I cant believe its thanksgiving this week! I remember last year coming home from college for thanksgiving, and now its already been a year and i am going to be celebrating in guatemala with Elder Clyde eating some fried chicken and fries from a street vendornear our house, which although its going to be nothing like thanksgiving back home with dad's pies and all, we are pretty excited for it. I hope everyone has a good week back home gorging themselvs and enjoying each others company, but here its just going to be a pretty usual day.
Well this past week has flew by and theres tons of strange and cool things that have happened, but for the sake of time (like always) i am going to focus on the main things. First of all, we came into this week super stoked because we were having some good success with our investigators and had a baptism scheduled for a 12 year old girl, silvia, who we have been teaching for the past several weeks. she is a really smart 12 year old and undesrstands everything we teach her, more than her crazy mom who just rambles off about the most random things and the crazy stuff she does in her evangelical church, and pretty much, i think her mom is plain crazy. so anyway, we were making some real progress with her, but the only challenge was that she needed her fathers permission because her crazy mom wouldnt sign the papers to allow us to baptize her, and her dad lives far away, so the whole week we tried calling her dad and trying to get permission, but we could never get a hold o him, and when silvia was able to talk to him one day, she said that he said she couldnt be baptized. we really wanted to explain the situation better to her father, because she's smart, but she probably didnt explain it too well to her father and of course a dad would say no to his daughter wanting to get baptized by two random gringoes talking about Christ, but anyway, long story short, we couldnt get permission and thus we couldnt baptize her this week. It also feels like all the good things we had planned with members and our investigators this week fell through so we are back to square one trying to find new people to teach and keeping our ward alive which is incredibly stressfull and hard work down in this heat of guatemala.
Well another interesting thing that we did this past week was that Elder Clyde and i went to go chop wood for some of our recent converts, and boy did we have no idea what e were getting ourselves into. It seemed pretty simple at first, they gave us some logs a couple machetes and an axe and said get to it. So we start hacking at this wood with the machetes and the axe. but chopping this wood was like trying to chop stone. it was incredibly hard and we struggled just to chop up one log in an hour and our hands were all blistered and bleeding. so one of the nieghbor kids came ove and showed us what was up. i thought i knew how to chop wood, but this kid showed Elder Clyde and i up hardcore, he went at this wood like only a puro guatemalteco could, and it took him like 20 minutes to do what took us an hour, and he enjoyed it too, showing us poor bleeding gringos how to chop wood. haha we probalby looked like idiots to these people, but now i know how to chop wood the right way, it just takes a ton of work and bleeding hands haha.
Other than that not a whole lot of crazy stuff happened. just continuing to work hard and learning more and more spanish everday. It will be cool to be able to talk with curt at christmas in spanish! Everyday is hot, but you'll find me and elder clyde walking the streets of reu trying to talk to people that arent drunk or crazy and doing the best we can to find and teach and move the work of sharing this gospel forward. I gave a talk in church on sunday of the importance of the Book of Mormon, and i was able to share my experience that i had last year when i decided to read the whole book of mormon on my own during college, and how much it helped and strengthened me when i need help or felt alone. i just want to share my testimony with you all about how i know that the BOM is the word of god, and that if we read it everyday we will recieve not only blessings, but inspiration and revelation for our lives and our challenges. i know this because it really heped me out a lot last year when i was away from home for the first time in college with not too many friends and struggling in classes, but i learned the most that i have ever learned last year and i know a big part was because i read the book of mormon. I learned a lot , gained some amazing friends, and prepared myself to be here, and everytime i open that book i learn more and more, so i hope you all continue to read it everyday and apply it to your lives.
Well sorry i dont have more to write, but all is well down here, i will we thinking about all of you back home this week as you celebrate thanksgiving. Thanks for your emails and your love and support, and im glad to know that Calvin and the boys havent forgotten me haha. i love you all so much and its going to be wierd celebrating my first thanksgiving away from home, but i nkow that this is where i need to be. If you are still looking for ideas for what to send me, i was thinking some good old honey bunches of oats would be amazing because you know i love cereal, and they dont have honey bunches of oats down here, all they have is corn flakes and it gets old real fast haha. also some reeses something would be amazing and snickerdoodle cookies or oatmeal creme pies as well would be amazing as well. and pictures and letters always last longer than snacks, so that would be awesome as well, and holly said something about sending me church music or holiday music, and i think that would be awesome as well. anyways, thanks for everything i love you all a ton and i hope you have a great thanksgiving! Permanezcan
-Elder Henderson
No comments:
Post a Comment