Hello Everyone,
I'm not sure what to write about
today but I'll try to think of things that have happened recently.
The biggest news is that Eva finally
moved! She called us on Friday and told us she found somewhere to move to so we
went out and helped her move. She is in a different area now and there
are other missionaries in our district there but we will get to finish teaching
her and baptize her. We invited her to be baptized this Saturday the 28th
and she said she didn't feel prepared but we promised her that if she prayed
about it she would feel ready. She didn't come to church for some reason
yesterday and we haven't been able to get a hold of her yet so I'm not sure
what's going on. She still wants to be baptized and we're not worried
about that, it's just the "when" that she doesn't know yet.
It has been extremely hot here this
week. The past two days it has been 96 and 97 degrees and it's hotter
than I can handle. I might die this summer since it will be like that and
hotter every day. It sounds like the summers last from about now to the
end of November so I'm hoping I can make it through. It's supposed to
rain Wednesday and Thursday so I’m looking forward to that. We can only
drive a certain number of miles each month and Elder Guzman and I are getting
close to our limit so we're planning on biking those days (since they hopefully
won't be as hot) to conserve miles.
We met some cool new people this
week that we're going to start teaching. This guy talks really really
fast and swears a lot but he's so funny and we love talking to him even though
we can't understand some of what he says (and Elder Guzman has been speaking Spanish
his whole life). He sounds like the perfect investigator because when we
told him about the Book of Mormon he said he had wondered why there was nothing
about the people in the Americas or anywhere besides Jerusalem or around that
area of the world. He also went of talking about UFOs and Area 51(or
whatever it's called) and other planets/aliens. He will be really
interesting to teach. He has a lot of questions and we have a lot of answers
so we'll see if we can match him up for a baptismal date (:
My Spanish is getting better
slowly. I am improving a lot in my ability to understand what people are
saying but I still have a good ways to go. The work is tough because we
have so many people we want to see and not enough time in the day to see
them. A lot of the time people aren't home and when we do get to sit down
with someone they love to talk so much that we end up staying for 1-2
hours. We also spend a lot of time visiting less active members because
there are so many people who are members but don't come to church or anything
like that.
Probably the coolest things that
have happened this week were when we took a member to a lesson with us.
We were there with the investigators for 2 hours and Elder Guzman and I
probably said 2 sentences between the two of us. The member we took
talked the whole time but what he said was really cool. I'll kind of sum up
what he said:
When he was 16 he kept having these
dreams/nightmares that the devil was knocking on his door every night and
trying to get in. One night the devil didn't knock and for some reason he
had no fear and opened the door wide open to the outside world. No one was
there. He started floating up into the air. The houses gradually
got smaller and smaller until he couldn't see them anymore and he entered the
clouds. He could see a light and eventually got to it. It turned
out to be a beautiful house and he knocked on the door and a man (who he later
figured out was Jesus Christ) answered the door. He went in and talked
with the man for a while and showed him part of his house. He asked the
man if he could see the rest and he said no, not yet. Eventually he left
and the man said to him three times "Keep going, and don't turn
back". He slowly made his way back through the clouds and back to
the earth. He woke up and didn't think much of it for a while. One
day, he was about to get on a bus when a street vendor person started talking
to him. The vendor asked him if he could give him a present after they
had talked for a while. He stretched out his hands and gave him a small
set of scriptures. The man told him that he wanted him to read Exodus 20
three times and then once he had finished to come and return the book to him.
When he heard three times he remembered the dream he had had. A few days
later he had read the chapter 3 times and decided to go return to the
book. He went back to the same outdoor store and asked the woman working
how he could get a hold of the young man that lived there. The woman was
surprised and told him that the only people that worked there were her and her
little daughter, nobody else had worked there in over 10 years. He told
her about the young man and their conversation and she told him that she had no
idea who the guy was. He kept those scriptures and began to read them a
lot. A long time later after he was married his friend introduced him to
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and he was baptized three weeks
later. A year later, he and his wife went to the temple in Mexico City to
get sealed. He told us that as soon as he walked into the temple he
recognized it as the exact same house that he had entered in his dream a long
time ago, and this time he could go further into the house. That was a
really cool story he told us and he spent most of the 2 hours we were there
with the investigators telling them that story.
This week a lot of the downtown
streets close to where we live are closed because (we think) there is going to
be an asparagus festival! There are a lot of fields around here that grow
plants and vegetables in which people work but I think the two most prominent
crops down here are asparagus and grapes. Anyway, I think there's going
to be a festival this week and that's why a lot of things are closed down but
we'll see! If this is the case it will be fun to be around.
I can't think of anything else that
has happened this past week. Hopefully there will be lots of interesting
stories a week from now.
Les Quiero
-Elder John Gaskill
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