Week 81

Hola holaa!!

So throughout the entire 18 months of my mission so far, I have only eaten with members 4 times... and that was all within the first week of entering the mission field when COVID didn't exist. Flash forward to now, and we keep telling members that we are soooo close to being able to eat in their houses again............. and then the COVID guidelines changed once more... in the opposite direction, and now we can't give handshakes again and we gotta wear the masks during missionary and church meetings. It's kinda crazy how many missionaries and other people are complaining about these changes though. The word of God is the word of God, "...whether by mine own voice or by the voice of my servants, it is the same." (D&C 1:38) I'm excited to see what comes of these changes.

So our area had been a bit unmotivating recently with the lack of solid new people and a bunch of cancelled lessons. But then we had an exchange with the Assistants, and I stayed in the area with the one, the only... Elder Hansen, who has no fear of talking with everyone. It was actually kinda ridiculous how we'd be walking to go knock on a certain door, but the second he spotted someone, he was shouting across the street to some confused Latino, and we'd close the gap and just teach them. Even if they didn't seem interested on the spot, I definitely learned that it's better to talk to someone who's not interested rather than not talk to someone who would've been interested.

We had another English class, and although there weren't 80 people like last time, we definitely planned it a lot better and taught a really fun class about naming the parts of the car as well as learning directions, which involved a legendary activity where 60+ students all leaned to the left and to the right as we pretended to drive down a road (pictures down below)

Miracle:

So, we had been a bit bummed and a bit hopeless from all of our cancelled lessons lately. But on Tuesday, we received a call from some missionaries in Colombia, who informed us that one of the people that they've been teaching, Carlos, would be moving to Utah into our area in the upcoming week. At first we were like, "Cool cool." And then they mentioned that Carlos had already accepted a baptismal date set for August 28!! So in our struggles, God blessed us with someone who is willing to let God prevail in their lives, and we're super excited to work with him!

God is still a God of miracles.

Elder Terry

Fotos:

1) Me at the conference center