los mios

My fam

It kind of freaks me out that Ben is already home.  

Gosh, it was good to see los mios yesterday.  Very weird that a year ago I was in my first area. After I spoke to y´all my comp spoke to his fam. They are Columbians and they seem like fantastic people. While he was chatting with them I watched 17 miracles, Soy Mormon videos and other Mormon messages. This was fantastic cause it definitely helped this guy not miss his fam. 

Transfers were today and now I am one zone over but still in Gomez. My comp is elder Rubiera. He is from the Republica Dominicana and served in Megs mish for 5 months before coming here. He showed me pics of the island. Looks pretty dry there.....not. =)  I’m sure the megster is really suffering.    

Pres Flores has instructed us with good wisdom that if there are investigators that aren’t going to church, even if they are reading, we should give them space after several weeks.  This week we had to do that. We had contacted a house a while back looking for a family. A grandmother answered the door and we said we were missionaries and talked briefly about eternal families. We asked if we could come in and share a message. They accepted. We taught them several times every week and they absorbed everything we said. We gave them a Book of Mormon with a small explanation in of our first lessons and some homework to read Mosiah 4. We had to go but we told them we would explain more about the book in a later time. Well, they were very curious about the book and started talking after reading the chapter and started talking about the Mayans and the White spirit they had seen and wondered if the book talked about that. They started looking through in and found the introduction and the picture of Christ with the Nephites and they later told us that they were stunned.  When we got back they had already read a chunk of the book.  I have to say they were very fun to teach. They had great questions always ready for us and every lesson sort of ended with a cliffhanger =). The problem was that they work on Sundays and couldn’t commit to attending church, so we had to leave them but hopefully other missionaries will go back and find them ready. 

I told you that one of the members taught a lesson on the Word of Wisdom and included the idea that Mormon’s don’t drink water. Ha - after church we had to console our investigators that it was a misunderstanding. Another fun member moment was that an hermano had to prepare a lesson on the apostasy and restoration and asked us for help. We asked him what we he knew. He responded, "well it lasted about ten years right?" That would have been the 1960`s J.

Mary our grandmother investigator invited her daughter to talk with us. She had lost her son exactly two years ago to cancer and she needed comfort.  We taught a quick lesson on the Plan of Salvation. She started to cry in the lesson and told us that when her son had died several priests told her it was for her sins and her other children would meet the same fate. Since that time she has been constantly worried for her children’s wellbeing; thinking that every time she heard them cry she was about to find them mortally wounded.  We got to look her in the eyes and tell her that such things were not true. She visibly calmed down and we got to talk through it.

My new comp seems like a stud. He has 18 months and is clean and seems to be a hard worker. Apart from that he seems like a genuinely good guy so I am very excited about this time.

My last comp and I were great buds.  We spoke English way too much but I will miss the guy and the other two elders that were in our ward. We got super tight. 

Hey, I gots to head 

Happiest birtday (without an “h” because with my Utah accent I never say it with an h) to my mother.

Love from this guy