When Will My Life Begin?

6:30 AM, the usual morning wake up.  Start the shower, and sing to some David Archuleta.  Shirt and tie, pants, and socks and shine shoes up.  Sing again, then by then, its like 715.  And so Ill read a book, or maybe two or three.  Ill add a few new scriptures to my gallery.  Ill head off to lunch and teach till day breaks dawn.  And I keep wondering and wondering and wondering When will my life begin?

What a long, tiring, exhausting, awesome week!  Many lessons and quemadas and quejadas, but above all, 2 beautiful baptisms.  Lucero, 16, after being an eternal investigador for 8 years, was finally given permission from her papi to be baptized.  It was alot of followup, fasting, diligence, and patience, but in the end it paid off and her time to follow Christ came.  Sara, 20, has also been an eternal investigator for 2 years now.  But after much followup, fasting, diligence and patience, she quit her job and was baptized last saturday.  I was fine, didnt cry, untill Sara and her sister both hugged eachother and started crying now that the family was finally united in the faith.  A moment to never forget.

And my personal highlight was yesterday.  I went to (como se dice despedirme en ingles?) go say goodbye to all my family and friends in my first wards Los Angeles and Progreso.  I wasnt trunky all week up until yesterday.  Yesterday I reminisced on all my mission life ever since I started, as I walked up the old streets where I first started my missionary work.  Sister Glorias house, Emiliana, Jesus Leiva, the old graveyard where drunks used to chase us, lunch with Mama Jade, all the cerros I sweated, bleed, and cried climbing, thinking it would never end.  Painful memories too, haha.  But Im at peace and felt the Spirit so strongly knowing that I did it.  I made it.  I climbed those hills and faught them for 2 years.  And managed to bring many lamanites to the true faith in Christ because of it.  The hardest moments of my life are written in my footprints on those hills.  But time and wind will come, and will blow them away.  None of it really matters.  What matters is the man that I became at the top of the hill.  And not because I made it to the top, but because I faught the temptations and challenges, and learned on the way to the top, and became stronger.  And on the way, found many children of God who were willing to accept the truth, repent, and come to know their God, their Father in heaven that´s waiting for them at the top of Life´s hill.  Nothing has been more worth it.

I have a beautiful family in Peru.  No, I dont want to leave them.  Nor did they want me to go haha.  But I cant wait till you can come meet the people that climbed these hills with me.

Con Amor,

Elder Walker

Tomorrow night,
Lights will appear
Just like they do on my birthday each year.
What is it like
Out there where they glow?
Now that I'm older,
Mother might just
Let me go ..