Keeping up the Faith

Awesome sister in the ward

Jesus Loves You, ALL NIGHT LONG

This week was kind of mundane. Actually, truth be told, it was a good week, just there wasn´t a whole lot that went down.

So, like I said, not a whole lot went down. The work has been really slow. Literally every single appointment we´d set up fell through. We have had to spend more time outside of Empalme than in, and, because of the cold, literally nobody is ever outside/ willing to talk to us. So it´s kinda dragged by.

We did have about 2 solid lessons though (one of which we dropped in at an unscheduled time so they wouldn´t know when to not be there). The first was with a less-active family. This family (Gutierrez is their last name) used to be a solid family, they fed missionaries, the sons went out with missionaries, gave tons of references, they were just a golden family. They were, that is, up until the Branch in Empalme closed down. We´ve met with the mom before, and she hasn´t progressed at all. We always leave just one verse for her to read, and she never reads it. This last time, however, we met her two oldest sons. They are total capos. They haven´t read the Book of Mormon in years, and were stoked when we left them something to read and invited them to church, like more stoked than a little kid that just got asked if he would eat a chocolate bar we were about to give him. It was really cool to see. Unfortunately, they didn´t show up at church. Next week we´re gonna stop by their house in the morning and try to motivate them to wake up and come.

The other was in a lunch appointment that we had with a family whose daughter recently returned from her mission in Brazil, but the father is less active because their son died a few years ago in a motorcycle wreck. He usually leaves at the end of the meal before we can share a spiritual thought, so, we whipped out our scriptures during the meal, while everyone was still eating, and had a super spiritual moment. The mother bore a powerful testimony of keeping the commandments, even though she was super stressed about her husband not being active. After the meal, they gave us HUGE chocolate eggs for Easter. The members here are awesome. They are few in number, but are all capos.

Haven´t been able to talk to Juan José more than 2 minutes at a time. He´s never at home when he say´s he will be, and won´t come to church, it´s not that he can´t, cuz we´ve offered to pay for him, it´s that he won´t. We have stopped by his house in the morning, but he won´t get out of bed. Member´s have stopped by to pick him up and drive him but same story. Dude worries me and stresses me out. I have never once in my life been really worried or stressed about anything at all, but this guy is gonna give me some gray hairs. I really hope my kids don´t worry and stress me out like this man does.

Long story short, this work is really, really hard and super tough. However, it is super rewarding and pays off a ton. I love it.

Elder Brown

John 17:3