February 22, 2011

Hola familia,
Sorry I couldn´t write yesterday. We had to go to the capitol to do papers for Elder Diaz. We left at 5:30 in the morning and got back at 7:30 at night, so that was a bummer of a p-day waiting in lines all day for like 5 missionaries to get signatures on legal documents. But we got permission to be able to write to our families and to President Stapley today.

I didn´t know that Lance lives in South Jordan now. That´s awesome, but it would be rough to go back to a different ward and a different house, in a different state. (Lance was David's roommate at BYU and will also be rooming with him this fall at BYU. He just returned from serving a mission in Armenia.)

Sounds like everything´s going good up in Utah with basketball and everything. That´s awesome that Dad got even more involved with the sports world. We´ll have to have some major catch-up sessions. The package made it fine. We got it Friday at interviews. It´s a nice camera, and no one in customs broke it or stole it, so todo bien (all right). The Reese´s Pieces and other candy made it also, and I ate all of the candy that night--not the best idea. We´ll see what happens when I get back and am surrounded by American food. I might gain 36 lbs. in the first couple of weeks or something like that.

The day we ate lunch with Brother and Sister Grieves was the first time we got food from this hermana. She has a key to the church and left the food for us inside. I don´t really know why she does it that way, but my companion says that she did that before when they got food from her. We live a couple blocks outside of our area, but the chapel is right in the middle, and is closer to where we work, so lots of times we study the language there in the church (We study the language usually from 2:00 to 3:00 in our mission, because the people take the siesta, and it´s the most ineffective hour, so we work at 10:00, and then study language in the afternoon.) If people give us tupperware containers of food, we go to the church to eat it. But yeah, that hermana gave us tons of food. It was ridiculous. We ate the rest at night for dinner, and we still had more left over. It was really good.

Interviews went well with President on Friday. Before we went in he said I have a reputation for having the shortest interviews in the whole mission; when President Acey was here too. So he said we had to have an interview for a half an hour--we made it to 25 minutes. Almost made it. But he had to talk about how cool my tie was and about basketball to stretch the time out. Elder Diaz is still pretty much the same. President says that´s he´s wanted to go home ever since he got here, but his mom won´t give in, and won´t let him come home, so he´s just waiting it out. But we´re still working hard and we´re being obedient. Something's gotta change in him some time. But President couldn´t really change his mind, but said that I was chosen to be with Elder Diaz because every missionary has to have a companion, and Elder Diaz is a hard person to be with, and he needed a good misionary to be there for him. We have transfers this Monday that´s coming up, and President says he needs me to stay here in the Plata, but he´s not sure what he´s going to be doing with Elder Diaz, so we´ll see what happens. Elder Diaz has been here his whole mission, almost 6 months now. So it might be good to be put in a new place and see if a change of environment helps him.

Here in the area of South America Sur, they started a program called the 15 families a couple months ago. The ward council chooses 15 families--less actives, recent converts, or part member families, and the missionaries repass the lessons with them with the help of the other members. Our ward still has only chosen 6 families, but this Sunday, four of the six less active families made it to church, and also Leonidas, our investigator from the Dominican Republic made it, so that was awesome. We´re working really hard to have members in all our lessons with the six families, and with all the investigators. Sometimes they stand us up, but we´re teaching a lot with members, so that is awesome.

We found an awesome woman this week named Marta. We clapped her house, and we were able to pass by a couple of days later and we were able to get in and teach her. When we had first contacted her she said she had already found her church, and that she is Evangelical. But I bore testimony of the restoration and that every one of us can know what God wants for us through prayer, and she said that we could come by another day because she was busy. When we taught her she said that she was raised Catholic but with all of the saints and the recited prayers, she just didn´t feel right. Then she found an Evangelical church and that the way they pray gets to her a lot more. But she says that she knows that there is still more that God wants for her, and that´s why she let us in, because she´s unsure what church is the true church, but she wants those blessings in her life. After sharing the Restoration with her, we left her with a Book of Mormon and she is excited to read and pray to know if these things are true, and willing to follow the answer when God responds.

I know that the Church of Jesus Christ was restored to it´s original form through the restoration of the gospel through the prophet Joseph Smith, and that every one of us can have the peace and the happiness that comes with having the gospel in our lives.

I´ll talk to guys next week, love you all.
Love, David