E-mail 11/25/2013

Familia

Well this week has been awesome, we have been working extremely hard to complete our goals this week.   We have been working on having all our lecciones (lessons) with a member present. We just about completed our goal, but Saturday everything seem to keep us from completing our goal, all our investigators were busy with one thing or another.  It was about 7:00 pm when we just about gave up with our goal, then we decided to visit one of our investigators that we haven´t visited in a while, because he´s not always there when we visit, but he was this time and told us that he usually goes with friends at this time, but for some reason he stuck around the house when we came to visit.  The Lord sometimes gives us a hard day just to prepare us  for something special to come.

Something else that happened this week is we had the wife of the Francisco (who is trying to stop drinking) start to have lesson with us, she is very Católico, (Catholic) but she told us that she wanted to follow her husband.  We hope to baptize him in Dec and help her gain a testimony of the church, so he can baptize her afterward.

I love it here, I love the people and to be honest I don´t want to be changed from this area because I have worked so hard with these people, I want to see them baptized.

Love Elder Durrant

E-mail 11/18/2013

Sorry I didn`t write last week.

But this week has been filled with hard work.  We are working on having more members join us when we teach.  And we had ward conference this week, we only managed to get four investigators to go, but we had more success in less actives and future investigators, the place was packed, there was about 60-70 people there.  They have selected three possible places to put the chapel, so the excitement continues.  The investigator I have mentioned before with alcohol, Saturday makes two weeks clean, he just needs two more (and a whole life time).

The people here are amazing, we have about 15 investigators and about 6 possible people to teach.  We have been so packed that we don`t have time to visit all of them. But we have divided the area for December.   We thought it would be easy to divide it, but the Lord had a different idea. So we started off with a prayer, talked over it, then asked the Lord what he thought, when we didn`t feel anything we talked over it some more and then prayed again. We followed this pattern until we felt good, it took us about two hours to do it. My companion said ¨so this is what it`s like for the apostles when they make a new mission.  The Lord really is active in this work, we just need to work on being able to access this help.  At first I was really afraid of promising a blessing to people, but I have learned that the Lord has already promised this things.

We also had a seventy come and speak to the stake leaders and they invited the missionaries to join, Pres. Villarreal spoke too.  We are hoping for even more animo (encourage) with the members.  He invited the members to complete the commitment in General Conference to invite someone to hear the missionaries before Christmas. And he invited us to visit the members and teach them the Restoration, so the members could decide if we are worthy to teach their friends.  It was awesome!!

Love you all!!

Elder Durrant

E-Mail 11/04/2013

Dear familia,
Well this has been a very interesting week. First off me and my comp. have been speaking Spanish almost always ever since I got here. But it´s my responsibility to teach him English, so we decided to speak English in the house and Spanish outside. It was so funny because it wasn´t just Elder Paczka having a hard time. Well let´s just say it was harder then I thought to switch between languages. I would start to talk in English but then I would just automatically switch back to Spanish.  Well after speaking English a little bit again it came back to me, but it made me wonder if I was learning Spanish or English. It also makes me wonder what it will be like when I come home.

Well as for work here, well we have an investigator that we have had ever since I got here, (I´m pretty sure I mentioned him in my emails before) he is an alcoholic and he hasn´t been able to quite, so this week we decided to visit him every day.  So far it has been working, except for one day we were a little late because we were waiting for a member to join us, but then we found out that he couldn't, so we rushed over and on the way we found him sitting down with a drink.  Well he told us that he thought we weren´t going to come so he went for a walk and passed by a friend and he gave him a drink.  Luckily we found him before he drank a lot, so then he poured the rest out. but we hope it will be the last.

We have also been working with a less active member, when we visit him he always has an excuse and that we can come back another day, but when we come he just does the same thing, so we decided to just share a scripture at the door.  Well when we went to visit his son, but he wasn´t home and the father was, so when we asked him if we could visit with him, he said yes and during the lesion he was very attentive.  Well needless to say we left his house shocked. he still didn't come to church, but I have high hopes for him.

The other interesting thing to happen this week is well Halloween, all saints day and day of the dead.  Well my comp. said they celebrate Halloween in his city on the 31, but here they celebrate it on the 1 and 2 and rather then go to houses for candy they go to stores, so centro (center) was swarmed with little kids. It´s funny because we have Halloween because they have all saints day and day of the dead and they have Halloween because we do.  Well they still had their transitional stuff, they had some stuff setup in centro so I took some photos, but the computer dosen´t want to load the camera so maybe next week.

Love you all!!

Elder Durrant