Email 18/12/17

Hello everybody,

Here we are again.

Finally on Tuesday, we were able to get in contact with Alfonso. As it turned out, the reason why he couldn’t come to church last week was because he was in the hospital due to a stomach ulcer! Fortunately, it’s all better now. And even more better, he was confirmed as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints yesterday! I was given the opportunity to be the one to carry out the confirmation, which was a neat experience. Alfonso is so excited to be a member and is looking forwards to receiving the priesthood soon. Actually, we were teaching him about the priesthood in Gospel Principles class, and he was asking when he’d be able to receive the Aaronic Priesthood. We told him that it would surely happen soon, but we weren’t sure what the branch president’s timetable was going to be. Well, as soon as we had finished the lesson, our branch president popped his head through the door and said, “Alfonso, you’re getting the priesthood today,” so we were like, “Good thing we just had that lesson haha.” But it turns out that they need to wait until his records are in the church’s system to give him the priesthood, so that’ll happen soon.

We were able to give some service to the members this week through decorating the chapel for the branch Christmas dinner, which happened on Friday evening. We were also inviting all of our investigators and other people to come. There’s this guy named Fernando that runs a little kiosko here. He’s Argentine, but lived in Seattle for a while, and speaks decently good English. He has an English Book of Mormon, and sometimes we stop by to read a chapter out if it with him (we also discovered that he really didn’t have a good understanding of what the Book of Mormon is, so we’re going to be working on that). Anyways, we invited him to come, and he did, along with his wife and son! While he was introducing himself to the members, he said he was “practically Mormón,” so maybe we can help him become actually Mormón now. Our investigator, Bibi, and her husband came too, so the activity was good.

Something else cool that happened this week was in our pueblo, Chipiona. There’s this family consisting of a grandmother (Carmen), daughter (Mari Carmen) and granddaughter (Jessica) who have been somewhat investigating for a while. In other words, every time we would go to Chipiona (usually once a week), we’d stop by their house and usually just be able to share a quick message in the doorstep or something to whichever one of them happened to be home. Well, this past week we were finally able to go in the house and teach them the full restoration lesson, to all three of them. That was great. It’ll be great to go back and see if they have been able to read and pray about the Book of Mormon and how that went for them.

And those were pretty much the exciting highlights of the week, everything else was pretty normal. We had a good lesson in Elder’s Quorum yesterday about following Jesus Christ and following His perfect example. That includes trying to do what he would do, trying to say what he would say, and following all of the commandments He has given us, including His perfect gospel of faith, repentance, and baptism. Here’s a scripture that was especially applicable to this week seeing as though Alfonso received the Gift of the Holy Ghost yesterday as part of the confirmation:

“And the Father said: Repent ye, repent ye, and be baptized in the name of my Beloved Son. And also, the voice of the Son came unto me, saying: He that is baptized in my name, to him will the Father give the Holy Ghost, like unto me; wherefore, follow me, and do the things which ye have seen me do” (2 Nephi 31:11-12)

Love,

Élder Stark ??