I loved everything about this week.
We went to a zone meeting and talked about how our invitations don't have to be so rote, but rather that so long as they are direct and specific they can come out in any comfortable way.
We went to the temple wednesday morning because elder Bertelsen hasn't been during his whole mission (that's 20 months of not going to the temple) and it was a very spiritual experience. I felt like I received many answers to questions I'd had. The celestial room was beautiful in the morning. San Antonio temple has stained glass that makes it one of the most expensive temples of its size. What a blessing!
I served in mission creek and we were lead to find a family who has been inactive in the church since the 80's. Their son just died in a military tour in Iran. Their daughter is also weeks from having a child. The bishop was also assigned to be their casualty officer. They are ready to come back and learn the plan of salvation of God for their family.
A highlight for me was friday. I served in Yorktown Texas. They live in a portable trailer on a small property in the middle of cow fields and oil fields. There closest neighbor..you can't see. I don't know why they live there, but It was so fun! We planned for our day sitting on top of the trailer with the stars above us. We drove their truck 300 miles which was a LOT, and we found a few families to teach. They are great Elders, and I just loved being out in the open country, I felt like a real man. Haha.
Oh! On tuesday Brother Meuller called us and said, he wanted to meet us during mutual so he could talk to us. It wasn't the first time, so we went planning to teach another commandment that would help him feel even more confident in his eventual decision to join the church. He sat down with us and his home teacher Brother Torres. We'd previously invited him to be baptized on the 26th of this month, and he said, i'll be baptized and i'd like to be on the 19th of this month. Soo, perfect! While I was gone on exchanges Elder Bartier and Elder Bertelsen taught him all of the commandments and then scheduled his interview which I was just in time for when I got back.
So what i'm working on right now, is showing love to others the way that they recognize it. My go to is to work really hard, let them know when they're doing a good job, and to really listen to them when they want to talk. However, I live with people that communicate love a lot more through service, and compliments, and other things that are gushy. So i'm trying to cook more for everyone, and the like. It's been gratifying just to see, that although it's not my natural way to let others know I care, they feel it more.
Our week is already pretty well planned out for us, and I can't wait to go get after it.
The Atonement has the power to change us. If we let it, it will bring us back to God. I learned this week that it was never in God's plan that we would sin. Although he provided a savior for us in the instance that we did sin.
It is God's plan that we go through tribulation and experience temptation. Experiencing the opposite of joy, health, oneness, and the light of Christ, gives us the opportunity to make choices that use our agency. Without opposite choices, our agency would be as if dead. Adam and Eve could pick which vegetable they wanted to eat that day, that's agency, but that's not the purpose for which God gave us agency. When they were tempted they could then choose between good and evil, they could choose to be obedient to a law instead of being compelled to be obedient by their circumstances of having only good to choose from. When we really make the choice to be obedient, knowing full well what and why we're choosing, that expression of agency rewards us with a greater amount of God's light. Light causes us to want to continue to do good, and cycle starts where light attracts us to do what is right, and adversity entices us to do the opposite, so that every decision to obey the laws of God bring us ever closer to his presence. The light grows brighter and brighter until the perfect day.
I love you!
Stay Salty!
Elder Tyler Meidell
At the beginning of last week we weren't sure how everything was going to play out for the baptism. If you recall, the second oldest daughter in the vargas family didn't attend her interview, church, and locked herself in her room when we visited. Wednesday God helped us organize a lesson that packed a spiritual punch. The new pimary president came with her daughter who is a good friend of the oldest Vargas daughter. Claudia came who was just baptized into the laurels 2 months ago and shared her experience preparing for her own baptism. A Relief Society president for an English ward comes to teach the girls piano lessons, and her lesson happened to be a the same time as ours. With a small member army on our side, the first miracle was that Nadely came out of her room to find out why there were so many voices in her living room. She was immediately grabbed with welcoming voices, and tender comments which brought her in to sit down with us. We very generally taught baptism as an essential part of becoming clean and preparing to enter into Heaven. 
My dad made a comment a few weeks ago that as a missionary I may be becoming better at working through awkward situations. I had a chance to put that to the test this week. It wasn't flawless, but our overarching objective was accomplished. It was 6:30, we had a lesson scheduled for 6:30 and 7. On the way to our 6:30 we met a mom with 3 sons who were interested in hearing our message. It was in a neighborhood where we didn't want to risk not being able to find this person at home again so we tried to take advantage of the opportunity to teach immediately. We also never want to miss a teaching appointment, so we told the lady we met on the way, we're about to share this message with your neighbor, do you think we could share it to both of you together? She said she had no idea who her neighbor was, so we just told how nice her neighbor was and this and that and she finally agreed. So we ran over to the neighbors, who we've talked to once before and said, hey, it's great to see you, we're excited to share this message with you, and we just met your neighbor, she's so great, do you think you'd want to hear it over at her house while we explain this to her family too? She was quite a bit more open to the idea. So we walked with neighbor over to the Mom and 3 sons house, knocked on the door and said, Hello! Neighbor, meet your neighbor, we can't wait to share this with everyone.. so can we come in? Haha, we're going back tonight and hopefully the good neighborly vibe is still there.
Elder Cruz was transfered to mission creek and Elder Bertelsen stayed. We knew that was what would happen, and they knew that we knew, so we resisted their probing questions and everyone found out by email their transfer results last tuesday. Elder Masters and I are the only area leaders for the mission this transfer so while he received his new trainee (Elder Batier, who we love) Elder Bertelsen and I administered the spanish tets before the san antonio and austin transfer meetings at 6:30am and 10:30 am respectively. There were numerous people who passed, and we know that because we graded ALL of the tests in the mission. It took a good 9 hours to get through them but now we have time to move on to less repetitive things.