Them darn ¡PULGAS!

Well everyone, this week has been a pretty good one, and I’m pretty happy with everything that happened. 

Thanks for all the updates and everything. Mom thanks for the email and for sharing with me struggles that you are having in your life. I think that at times life is just one long struggle. But the thing is like you have always told me, is that we learn the most through our struggles and that we should really just find joy in the little things in life and not worry so much about what we can’t control. Curt and Holly, thanks for the updates on bronco and the family. The boys look so huge in the photos you sent me, I almost don’t even recognize Calvin, and it seems so weird that you have 3 kids now, but I’m excited to see everyone.

Well my week turned out to be pretty good! I am happy to say that Elder Bejar and I have been working really well together and we have been getting along better. I really started this week praying for help to be able to work hard with Elder Bejar and that I could help him have more desire to work with me without making him mad, and it really did work. He agreed to do a lot of things and I am really satisfied with the work we did because we found several new investigators including a family of 9! To get to that point though, the beginning of the week started off really tough because we had almost nothing, so we spent practically a whole day looking for new investigators which involved contacting for about 4 hours straight without a single person letting us in their door, but… the last house we contacted we found a mom and her two kids that were super happy to see us and talk to us (a lot of which had to do with the fact that I’m gringo and they wanted me to teach them English haha). But it was good to talk to them because we have also been trying to ask referrals from everyone including investigators, so we asked this mom for a reference, and she introduced us to her two neighbors which is another family with the husband Urias and his wife Julia, who are both really cool and Urias was telling us that he really wants to go to our church because he likes our doctrine and likes the church, but he has personal challenges that are holding him back, so we are going to be working on helping him out. Then the other day, people just started popping out of the woodwork! We walked by this one house and these little kids shouted out Gringo! So we went over there to contact them, and the family invited us in and it turns out they are a family of 9 who are really nice and humble, but they go to another church like everyone here, but they are really nice and were going to come to church with us yesterday but they didn’t show up. We also found a family whos daughter is either insane or possessed by a devil because she sits by herself in the corner and talks to… well somebody or something, and when we were praying with the parents she started wailing and shouting and talking about how she wanted the suffering that Christ experienced to come down upon us which was well… super creepy, but the parents really want help for the daughter and say they want to come to church so we will see what happens there. 

But the big news is that the lady Vilma that we have been teaching with her husband and kids showed up to church yesterday! We did a fast so that we would have people in church so that we can baptize the end of this month, and lo and behold Vilma showed up with her 12 year old son Anderson and they really enjoyed church, so we are going to go back with them to watch the restoration video and see if we can put a baptismal date with at least her and her son.

Oh and on another note, so President was here in the mountains this week but didn’t end up working directly with us, but instead worked with missionaries in our zone which was really helpful because there are a lot of missionaries that need help. And he was planning on being in our activity with us, but a couple missionaries in our zone decided to make some stupid decisions and so there were emergency changes and he had to drive a couple missionaries back to Reu so he ended up missing our activity. The activity turned out pretty well though. Not nearly as many people showed up as we wanted to and there wasn’t near as many references either, but a non-member family showed up with members from our ward so we are going o follow up with that and at least the members enjoyed themselves and the stake president was pretty pleased with what we did.

 Oh and on another side note, is that up here in the mountains there aren’t too many bugs, but there are a lot of fleas. The fleas get into our blankets and clothes and currently they are eating me alive. Thy bite me during the day and when I’m sleeping, and they itch super bad and now my companion makes fun of me saying that I look like a dog scratching my legs all the time. That’s one thing that I will be happy about back home is the ability to go to bed and not worry about things eating me haha. Other than that I’m doing well, and trying to keep working hard and being focused in these last few months! I love you so much and hope you have a great week!

Con Amor,
-Elder Henderson