Bueno, mi familia y queridos amigos,
Tengo que disculparme por no haber escrito la semana pasada. Solo es que la actividad que hicimos tardó mucho tiempo y cuando regresamos para escribir, no había tiempo.
Thanks everyone for your emails and concern for last week. I’m fine and everything its just that as a zone we went to go hike to a waterfall (I’m going to attach pictures) and it took a lot more time tan we expected so when we got back there wasn’t anytime to write. Soooo for that until today I’m writing you all.
Well these past couple of weeks have been very busy for me and well, very busy for Elder Taylor and i. but they have been good weeks and I have really learned a lot!
So to start off, Elder Taylor and I have been really working well in our area, but a couple weeks ago we sat down with each other to talk about what was happening because we hadn’t had a whole lot of success up to that point with what we were doing. So we sat down and opened up Predicad mi evangelio and read in chapter 9 about how to find people to teach. Because we had been finding several people through our own efforts but really none of them had been progressing too much. For example Vilma and Jaime, the family we were working with, just weren’t progressing and for a couple reasons we stopped visiting them to take a break and try to work with more people that wanted to progress, but the problem was, finding these people haha. So while we were reading we read the section where it talks about the importance of members and a story of when two missionaries did service and helped out the members to gain their confidence to b able to work with them more and receive references and the story explains that through all that they had a lot of baptisms. So Elder Taylor and I took inspiration from that story and we decided to do something for the members to gain their confidence and to start working with them. So Elder Taylor before the mission took some culinary art classes and is pretty good at cooking and has some awesome recipes. So we decided to make cookies and we went on a hunt to find the ingredients we needed to make these peanut butter cookies (which was not an easy task to find this stuff here in the mountains of Guatemala). We were able to find a sketchy hole in the rock type store that had imported peanut butter and other things we needed to make cookies and we made a ton of these peanut butter cookies that are pretty bomb if I do say so. So for the past two weeks we have been visiting all the members in our ward handing out these cookies to show them that we were thinking of them and that we want to work with them. There is an activity that the central America area is doing this next week that is called La semana de la familia. (the week of the family) its this awesome activity where every member family needs to have a non member family over for a family home evening and then take them to the church during the week to listen to messages about the family and do workshops that are focused on the family. Its pretty awesome so we have challenged every member family to have a family ready for the activity and because they have fallen in love with us because of the cookies, almost the whole ward is pretty excited to work with us and their non member families!
This whole new way of working that we have been doing with visiting members has already paid off because last Sunday, all the investigators we had prepared to come to church bailed on us, so as we left the house in the morning we prayed for a miracle that someone could bring an investigator to church. Lo and behold, as we were sitting in church, a recent convert named Jovita showed up to church with a non member teenage girl named Yaquelin out of the blue. It turns out that Yaquelin has tons of family problems and ran away from home in a small pueblo called sipacapa which is way deep in the mountains. We went over to talk with her and we found out a lot about her life (which I won’t share) but she expressed to us a strong desire to change and after only going to church once has accepted a baptismal date for the 17th of May! So that was a really cool miracle we have seen and we hope to see more from our work with them members in the weeks to come!
Another really cool thing we did was that last week there was a fair in town here in San Marcos. And it just so happened that the fair was set up almost directly in front of the church. So Elder Taylor and I had a brilliant idea to do an activity as a zone in the fair to get attention of the people about the church and get some references. So what we did is that one day last week we set up a face painting booth, a character drawing table, a ping pong table that the church has and a sling shot game right in front of the church were the fair was and tons of people were walking by. We also cooked some more awesome peanut butter cookies and popcorn to give away for free, so that when the people walked by and saw all these crazy white missionaries with some awesome games and wanted to get there faces painted, we told them to go get some free cookies and popcorn that were strategically located on tables that we had set up with church pamphlets and other information about the church with missionaries contacting everyone that came by to get some free food. It was awesome! We got tons of references and tons of people wanted to get their faces painted, we were definitely the talk of the whole fair haha. The fair was pretty cool as well, it just had tons of people selling sketchy Guatemalan food and sketchy Guatemalan rides and stuff. We did get some churros from the fair, but to be honest the churros in the states are quite better than the real Latino churros haha imagine that.
There are also a lot of people here that want to learn English, so Elder Taylor and I have started teaching English clases which is pretty fun. We are just doing a lot of activities right now to get people excited about missionary work and trying to find some people that are willing to listend and progress. But that’s my biggest report.
I still have a ton of other stories of crazy people that we teach and just the struggles we have trying help people understand the truth and really get rid of the wicked traditions of the catholic church. For example we taught a family last week that told us that jesus was baptized by pedro sprinkling water on his head… yeah, we had to open up the bible and read with them how jesus was baptized in the river Jordan by john the Baptist, but that gives you an idea of what we deal with on a day to day basis. But its fun, although frustrating at times, Elder Taylor and I are making the best of it just working hard to finish off our missions well!
Oh and yes, on Sunday I am going to be calling for mothers day, and because I also have church in the morning, I think I will be calling in the afternoon at like 3ish, but I will call home before I jump on skype, if we can find computers to do it on.
So I will be talking to you all on Sunday, and dad I think it will be best to answer your questions on skype.
Love you all and have a fantastic week!
-Elder Henderson
here are fotos from the waterfall that we visited which was super cool. Elder Taylor is in the first one.
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