Week 98 - A New Companion

So a lot has happened this week!  One highlight is we have a baptismal date for a young ten-year-old girl who's step-dad is a member.  The father's wife is also receptive to our message.

We were also able to help "M".  He's super humble and he even brought his wife with him to church. They both seemed to like it.  This week was the primary program.  Primary is the name of the program for the young children in our church.  The children give very short talks and sing during the program.  It helped a lot because they talked about parent's responsibilities to their children -- something they were interested in.  The mother even said she wants to bring her two daughters to church.  When she found out that Elder Brown was being transferred to another sector she jokingly said she wasn't going to come anymore.  At least we hope it was a joke.

This brings me to my next announcement.  My last six weeks of my mission will be spent training.  Woo Hooooo!  I'm kind of nervous about training again but we have a lot of people coming into the mission now.  Hopefully, we will continue to have a lot of success together.  My companion's name is Elder Soliz.

Avocado tree

Week 97 - The Family: A Proclamation To The World

We taught one of our investigators The Family: A Proclamation To The World.   He and his spouse are not married.  He asked us when he could be baptized.  He didn't understand when we taught him about the Law of Chastity that he would need to resolve that first.  It was kind of awkward.  I hope the proclamation helped.

We also found another family where the mom and dad are not married.  The dad is a member and the daughter wants to be baptized.  The mom wants to get married so that's pretty cool!

Elder Brown fell off his bike this week.  There was a bottle on the ground and when he went to ride over it his bike slipped on the bottle.  He hit the ground hard and probably should have at least been cut up or had a broken bone or something.  But, he got up without a scratch.

I spent a lot of the week trying different combinations with my shoe's souls because the shoes I have are really good but I stretched them out until there was enough space to have my feet shift a little bit. It ended up destroying my soles and giving me two blisters but I think I've got it figured out now.

There's a woman in our ward that likes the missionaries and has us over for lunch every Tuesday.  She doesn't ever want to come to church. She finally went this week because her husband was speaking.  It was a little uncomfortable because he just cried through his talk about how grateful he was that his family was there.  I hope his family will come with him in the future.

That's my week.  We played soccer today and we are about to go to an all you can eat pizza place.  It has good Chilean pizza.  They do pizza a little different here.  It's not like the Dominos or Pizza Hut I grew up on.  I look forward to going when I finish writing everyone.

Week 96 - New Investigators

This week was pretty good.  We found ten new investigators.  They couldn't get to church so we had some baptismal dates change but it seems like we may have several future baptisms in the mix. We also had six Haitians attend.  Hopefully, they all had a good experience and liked it.

"M" went to church again!

We had one man tell us that we weren't helping him and he didn't feel the spirit.  I bore my testimony to him.  It seemed to help.

I had an exchange with Elder Larsen.  It went well.  We walked a lot.

Today we cleaned.  Our mission president will be coming Friday.  He will be interviewing.

We are playing ping-pong at the church today.

The avocado trees here produce so many avocados. I see boxes of avocados and they are so delicious!!!

I am going to play for the primary program here.  I will play four or five songs and I have only played some of them yesterday.  It'll be interesting since I can't really practice, but thankfully my sight reading has gotten a thousand times better in the mission.

Week 95 - Finding Investigators

This week has been a lot better.  We found quite a few people willing to listen and be taught.

We found a man named "G" who decided to talk to us because he's upset with his church.  Their religious leader is coming to Chile and the church and people are spending millions on the visit.  (See this news story for details)   Some are becoming disillusioned over the cost and are leaving.  It's opened up teaching opportunities for us.  "G" started talking with us and we taught him about the restoration.  He likes what he has learned.  We might have a problem getting him to church though.  He works at a fish stand on Sunday.  He gave us several fish and we ate them Saturday night.  Now our apartment smells like fish.

We also found someone who works at a nice soccer field.  He wants us to come and play while he makes us a grill.  We'll probably take him up on his offer in two weeks.

"M" came to church again.  We went to his house to teach him and watched The Restoration video. After, he wanted to show us a movie on Christ he likes to watch.  He was showing us bits and pieces and he showed us the part where Jesus is baptized.  His entire family has committed to listen to us.

Today we played soccer on artificial turf.  It was pretty fun and we had almost everyone there.