Shakin' off the dust

January 23, 2023

Yeah, so I suppose I don’t write all that much anymore do I? Well anyways, I’m here.

This week went alright, on Tuesday we had our district council and all that. Afterwards, we went to go see our convert Axel, whom we baptized last week. We also talked to our baker friend, Francisco. I wrote about him in a previous letter, and the miraculous way we found him, but since then we havent seen a ton of progress, but he’s a nice man. We also visited a really cool less active family. The family Rivero.

Wednesday the most eventful thing was that in the evening, we were walking around our area. Our lessons fell but we had a backup plan of visiting an inactive family. The Labrada Family. The Labradas son is named Armando, and he has schizophrenia. Throughout the weeks he sends us in insane amount of text messages in english that make no sense. For example:

“I have to take a breakfast”
“My place is sentence”
“The money is down the earth”

Or a personal favorite:

“My nationality is Russian”.

We wanted to go see how he was doing, so we went. His family let us in, and gave us something to eat. They then gave us a large plate of fruit and went to the store to buy us chocolate milk. They gave us cookies, and at the end the gave us sweet bread. They also invited us to eat pozole with them in a few weeks. Such a nice family. Armando is also extremely nice as well, and we invited him to our english class. It was a good visit.

On Thursday we had exchanges. I worked in my area with an Elder named Elder Castro. I cant lie, I was not really all that excited to have exchanges, but it ended up going well. We got off the Mexibus in our area, and as we were walking to go visit a member, we crossed paths with an inactive that I havent seen in a while. We talked to her for a second. She was on her way to go pick up some chairs shed sent in to get repaired, so we helped her take them to her house. We also set up a return appointment to meet with her again. We kept walking and an inactive guy saw us and offered us a ride up the hill we were walking up. After that we visited the member we were going to visit and she gave us our food. We talked to her for a while and then visited another very nice inactive nearby. We had to briefly go back to our house to drop off some food to put in our fridge, and on the walk back, a member in his churro making place, gave us churros (really good by the way) after we went to the house, we went to go visit some investigators in a motorcycle repair shop. They asked if we could come back another day, and so we visited a recently convert family. Ir was a good visit, and we read some brief scriptures and talked about some problems they had. After that, we climbed a large hill to look for an old investigator, but it turns out she moved. So yeah. We climbed down and visited Armando and Patty. Patty was just in the hospital for three weeks and it's good to see her back. They are a very nice family. Armandos not a member but he’s expressed a desire to be baptized. To finish the day we visited some members close by, because I had a question about a certain inactive that I didn’t know, and they said they’d accompany us to visit them on Sunday after church.

Friday went much slower then thursday, but we were at the church in the morning. I had a video-call to do, and when I finished my meeting, I walked out into the foyer, and saw that an extremely drunk and intoxicated man had walked into the church and laid in the courtyard. We sat by him and tried talking to him. His name was Francisco. He couldn’t have been older then 35. After a while he just kind of passed out and was sleeping on the ground for a while. After a little bit, he stood up and shook my hand and gave my comp a hug. We tried to buy him a water bottle but he got a red cola instead. He It was a, well, different experience you could say. He went on his way and we never saw him again. That night, there was supposed to be an activity in the church but practically no one showed up.

Saturday we had our first English classes. At first no one showed up, and we were a little disappointed, but after a little while about 7 came to the class. It was a good class and there were 3 non members there. Afterwards we taught a lesson and one of the guys, Carlos, was interrupting us the whole time and it made it virtually impossible to teach the message of the Restoration. Oh well, he’s a nice guy.

On Sunday, Axel, and the inactive family Rivero came to church. It was cool. After church we went to go visit some inactives with the members we visited on thursday, it was good but the visit made me a little uncomfortable. At one point I talked about service and how as missionaries sometimes is hard, but every time I feel sad, or tired, or feel like giving up, God puts someone in my path that I should help. For some reason the lady didn't really like my comment and she kind of implied I was wrong. Then she said that you can tell which missionaries are there because they love god and want to be there and which ones are there for other reasons. My insecurity kind of kicked in at that point and felt she was implying that I wasn’t a good missionary or something. Oh well. She gave us fruit after. Also the members who came with us are really awesome. We finished the day by visited some inactive members and then we were gonna have our correlation meeting for zoom, but no one connected. Anyways. That was my week. On to another one!

Pics

1. Us and the Rvero family