Week 96

Hey guys! Sounds like you all had a great spring break! We had an awesome week. We found lots of people to teach and Elder Alfaro is doing great. This week the main excuse that people used to tell us that they didn´t have time to listen to us was that their children had lots of homework, so we´ve helped a lot of children with their homework this week to be able to find families. The parents almost always accept because they themselves can´t help their children with their homework. Usually one of us is helping with homework and the other is talking with the family. I think I forgot to tell you guys this, but Elder Alfaro was studying Chemical Engineering in Bolivia. So we get along well. It´s a really easy way to gain people´s trust because they see that we aren´t robots and that we´re here to serve them. We´ve been teaching a young man named Rodrigo and his family. He really likes to learn about God and his grandma and extended family are all members. He went with them to the temple in December and his grandma bought him a triple combination, hymnbook, and The Testaments movie. He`s been reading the book of Mormon since December, and also listening to the Jehovah`s witnesses. The first time we met him he was in Alma, and we were shocked. We taught him and his mom about the restoration and we started explaining what baptism was he said "Mom, I want to get baptized!" before we could even invite him. His mom said that they would have to talk to his father. Later in the week they said that Rodrigo`s father was opposed to his baptism because he didn`t want him to lose 2 years of study, but that we could talk to him on Sunday. we came by on Sunday morning and the dad, Hugo, is actually really awesome. We had a great lesson and at the end when his father asked us if it was obligatory for his son to go on a mission after getting baptized, I was tempted to go the easy way out and say that it`s technically not obligatory, which is true, but withholding the part about how it is the duty of each baptized young man in the church, and is what God expects of us, just so Hugo would let his son get baptized. But then I realized that if I would have  said that then it wouldn`t be working with the end in mind. So we explained the part about how it is our duty and we bore our testimonies about how our missions have changed us. Then Hugo surprisingly said, "I want my son to serve a mission". He also wants to participate with his family in the church. So now Rodrigo is preparing for a baptismal date May 6th, and we are working with his parents to be able to get married.

Also yesterday we visited the father of Nicole, who is Harumi`s cousin. Nicole comes to church every week but doesn`t have permission to be baptized. But yesterday we visited her father, and we explained to him what baptism is, he felt the spirit, and now Nicole has a baptismal date for this Saturday. Not only that but her father, Andres, wants to go to church because he`s "curious". I know that he felt the spirit. 

We had a lot of other really great experiences that I don`t have time to tell right now, but we have seen the hand of the Lord work with us this week. I hope you all have a great week!

Elder Jones

Week 95

Hey guys! So as you all expect, the entire stake center went crazy yesterday when President Monson announced that there will be a 2nd temple in Lima. The 4th in Perú. It´s really exciting for all of us. We had a great week and I really enjoyed conference. We felt that it didn´t make sense to wait until the 23rd for Harumi´s baptism and we invited her to get baptized on Sunday after the conference! So Elder Alfaro had his first baptism yesterday. It was a really great baptismal service. Many ward members came. The first time we met Harumi she said that she could feel the spirit when people in the church bore their testimony and she wished that she could have a testimony like them. After her baptism she was given the opportunity to bare her testimony and I could tell that she was really happy about her decision and that she has known the things she bore testimony about for a few months. She just needed help recognizing an answer and she herself needed to make the decision to be baptized. She was so happy after coming out of the water. Elder Alfaro was nervous but he did a great job.

On Wednesday of this week I felt the impression to write a talk about the phrase "retain in remembrance" used by alma the younger in Alma 5. So I did and it´s about 6 pages long. I didn´t know why I wrote it, but I was happy that I did because I learned a lot about how remembrance is used in the scriptures. Then during the Sunday afternoon session Elder Gong gave his talk on exactly that, and it made me so happy because I was able to get even more out of his talk, and many other talks, because of the talk I had prepared. I think one of my favorite moments of the conference was after Elder Kearon gave his talk about refugees when President Uchtdorf stood up to announce the following speakers and he was crying. I got a lot out of the conference, and I feel like I have more energy and desires to take advantage of my time left on the mission. 

I hope you all have a great spring break!

 Why Lima needs TWO Temples!!!!

Glory to God on the (second) highest

Week 94

Hey guys sounds like everything is going great. I can´t believe that Seth is 8 years old!!! also that must mean that Emmett is 2 years old, which is crazy. We had a great week! A lot of people left to their homelands in other parts of Peru because there was a 4 day weekend for the catholic holidays. Almost everyone in my sector is not from Lima, but from some other part of Peru. It´s funny, I´ve been here long enough to be able to guess what part of Peru someone is from just by the way they look and talk. The Damian family is doing great. Their daughter, Harumi, had plans to get baptized this saturday, April 2nd, but the bishop said that it would be better to wait until April 23rd so she could get confirmed in a sacrament meeting. (we wont have sacrament meeting for 3 weeks because of general conference, Peruvian elections, and then stake conference). She was sad that she has to wait that long to get baptized, and that´s a really good thing. Today we went to the mission offices in Magdalena so my companion could have a meeting with the mission psychologist, and I talked to the secretaries about the birth certificates of the everyone we want to help get married, and they said that they´re on their way and that they´ll be here soon! So that´s exciting. After his meeting I took him to the beach in magdalena because he´s never seen an ocean before! Bolivia doesn´t have coast.

We did lots of unplanned service this week, and that has helped us find lots of new investigators. We mixed concrete by hand to help a man build his house. We picked and carried rock for a man that also wants to build his house. We carried bricks up staircases to help another man build his house. There are a lot of people building their houses, and it´s hard work so they always accept our help. He´re working with the bishop to help a less active man named Julio overcome alcoholism. Sometimes we tend to think that addictions take away our agency, at least in some degree. But what I have seen this week in working with Julio is that with addictions we don´t lose our agency in any degree, but we lose the hope that we can change. And that can be recovered. On Saturday night Julio fell into his addiction, got drunk, and got himself into a fight with someone that was also drunk. When we found him yesterday, he had two black eyes, cuts all over his face and back and a part of his ear had been bitten off by the man. Julio had rubber gloves, gauz, and rubbing alcohol in his house so I got to remember life guarding times and I cleaned his wounds. He had two really deep cuts in his back that looked like they were from a broken beer bottle. They were full of dirt so they took a while to clean. We told him that he needed to go to the hospital to get stitches in his back, sohe´s going to go today. I had never cleaned someone´s wounds before as a service and the feeling I had while doing it was different from the feeling I have while doing other service. I feel like it was the pure love of Christ. He had brought this pain upon himself, but he couldn´t clean his wounds by himself.

I´m learning a lot here in Magdalena and I´m enjoying my time with Elder Alfaro. I hope you all have a great week!

Elder Jones