Less Than the Dust of the Earth

Email 23/10/17

Hello everybody,
The theme of Elder Kassing’s and my week was, “We’re not sure whether to laugh or cry right now.” You’ll see why.
We had another lesson with Mike, the American, on Monday evening. Noche de Mike. Mike home evening. We were going to try showing him the Joseph Smith: Prophet the Restoration movie in order to review that lesson, but because he had already seen it, we settled on watching Meet the Mormons. What we are trying to do is set up a Family Home Evening with a family from the American branch, but that probably won’t end up happening until the coming week.
On Tuesday, we were finally able to teach our investigator, Maru, again. It had been about a month since the last time we had taught her, so she didn’t really remember anything. We ended up teaching her about the restoration again, and it seems like we’ll be able to start meeting with her on a more regular basis, so hopefully we can help her start progressing.
Wednesday is when things started to get weird. As some of you might remember, we have an investigator named Jaime, and we have been over to his campo a few times to help him out there. To make a long story short, he was being really creepy when we went over. There were a lot of red flags popping up when we were with him. What also was fishy was that we could not find any records on him in our area book. For someone who had known the missionaries before, it was weird to not find a teaching record or a mention or a progress record, or anything. We were left scratching our heads trying to figure out what to do.
On Saturday, we were trying to meet with María and Manolo, some of our other investigators, and it ended up not working out because there wasn’t a man in the house. Our backup plan was trying to find a menos activo named Diego that kind of lived out in the boonies. After an unsuccessful search for his house, we ended up trying to call him. After dialing his number, we were shocked when “I Jaime” came up as the person we were calling. In other words, Jaime is actually named Diego, is a member, and when we told the members about him, they were all like “tened cuidado con él.” (“Be careful with him.”) So I don’t think we’ll be going back to his Campo, it was all a weird and stressful situation.
On Friday, we went out to Chipiona, which is the Pueblo that’s part of our area. We were able to teach about the Book of Mormon to Jessica, someone we’ve been trying to have a lesson with for a while, so that was great. That evening, we had a lesson with Laura, who is our most progressing investigator right now. The lesson went really well, but the complicated thing is that we found out she’s probably a prostitute, and she’s about to leave for a month to go to Belgium to “work,” so uhhh. She’s so nice, and really wants to follow Christ, so I hope we can help her do what’s right.
On Thursday (sorry I’m jumping around so much here), we had our monthly branch Noche de Hogar, for which we wanted to show the Elder Ballard youth broadcast for the Europe Area, but that didn’t end up working, so we just watched Meet the Mormons again haha. Elder Kassing and I made Arroz Con Leche for everyone.
I was asked on Sunday to teach the Young Men’s class, and was given exactly 15 seconds of preparation time. I chose to talk about the priesthood and the need for obedience to qualify for priesthood power. Heavenly Father has given us the great gift to have the restored priesthood on the earth. The priesthood literally is his power, and we need to be in the right place, doing the right things, if we want to be qualified to bless the lives of others with it. I shared this scripture as part of the lesson, in Helaman 12:6-8:
“Behold, they do not desire that the Lord their God, who hath created them, should rule and reign over them; notwithstanding his great goodness and his mercy towards them, they do set at naught his counsels, and they will not that he should be their guide.
 
“O how great is the nothingness of the children of men; yea, even they are less than the dust of the earth.
 
“For behold, the dust of the earth moveth hither and thither, to the dividing asunder, at the command of our great and everlasting God.”
 
The point I made with this scripture was that man is the only thing that can choose to disobey God. Even the dust always obeys His voice, and we become “less than the dust of the earth” when we choose to disobey Him. So basically, let’s just try to be better than dust and keep the commandments and do what God wants us to do. Only then do we qualify ourselves for receiving blessings thanks to God’s restored priesthood power on the earth.
Love,
Élder Stark ??

Photos

1: Castillo
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2: Campo
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3: Templo
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4: Noche de Hogar con la rama
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5: Neblinoso
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6: Atardecer
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7: Atardecer
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8: Sara, Raquel, and Tomás. Noche de hogar.
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9: Until next time
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