elder jones week 82

 Show original message

Hey guys! I had a great week! I´m glad to hear that everyone is doing so well and sorry that mom and dad didn´t get the positions that they were looking for, but I´m sure it´s because there is something better waiting for them! There is a really cool mormon message called "the will of god" that talks about that. 

We had a week of miracles! We´ve been finding random people in the street that are super prepared to recieve the gospel. An elderly couple stopped us in the street just because we looked really happy and they wanted to know why. Elder Bates and I get along really well and it´s true that we´re always really happy. Alejandro who was baptized this last week has been helping us a lot with another investigator his age named Jose, and he is able to have one on one conversations with him that we can´t have, so when we plan lessons to visit José we talk with Alejandro first to ask him what really impedes José from getting baptized, and we are able to teach José that in a lesson with Alejandro. He´s progressing really well. He came to church yesterday for the 3rd time, and he has decided that he will be baptized on the 16th! We have seen a huge progress in him as he has come to recognize the existence of God and his plan. We are also teaching Bruno, who came to church by himself a couple of weeks ago because his aunt, who is member and lives in a different part of Lima, told him to go. And we were finally able to teach him on saturday and he accepted everything, even to be baptized on the 16th, but only if he could be baptized before 4:00 because he´s going to be busy after 4. haha. He´s 19, and he speaks english. He wants us to teach him the lessons in english. He came to church yesterday and he really liked it, and we can tell that he has the desire to be baptized, but that he needs to understand the gospel a little bit more for it to make a lasting impact on his life. I was studying a conference talk this week called never too early, never too late, he was talking about teaching children, and he cited a scripture from Matthew 13:19 that says "When any one heareth the Word of the Kingdom and understandeth it not, then cometh the wicked one and catcheth away that which was sown in his heart. This is he that received seed by the wayside." That helped me understand because my entire mission I had thought that the only thing we need to accomplish in a lesson to help the investigator progress is that they feel the spirit, but really if someone feels the spirit but doesn´t understand, satan has power to make them believe that it was never there. So just as hearing the spirit is understanding what it is saying.  So Bruno needs to understand the gospel more, even though he has already felt the spirit in the lessons. And I´m sure that with time in the lessons and as we teach so he understands, his understanding will increase. Also we had a really great experience with a referral this week. Our mission president told all of us to get on line in the middle of the week to check to see if we had referrals, which is something we never do during the week, it is always on monday. But wew checked and there was a referral of a woman, named Yolanda, who was listening to the sister missionaries in Tarapoto (the jungle) and had a baptismal date for december 26th, but then she moved to Lima. So we contacted her and she was really excited to hear from us and we accompanied us to church yesterday. She is really anxious to get baptized. The members of the ward recieved her well and she already has friends in the church. I feel grateful for the revelation of president Larson, because if he hadn´t said that, then we would recently have found out about her today, and she wouldn´t have attended church yesterday. We had a great week and I´m looking forward to this week!

Elder Jones