Monday, 21 October 2019

Mission Week 52 - Un año 😭


Hola muchach@s ¿que han hecho?

Welcome to this (hopefully) fantastic weekly email! It was a pretty solid week even though a lot of stuff fell through.

On Tuesday we found two more people to teach! Isauro and Teresa briefly met with missionaries a long time ago but we taught them the restoration and they seemed to like it. We planned to go back on Saturday but they were asleep so it didn't happen.

We drove to pendleton again for some more phone stuff and it was way better this time. I think a lot of missionaries here are really making an effort to be obedient and it's super cool to see! Because of some scheduling stuff and giving people rides, I think we ended up being in the car for like 5 hours which was pretty rough haha. Mini road trip though

Friday we had a lesson with Tom, Grace, and Valentina! We had sent them a short video teaching a principle during the week and they loved it! They even sent a video back with the 7 y/o thanking us jaja. We ate with them and had some cheesecake (it had been soooo long since I'd had it) and then followed up on their reading of the book of Mormon. Turns out Tom has read half of the book since last Friday and Valentina has been reading every day! Grace hasn't, so we are going to remind her. We had a good discussion about some stuff in first Nephi and then Hno. Velez came in clutch and invited them to church since he and his wife were going to speak! Only Grace ended up coming because Valentina got sick, but it was still super good. 

Saturday was kinda a rough day. When we were planning it looked like we would have a stacked day of lessons but all of them fell through. The last one was kinda funny though because we went to the house for the first time and there were just a bunch of people sitting around inside a garage listening to music, drinking beers, and watching a dude butcher a whole cow. They all looked super dead inside and were giving us crazy weird looks. I dunno I guess some people find that "fun", but I wouldn't call that a party jaja

Yesterday we had a lesson with the 2 sons of a member here. They live in Barranquilla Colombia and it went super well. We are kinda on a time crunch since the members leave for Colombia in like 2 weeks but we will do what we can. After we had a good visit with the Aballays and had an interesting talk about our branch. It's pretty sad, but there is a lot of hypocrisy and negative talking in our branch. Obviously it's not everyone, but it's been a problem here for a while and it is frustrating as a missionary since we WANT to bring people into a loving, unified, environment. Anyways, we talked about that then we talked about Spanish and English since Karen is learning Spanish. They gave me a super nice compliment and said they thought my Spanish is the best they have seen in the branch from missionaries, and they gave me and E. Jones a few specific things to work on. It was good to hear that cuz most of the time people don't give you any kind of good feedback they just say, "oh yeah you have pretty good Spanish. It was just super uplifting to here a genuine compliment like that especially because I've never really stopped studying the language since my MTC teacher threatened us if we ever did that jaja shout out to Hno. Durrant. Seems like it is paying off!

I've been loving studying more and memorizing scriptures recently. I think I've learned more from the scriptures recently than I ever have. I was also reflecting on E. Johnsons talk from general conference that we simply need to study every day, every day, every day. No questions asked that's just what we do. Like E. Klebingot said to us, "It really doesn't matter how you FEEL about keeping the commandments. You do them because you love God and trust that he will provide." I really want to make that a lifelong habit! 

¡Les quiero mucho! 

- Elder Thompson 


Foto:
La familia Aballay



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