La Vida Es Una Autopista pt. final

Well this letter is about a week and a half late and a little bit out of context now but I figured I owe it to you all to fill you in on what’s been going down recently. Unfortunately, due to the Corona Virus Pandemic and political problems around the world, I am no longer in El Salvador. We had to pack everything up and basically just say goodbye. Due to the strict quarantine laws in El Salvador, we couldn’t leave the house to say goodbye to anyone and so everything just kinda happened really fast. I was closing in on my last months of my mission so I was released this week as a missionary and I am now officially no longer Elder Moulton. So it’s back to Tanner. 

I really don’t think there’s words (in English or Spanish) to express just how much these last 20 months meant to me. The lessons the Lord has taught me over the past little while will always always always have their place in my heart. I didn’t understand God or life or pretty much anything before i left on this mission, and the truth is I still have quite a ways to go. But I came to understand one thing. 

Now I don’t wanna get too long or sappy on anyone, but I think that this being my last email and all of us being stuck in quarantine with nothing better to do gives me an excuse to rant a little bit. I decided to go on my mission because I felt that God loved me. Most of my life I went through the motions, learning, growing and progressing, but it wasn’t personal. Until one day I felt the call. So I left. I left expecting to get to know another country, another people, another culture, another me. And I would definitely say that all of those things happened. But the best thing I really came to know wasn’t the food or the friends or the experience, it was my Savior. 

John 17:3
And this is life eternal , that they might know thee the only true God , and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent .

I came to know joy, watching 84 year old Don Paco entering the waters of baptism or watching Luis Delcid stepping into the church for the first time in years. I got to know sadness, Hermano Candido dying just months after his baptism and familia Martinez struggling to put food on the table every week. I got to know some of the best people in the world, people I am honored to call my best friends. And I came to know El Salvador, a country that may lack in size but makes up for it with love and pupusas. In almost every aspect of my life I came to know more than I ever had before. But putting aside the mountain roads and the rainstorms and the bus rides with chickens and bananas in my face, what I came to know was so much greater. Because I came to know my Savior. 

If there is anyone reading this and if you feel in anyway at all like what I am saying is true I just want to share one piece of advice. LOOK. Nothing happens in this life until you go out and do something. And the most important thing in life, at least in my mind, is happiness. By coming to know my savior I came to know happiness. I saw familia Cortez, a family with absolutely nothing who sacrifice everything to put a tin roof over their dirt floors and provide their children with beans. I saw Tomas, a lonely old man with only cats and cigarettes as his company. And I saw the familia Fuentes, a single mother with 4 kids and a whole lot of bills and unemployment. i saw Diego and yamileth, a struggling couple who’s parents both died within 3 weeks and who even with the world against them were married and adopted a pitbull. But what I saw in each and every one of them is something I can never forget. I saw happiness. They didn’t care about what they didn’t have because they had joy. These people had every right in the world to just throw in the towel and mope, be sad, complain. But they didn’t. Why? Because they were happy. They had come to know Christ. 

I know and I testify, as my last testimony to you all, that there actually is a living God. He is a God of mercy and love but he is above all a God of happiness. The gospel of Jesus Christ has brought me that happiness. And I can not deny that it has the power to do the same in the lives of each and every one of you. I was honored to represent our Savior for these past few months and I am happy that I will be able to continue getting to know him even more now. I pray that we can all get out of this mess soon and that at least a little good will come out of all of this. God has restored the truth to the world in these days, all you have to do is look. Thank you all so so so much for your emails, support, love, and especially prayers. There were days when the spiritual boost really kicked in, I really needed that. Please continue praying for paradise (aka El Salvador) and stay on the grind!

SALUUUUU

(Ex) Elder Moulton

Ps 
Please keep in touch! I will have this email a little while longer but if you wanna stay in touch just shoot me an email or look for me on social media. Gracias por todo amigos, cuídense.

Reflection

Well this is coming in a little late, anyone reading this should know I am writing this about a month after the fact. So I think this is going to sound more like a reflective diary piece, which should be a nice change of pace to the whole “another week in paradise” schpeal. Well we’re talking about February, maybe January. Jokes start coming in about the whole corona virus, the mission presidents wife is sending us memes. And here we start. In the middle of all of this, President decides I am ready to be the Senior AP. I had been junior AP for one change and President decided it was time for me to train a new guy. So there we are, Elder Foster and I are out here, clueless because I’m supposed to be the senior comp of the mission but I never know anything. And we are just blowing off the corona virus jokes as some phase joke thing from China. Really wasn’t even a concern. But it starts spreading. And I started getting worried. My last weeks on the mission were without a doubt the weirdest, hardest, most educational, and spiritual times of my life. I remember getting put on quarantine. The national panic that entered slowly in the ward and community.  I remember going out to buy kiddie swimming pools because they shut down the baptismal fonts and we had to have something. Teaching lessons over the phone, doing a whole bunch of facetime interviews because we had to do all the the interviews for the whole mission. It was rough. I would check the church newsroom page daily and beg God for a way to be ok with what was happening. Quarentine wasn’t so bad. I learned to cook eggs and stuff, wrote a great original cover song to Bare necessities by Mowgli and Co. It was something. We got locked on our balcony and everything. But I remember one day just breaking down and sobbing because I knew we were coming home. Next day we go to the office to start coordinating stuff and we get the call from president. Official. Then we get put on a country wide lockdown, jailtime if youre outside. But this is the crazy part, we had just designed an extremely complicated bus route in 2 parts circling the entire eastern and central parts of the country, moving and joining a few groups of missionaries to prepare for the great escape. So we got this crazy, brain bursting logistical nightmare going on and then 1, President notifies us officially we will all be going home, and 2, the president of the republic shuts down all the streets. Long story short, we prayed and fasted and they got through checkpoints and even tho they had to stop and pay a gang some fees in front of one of the houses and do a midnight run, everyone got to a house safe. Also we had a baptism the next day but no water to fill our kiddie pool baptismal font. Your boy was losing it with the stress and non stop phone calls, but we clung to hope for the baptism of Carlos. So we prayed for rain and boom as soon as we start the fast rain comes down for the first time in 6 months. Just to clue you in, the baptism didn’t happen. Which was a very tough situation but we weren’t out of the water yet. Due to the shutdown, we couldn’t get home from the office. So we stayed with the secretaries. We managed to make arrangments and get someone to pack and smuggle us our bags a few days later but I never saw our house again and we lived a fat minute in the secretaries house with just the clothes on our back. Then the fun stuff started. The next week and a half we waited by the phone as we received updates and forms and requests from governments to get everyone home. We didn’t sleep till 2 or 3 every night. We filled out forms and brought a computer from the office to the secretaries house to do work without  internet. Ended up making forms to give buses permission to travel. The forms had my signature and were very suspect but got buses through. We did trips and movements and all kinds of mumbo jumbo (excuse the language) to get it all lined up. All in all I think it was like 2 weeks of quarantine. And full crisis mode. I can’t and honestly wouldn’t even want to explain every detail but after a few fallen through flights the gringos got on board Sunday. We had to work out everything from police details to bags to passports to clearance permissions and yeah. Wack. But God came thru. You can read my feelings about getting released in another entry just know that this whole thing taught me a lot. We had to go home. But we saw miracles and blessings and growth. I am not a big fan of Corona Virus but in the time we had reflecting on all this I realized what I wanna study, what I had loved about my mission, what I had learned in 20 months, I gotta spend time with my family, and help them move houses. Things worked out. And things always will.