February 9th, 2015 Letter

Oh man, first of all, this pday has been especially great. My companion and I just decided to take it easy so we went to a panadería (bakery place) and got some orange bread and some other lovely things and we went to a bench on the street that we always contact on called Albufera and ate it together. We have never sat down on a bench on that street except to teach a lesson to someone, so it felt so good to sit down and just relax. Haha I don´t know why I enjoyed it so much but it just seemed so nice. We always personify calle Albufera and talk about ´´her´´ like she is our favorite investigator because she never fails us and lessons with her always go well. The best part about albufera is that there are always people to stop and contact and teach!! We always go there to go contacting.

Speaking of Camaroun ...  Our investigator D. is super awesome! We are scrounging spain for gospel pamphlets in french so that we can continue to teach him. We even tried to somehow break into the MTC because I know there are some in there haha. But things are going well. Well, he does speak english kind of. He told me that he learned english on the street ... so yeah, he speaks street english. It´s really fun when he tries to explain things to me (he speaks French with my companion) in english and then he just drops the F bomb here and there. We work so hard to keep straight faces. So we actually lost contact with him this week and it made us super sad and nervous. We thought we lost him for sure. Then, he found us in the Metro!!! We were all so excited to see each other! It was really a miracle. He told us that he lost his phone at work and had to get a new phone and new number and everything.

Oh here´s another ´´funny´´ story. As missionaries, in addition to teaching the gospel, we try to serve people every chance we get ... We got a call during medio dia on wednesday from a member in another area telling us that her friend that lived in our area needed to go the hospital THAT INSTANT!! We cancelled our lesson with our golden investigator to go take this woman who we thought was dying to the hospital. Turns out, she had a headache. We still took her to the hospital and ended up waiting there for almost 3 hours holding her coat in the waiting room and trying not to loose our minds. Then she called us and told us we could go because her husband showed up. The story is really funny now. It was not really funny in the moment. Hahaha. But now we have a great reference and we are going to try to start teaching her!

We set a baptismal date with our investigators, D! She was in Peru for like 2 months. She told us that she would feel more prepared if she could get a review of all of the lessons again so we are going to do that and then she will be getting baptized on the 14th of March!!! She is super super great! So excited for her.

 By keeping ourselves trapped in the past, we can never truly move onto the future, and like it says, we are disappointing our potential. That´s where Jesus Christ comes in. He never expected us to be held back by who we once were, whether it was 7 months ago or 1 day ago. That person is gone. We can be different everyday and overcome the past because HIS GRACE IS SUFFICIENT. His grace is sufficient for every person and every care. He will always be there to change us and refine us and love us. Something that I¨ve been amazed by on the mission is the incredible ability that people have to CHANGE. We can change on our own, maybe, but to truly change and become different people and to feel as if the past is past and the future is ours, we need Jesus Christ. We need a full knowledge of His teachings and His love for us. That´s why we´re missionaries. To share this full and complete knowledge that we have of Jesus Christ and our loving Heavenly Father, through the Book of Mormon and modern day prophets, with everyone so that everyone can have the chance to CHANGE. That´s what we call declaring repentance. It´s not going around telling everyone that they´re wrong and they´re doomed if they don´t follow what we say. It´s going around, being guided by the Spirit, and lovingly bringing the greatest joy that people could ever posses to them- the knowledge of Jesus Christ. A full knowledge, or in other words, the fullness of His Gospel.

So yeah, this week has been good. Real good. Sorry for the sporadic emails, we were sort of running out of time. Well, not really, but we still have to go grocery shopping. :) FOOD