October 11, 2010

Hooooooooooola familia;
Sounds like everything's going well up there. It´s good to finally hear good news about BYU. I miss that feeling of being in Lavell Edwards Stadium Saturday nights in the lights, in the autumn breeze. But I´ll get my chance this next year. Sounds like Mikayla´s growing up; but I´ll be there to see her prolific high school sports career so it´ll all be good.

Today with the zone we watched "The Princess and the Frog" in Spanish. Once every 2 months now we can watch an approved Disney movie from the mission home with our zones. It was pretty good. Weird to see a movie. It´s been more than a year without seeing anything besides the restoration and "Finding Faith in Christ."

We had really good lessons this week with Norah and her family (the familia Boliviana). They said that they felt like they weren´t producing fruits, that they felt our love for them and all of our efforts to help them and that felt bad that they hadn´t been so dedicated to reading and praying, and they commited to reading from the start of the Book of Mormon 2 pages everyday and to pray and ask if it is true after reading every time. And they have been completed all week, and we talked a lot about how in Nephi 3:7 that God never gives us commandments that we can´t complete, and how he´ll provide a way for them to complete all of commandments if they seek God first and act on all intentions to complete. They commited to seek all opportunites to keep the Sabbath Day with prayer and with faith; and they want to follow the Savior and his example. They are an awesome family. I love them, and hope and pray that they can overcome their obstacles and make it to church and to baptism.

This week we had another good experience with service. Saturday we were walking in the morning to some contacts that we had planned to return to, but we passed in the street and we saw down the street that there were 3 women moving a big pile of dirt and cement boulders with shovels and we went and helped them. 2 of them are members, daughters of Bartolo and Felicita, and we just put down our backpacks and started working. It was the house of the neighbor of the members, and as we worked we started talking to her. Her name is Carolina, and she is from Peru, and when she was a little girl she was going to be baptized but her parents forbid it. And now she has lots of problems; her husband's trying to recover from alchoholism, and she has depression but we talked with her a lot and she invited us to come back in the evening for dinner to meet her husband when he got back from work. They are both really awesome, lots of problems in their lives but they´re trying to overcome them. How much easier it will be if they can do it with the atonement of Jesus Christ and applying the gospel to their lives; the only way we can ever really overcome the pain and mistakes we make in this life. Just like when we found he family from Bolivia, we saw the pure importance of service and charity. We didn´t help because we knew that we would be able to teach and find a new family, we helped because we knew they needed it, and we were in the right place at the right time. God works in mysterious ways, but if we´re in tune we can be where he wants us to be.

This week I´ll be writing on Wednesday instead of Monday because the transfers where changed to half a week earlier this transfer, to Wednesday. So when I write Wednesday I´ll know if I´m still going to be here in 9 de Abril with Elder Fernandez or not. I hope that everything goes well this week. Til next week.

Love, David