Week #10

Alex has been in Chile for 10 weeks! I can't believe that. I feel like he has been gone for a month or maybe a little longer. Hopefully that keeps up until he comes home. In that case, he will be home in no time. I cannot believe he totally understands Spanish. I am very impressed with all that he has learned in the past few months. Simply Amazing! The pictures are of Alex balancing his cereal on top of the blender so the ants don't get to it, a beautiful tree blossoming, reese's he found in a store, and Elder Mann making a flower out of leaves from a tree. Cool!


What´s wierd is how long the days are, but then how we pass into the next week in no time at all. We´re on week five of my second change - in two weeks, I´ll be a non-new standard Private missionary. Also I´m trying this month to not speak English. I actually was going to try to not speak English until next month at all. Turns out it´s really hard to expain Harry Potter to someone in Spanish, so I gave up. Now I only speak English after 10 and on P Day. I understand everything now, officially, but I get bound up saying stuff occasionally, hence the need for practice. This adds to the longness of the days, but wierdly when I go so say something, usually I start speaking in Spanish automatically, which is wierd.

This week we had at least two miracles. As we walked to an appointment we were rather late for, we saw a lady on a park bench crying. I noticed, but Elder Mann didn´t. I mentioned it to him a block or two later. We kept walking to the appointment, but it fell through. We went back, and the lady was still there. We contacted her, which turned into a 45-minute lesson on the spot. She loved everything we taught. She had been studying with the Testigos de Jehová for two years, but had never felt the way she did with us. We have returned four times this week, and we are going to do a noche de hogar tonight with her family. She is having problems with her husband, and she has started becoming clinically depressed. She´s looked better every time we see her. If it hadn´t been for a medical emergency with one of her children, they´d have all been to church. I have never met someone more prepared for the gospel. Actually, come to think of it, that leads me to our other miracle this week.
The next day, we were doing some contacts in an area we´ve always wanted to contact. We knocked one door, and a man came out who said he didn´t want anything. It was somewhat surprising because when he spoke, he spoke in English. He didn´t even let us give him a pass-along card. But when we got a hundred feet away, he came out and waved and told us to come back. We taught and talked for a very long time. He said he´d never let anyone talk to him about religion, but he felt that he needed to figure out what life was about. He said many times that he wanted to believe, but he couldn´t, because there was no way of proving or recieving a witness of religion. He had six degrees from colleges because he had never married, choosing instead to continue studying while working for over 15 years. As we talked, I realized he had the exact problems I had before I understood the gospel. While most of the conversation was in Spanish, at the end I bore him my testimony in English that the Gospel cannot be proven - that I had tried, to which he said that he had too, but rather that a person must ask God and no one else. He wanted us to come back soon to talk more, having found a lot of reason in what we´d said, but he was leaving to Australia until March. We gave him a Book of Mormon, of course, with many chapters for him to read on the planes he would take.

We´ve had a lot of problems getting to talk to anyone, and now we have too many. I feel kind of spoiled now. We are moving from investigator to investigator all day. Our problem now is keeping up our contact numbers. We´re supposed to do 77 a week, about. We did like 35 this week. But on the other hand we´ve had some two hours of non-people-teaching time since Wednesday. Fetch - but hey, I´m not complaining.

It´s interesting that you notice that. We talk to people all the time who say that only the Bible is right and people are all out to get money from you. Then you ask them why they know the bible is true. Some say "It´s the Bible... it just is." Some people say "Because since I was 5 I´ve been reading it." They´ve been taught always that the Bible is true. It´s kind of stuck that way forever. At the same time, however, like it says in Our Search For Happiness, no spiritual truth has entered the hearts of people except by the Spirit of God. It says over and over again in all the Scriptures that the Holy Ghost testifies of the truth of all things - including the Bible. We don´t hold a patent on the Spirit. However, we do hold a .. "Patent?" .. well, that´s not really the best word, but we have ordained ministers who are entrusted with giving the Gift of the Holy Spirit, which gift is the best gift we can get on the earth. People think "baptize or bust" in the mission. I would say "Confirm or bust." There´s a big push in our mission right about helping people understand how much of a gift it is. I don´t know if you´ll get this (I think Jake will), but when you´re playing, say, Halo or something, there´s always that person who tells you what you need to do, and how you can do it. "Hey, Space Marine Guy, go blow up/resque/shank this person/building/alien." What would you do if that person didn´t talk to you? You´d just walk around and look for stuff to do. The Spirit gives you quests to do and will tell you how to accomplish them. Don´t think for a second that He can only talk to you about religious stuff. If you want to get in shape, look no farther. If you want to get better grades, look no farther.Go to God with every question you have. (It says in the Bible Dictionary under Prayer that some blessings are given contingent on our asking for them, nothing more.) (I recommend that you read a few of those in Family Home Evening, like under Holy Spirit, Prayer, etc.)

And like that, we´re out of time. El Espíritu testifica de la verdad de todas las cosas, y yo sé, porque yo lo he experimentado. Siganlo. Les quiero mucho.
Elder AC Crist

I´m excited for the package, finally. Haha.