Still tirando paradelante

Email 16/4/18

This was more or less an average to mediocre week. It all started, like most weeks do, on Monday. We had an exciting Noche de Mike that ended up being a lesson on the Word of Wisdom. Mike is a slow learner, but he’s definitely learning.

On Tuesday, we had a fun visit with Bibi. It can be frustrating to teach her because she has a ton of doubts that need to be resolved and when we start trying to help her with one doubt, that just basically opens up the door for her to bring up even more doubts. I think that her main doubt is concerning the imperfectness of man. If man is imperfect, how can we trust what they wrote in the scriptures or what modern day prophets say? It basically gets down to that every time. I like what the prophet Wilford Woodruff once said:

“The Lord will never permit me or any other man who stands as President of this Church to lead you astray. It is not in the programme. It is not in the mind of God. If I were to attempt that, the Lord would remove me out of my place, and so He will any other man who attempts to lead the children of men astray from the oracles of God and from their duty.”

Basically we are trying to explain that it is the Lord’s church, and it’s organization and doctrines are perfect even if the people always aren’t, but it’s going to take some time to get to that level of comprehension for Bibi.

We had our district meeting in Jerez on Wednesday. From the time we leave our piso to the time we get to the chapel, it’s about two hours. It was a good meeting, we have a good district this transfer. It’s also a pretty old district, everyone with one exception is over a year in the mission. In the evening, we had English classes, which are still going well. We have about one member and three nonmembers that come. We have a Noche de hogar planned this week after English class because some of the nonmembers expressed interest in coming. We’ll see what happens!

Thursday was a terrible day.

Friday was better, we spent a lot of time in the Capilla because we had to clean it, do weekly planning, have our correlación meeting, and teach some lessons. Pretty exciting.

Saturday was OK, we met with Manuela, a menos activa in the morning, and then in the evening, we spent a few hours walking around trying to make contact with some unknown members. That didn’t go that well. Most people weren’t home and the people who were didn’t want anything from us. Luckily, we met with Antonio Tomate who gave us a dinner, and then Ángel later that night, so the evening ended much better than it started. Ángel is on track to be baptized on May 5. We are reviewing all of the lessons with him one more time to make sure that he understands everything before the baptismal interview, but he’s excited, and the rest of the branch is excited for him, too!

In theory, we have a pretty good investigator pool right now, but ever since Semana Santa, it’s been hard to pick back up meeting with some people on a regular basis. And technically we have three other investigators besides Ángel who have baptismal dates for May 5, but due to various circumstances, we haven’t seen any of them for a looooong time. Life just gets so complicated.

Hopefully we see a bit more progress this week.

Love,

Élder Stark ??

Photos

1-2: The Great Apostasy. We did this in a Noche de hogar to teach the great apostasy where everyone was given a minute to look at this beautiful drawing I made and then try to remember it without being able to see it. We can clearly see why the restoration was necessary.