!!
LOVE 

Elder Taylor Chriss

Downtown Buenos Aires near the doctor's office

Elder Chriss and Elder Venegas

Cheesing it at the internet Cafe!

Cuando Llueve, Llueve mucho (when it rains its pours... more or less)

Hola Elder Damitz!

And it came to pass that the week was good in the eyes of Elder Chriss! haha yeah we had a great time! Me and my comp E. Damitz are working really working hard to find the people that the Lord is preparing for us in our area. We had several great opportunities to grow and get better.

   

Now as the title says, when it rains it pours.... First off we had like 5 meetings this week. which never happens (meetings are more rare here) First off in San Fernando (mission office) with all of the Zone and District Leaders, which was great and I loved all the things that we learned about. Secondly Zone meetings and ward meetings sooo it's pouring meetings.

  

Another type of rain that we are having is well, rain. The other day we were in our Zone meeting and it started to rain. We all look outside and groan, because none of us were expecting rain, so we had no umbrellas or coats. Then in the middle of the meeting our Zone Leader gets a call. He tells us that all of the colectivos (Public Buses) are not working.... we live very very far from our the church that we were in.... so let's just say that we got very wet.

  

It was a great week for my district! We had three baptisms as a district yesterday! I have been blessed to work with great missionaries here in my district. I was given the opportunity to interview the candidates for baptism and it was super cool so see the fruits of the missionaries and their work. As I have said in the past the mission is growing substantially. And it's great to be here to see it. The Lord is moving forward with his work and is preparing the world for his coming. 

I love you all! Email me, I love hearing from you.  Have a good week, stay cool and love one another.

Love Elder Chriss

Another MTC Gang photo!

BOCCA!!!

Pictures sent from Natalia before Elder Flores left

Capos (studs) de Mision Buenos Aires Norte

Ciao Elder Flores!

Hey every one how are you doing this fine day?  Another week passes, wow the weeks are passing by really fast... I don´t like it.

It has come to pass another transfer, hence the Email on Tuesday. And guess what more changes for Elder Chriss.  My companion E. Flores has moved to another area, of Parque Brown which in fact is where I spent my first week in Argentina. I have a new companion named Elder Damitz from California. He is super smart and is a hard worker. I´m looking forward to working with him.

This past week was a good ole week of working. And I´m going to tell you the truth.... not much happened. We taught several lesson to a lot of people but nothing grand happened during the week.

But at the end of the week we had the farewells for the departing missionaries. And me and E. Flores took some investigators to it. We had a great time.  I had the opportunity to see a lot of people that I known from other areas. First of I saw Elder Stout! Who is doing great (is a district leader) and is having a lot of success still in Parque Avellaneda. He brought Ari (son of JOSE!) to the farewell! I love that guy I´m so happy to find out that Jose is doing good and his family is coming closer to Christ! I got to see the whole gang (MTC) which what awesome. And I said good bye to my misson Father E. Pastrana who will be returning home to Kaysville UT. I saw lots of people and in the end it was great.

We were at lunch the other day and my companion was a little down and was telling the family how he failed to baptize this transfer and how he felt like a failure. The Hna told my companion a story I will never forget. She said " There once was a missionary who told me after one year in his mission that he only had one baptism. After he had served his entire mission that one baptism was his only baptism in his mission." Now in this mission having only one baptism is odd because baptisms are a lot more common." She continued " That missionary only had one baptism, but the young girl that he baptized found and married a returned missionary, had 5 kids, all of which are missionaries, and her husband is currently a bishop." She looked at my comp and told him "I'm that one baptism." As missionaries never must we feel that the work we do is wasted, because it is all worth it in the end. This Hna is the wife of the our bishop and is such a great example to me. I know that as long as I´m working hard and doing all I can to serve the Lord, I´m having success and as long as I´m obedient and following my leaders the blessings will follow.

l love you all so much! I hope that you all have a fine and dandy week. I will talk to you all later.

LOVE,
Elder Taylor Chriss

The WONDERFUL Lilian once again feeding my cute missionary son!!!

MTC District and roommates together again one year later

March Madness!

Elder Chriss and Elder Lines enjoying Taylor's favorite Helado!  Elder Lines is one of the senior missionaries serving in the Mission office.

Well it's your favorite time of the week! THE WEEKLY EMAIL OF E. CHRISS!!! 

That's right it's already March.  I´m not really sure what happened with February, but it just seemed to disappear!!! 

I have to say that it was a great week! We as always have been working our butts off here. Every corner of our area we have walked and we have been talking to as many people as we can! Another big thing about this week is that I have officially completed one year in the mission. Wow I´m kind of sad to think that I´m half way done with my mission, mainly because i want more time. With this in mind I will have to work as hard as i can so that I´m not losing a second of this time. 

   

This week of hard work was very interesting. We are as a mission focusing on contacting more people, the idea is that the bigger the net we throw the more elect people we will find. We are seeing great growth in our investigator Milagros, and we are hoping to see her baptized soon. I had a great opportunity to have divisions with and Elder this week named Elder Mejia, he is from Mexico and I have known him my entire time here! We had a great time in his area and we found several great new investigators. Our mission is growing a lot and we are doubling our numbers from past months, it is really cool to see the growth in Buenos Aires.

  

There have been several times on my mission where I have felt the help of my Heavenly Father but this week I had an experience that it was undeniable that I was receiving help. We were passing by people in our area and we were talking with a very nice member who as a lot of resistance in her home. As we were talking a very angry man came and decided to tell us that there is no such thing as God and that we are fools for believing in this. He said some very offensive words to us and wanted to continue talking. At this moment I felt a boost, With the clearest Spanish that I have ever used in my life I stood up (we were sitting at the time) and told the Man, "I know that God exists, I know that Christ is my Savior, And no man and his words can out weigh what I know to be true." My companion and I told him to have a good day and we left. As we left he said some not so nice words which I didn´t understand, But nothing he could say could diminish the feelings I had. 

I´m so grateful for a Heavenly Father who strengthens us in our time of need. I would like to repeat what I said, "I know God lives and that his son Jesus Christ is our Savior." I can not deny it.

I´m so grateful to be a missionary, to be here in Buenos Aires Argentina. Thank you all for your love and I hope you have a good week. 

A shout out to my Grandfather who is in the hospital, GET WELL! I love you all so much and I will talk to you next week!!!

Con Amor!

- Elder Taylor Chriss

I received the following letter from Elder Lines this week:

Dear Sister Chriss,

What a great son you have shared with us!  Believe it or not I got to spend a couple of hours with him today along with his companion.  His companion had literally worn thru and thru his meager shoes and so we went shopping.  Elder Chriss was a lot of help and I could really feel the compassion he has for his companion, Elder Flores.  They had to go with me to my other rounds through town getting business done along the way, so we had a fun time doing a lot of walking and talking.  He has a great spirit and attitude about him.  You have raised a  great son to be proud of.

Elder Lines

Financiero

Misión Buenos Aires Norte

I am so thankful for the wonderful people put on Elder Chriss' path to love and watch out for him! 
~Lisa 

The Family we live with!! A party for their anniversary. Funny thing is that they lived in Utah for several years next to the Home Depot on Highland Drive!!! Small world!

Lunch with some of our zone.

Wonderful Natalia Roldan posted this picture of Elders Chriss and Flores at a birthday party with the following caption, "Me encanta haber compartido este dia junto a ustedes!! Me divertí mucho hoy!!Son unos capos!:p"  Translation:
"I love to have shared this day with you! I enjoyed much today!They are a few bosses!"