Haz tu lo Justo!

Dear family and friends,

I hope you all had an awesome past week, and mom, i hope you didn’t die from all those bug stories last week haha.

Holly and curt, I'm glad that my old computer is serving you well, I'm pretty sure I left it at the house in Colorado, but at least it’s being used haha. Sounds like it was a crazy week with all those boys, I can’t believe cassidee´s kids are so big!

Well my week was actually pretty low key with some changes, but mostly just doing the usual. The big news for this past week is that on Wednesday we received another member of the office here. A mission in Chile sent an elder here to our mission, and for some special circumstances, President Ruiz put him here in the office with us. So Elder Coc (who is from here in Guatemala) is now officially companions with Elder Pulsipher and I am now no longer in a trio, but companions with just Elder Sanchez again. So this week we had to divide our investigators that we have between the two companionships so Elder Sanchez and I kind of got the short end of the stick in terms of the amount of people we still have, it just means we have to show our faith and work that much more harder now.

We did have a really cool experience this past week. So a few nights ago, Elder Sanchez and I were trying to go and find people we were going to teach, and go contacting and doing all of that, and it just seemed like nothing was working, no one let us in to teach and the members didn’t have anything for us, so at the end of the day we both just felt like crap. We just felt really down and especially felt like we were not teaching effectively and everything. We both just really prayed for guidance in how we can find more people to teach and how we can know where we need to go or what we need to say, and the next morning we had an awesome companionship study. We studied the Book of Mormon together and practiced teaching it with each other, and basically we both received some revelation and guidance in how we can teach better and share the gospel more effectively, so in the afternoon we went out and went with a member named Gabby to teach her neighbor Lidia whose son had just gotten married to a Mormon and baptized. So we went over there, and at first it was a little weird because she left us sitting outside for like 20 minutes, but then she came and sat down and we had an awesome lesson where we discussed her challenges that she has in her family and everything. Apparently what had happened is that her son had gone and gotten this Mormon girl pregnant, so they wanted to get married, but the girls family wanted her to get married to the guy only if he was Mormon, so basically he just baptized because the girls family wanted him to, and now with the baby and everything the girls family is like rejecting her and her husband to the point where they kicked them out of the house they were renting, and now they have some real struggles. So Lidia kind of has some hard feelings against the girl’s Mormon family for that, but we had a really good discussion about what our point in life is, and why we go to church, and how we deal with opposition in our lives. We also talked a little bit about the book of Mormon, and in the end she committed to reading the book of Mormon, and she said she will be coming to church with us on Sunday with her member neighbor, so we are pretty stoked about that.

On the other hand we don’t have to many other positive people we are working with because we gave them all to the new elder and elder Pulsipher. Oh and Alex the kid we were working with is kind of a no go now. We passed by on Sunday to bring him to church, and he came out and said that he doesn’t want anything to do with the church anymore because his catholic brother came to him and polluted his mind with all this catholic garbage and how it’s the true church and that he made a commitment o be a catholic forever and all this, so yes we have had to drop him because his hard hearted and spiritually blind brother polluted his mind… uhhhh.  We have been working with a few less actives and inactives as well in our ward, because there are literally hundreds. I feel like when we go contacting and start talking with people we find out that like 10 or 15 years ago they got baptized, but now they go to different churches. Yesterday we went out to this jungly part of our area and found this girl that was baptized not too long ago that lives in this like giant barn thing with her family. We talked to her about eternal families, and she has a strong desire that the rest of her family gets baptized, but they refuse to listen to us because they are catholic, but we are just going to go there and throw down with the spirit and truth of eternal families one of these days! On a side note, it was cool during the lesson outside the giant barn house because there were a ton of bats flying around everywhere, and one actually dive bombed and hit Elder Sanchez in the face, it was kind of funny haha.

But other than that, it’s just been the usual around here, in the office we are getting everything prepped for the area president that is coming to our mission next week, and Hermana Ruiz wants the office to be all decorated with Christmas stuff for his arrival, so went and bought a Christmas tree for the office which is going to be sweeeeeettt. But yeah, I'm doing excellent. We are out working in our area more and more, and I know we are going to baptize before I leave the office, speaking of which my replacement comes in a couple weeks so I will be training him how to deal with all the money and the problems that come with it.

For my small spiritual thought, I have just been thinking about the Book of Mormon and the importance that it has in my life and in missionary work. Really it’s what makes our religion what it is. In the giant mess of crazy churches out there that profess to be teaching of Christ, we are the only church that has the whole true gospel of Jesus Christ, and it’s thanks to the Book of Mormon. I was reading somewhere about how an apostle said that if he could do one thing over on his mission, it would be to teach more form the book of Mormon. It’s an amazing book and contains knowledge and clarity that we can’t get anywhere else. It’s now my goal to teach everyone I come in contact with about the book of Mormon, because through its teachings we have a closer relationship with Christ and obtain our salvation. My invitation for you all is to read it, and think about it, pray about it and to share it with someone in the upcoming weeks before Christmas. It will bless your life with a greater testimony, and most certainly bless the lives of the other person with the ability to find the path to eternal life!

I love you all a ton, I always talk about how I want my family to be eternal with all of our investigators. It’s a great blessing we have in the church! Have a fabulous week, and I will try to send some more pictures, it’s just that there hasn’t been anything terribly exciting to take pictures of other than the office and drunk Guatemalans in the street, but I will try to do better.

Haz tu lo justo!

Cariñosamente,

Elder Henderson