Hola familia y todos!
Well another week has gone by incredibly fast! It’s ridiculous how fast time goes! This was another meh week, we have been working hard and trying to get things moving, but it’s just been hard. We contact people and put an appointment and we come back and they either aren’t there or they are "busy" and we try to put a return date and then they say "but I’m Catholic or whatever" it’s been kind of tough dealing with a lot of the appointments falling through. It gets frustrating sometimes that we just can’t find anything right now, even though we do have some people, but not enough that truly want to learn. It can get hard some days especially when we walk aimlessly through the city going from fallen cita to fallen cita., but we are keeping our heads high.
One appointment was interesting this week. We are trying to reactivate a family and baptize the mom and I went there with a member on divisions and the mom was going off on how she can’t get baptized because she thinks she was a bad person after things that happened in the past. After hurricane Mitch in ‘98 she was with 3 kids, one newborn, and her husband was in jail for some reason and she was alone and lost everything. She went from church to church asking for help and she was rejected in every church and she has felt bitter about that ever since. We went back a couple days later to talk with her and her husband about going back to church. The daughters were not present but I can tell they have been affected by all the family troubles. The husband works on a cargo ship for up to 6 months of the year and is rarely home, but we shared a message about families, and they mentioned that they needed to be examples to their kids, and I used something I have learned about parenting from the Book of Mormon, studying some different parents and what happens to their children. For example, after King Benjamin gave his speech he took the names of all those that would make a covenant with the Lord, and only the little children didn’t make that covenant, and about 20 years later those kids rebelled against their parents and the church. Maybe not because the parents were bad, but because they maybe didn’t do enough to teach their kids what they had learned from King Benjamin, resulting in them leaving the church. Then I talked about another group of parents who had made a covenant with the Lord as well, and their children didn’t make that covenant either. This was the people of Ammon who decided not to take up arms to defend themselves or kill anyone. At one point they were about to break their covenant and defend their country, when Helaman realized that the youth hadn’t made this covenant, and 2000 of them went to battle instead. It says they were taught in the ways of the Lord and to put their trust in him continually, and later on these youth show their trust in the Lord by repeating what their mothers had taught them to Helaman, their captain. Because of their faith and the way their parents taught them, they were saved and not one of them perished. I shared this with them that both sets of parents had received the gospel, but the outcomes were very different. The dad was about to cry and we committed them to go to church and support and strengthen their family. It was a really great lesson, but they didn’t come to church because the kids were out of town, but it helped them change a little bit.
We have another family that are ready and willing and to get married and baptized as well, they just have to wait for the wife to get off work. She works a weird schedule they have here…work 4 days and rest 4 days and some months she doesn’t have weekends. But anyway, they are super awesome and ready. Well as for the title this week, it’s weird but we have been seeing a lot of gringos here. The first time was at Burger King where this guy asked us in terrible Spanish if we spoke English. Then he asked us where the bus stop was and told us the Mitt Romney is doing well haha! Another time we were walking and I said good night in Spanish to a lady with a huge Canon camera. She said a timid “hi” and I laughed so hard cause she was taking pics of a food stand. Then one day I saw two gringos walking down the street speaking English, going who knows where, and we have seen quite a few backpackers, including some that could’ve been Korean, pretty crazy! Well hope everyone has a great week and enjoys it! I know I will!
Elder Neher
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