E-mail 02/24/2014

Wow this week has gone by so fast!  Well this week I decided to finish reading the Book of Mormon in English.  My first six weeks in the field I was trying to study completely in Spanish, but that wasn`t working out for me so I went back to studying in English.  Right now I have been studying about half and half, like for example I would have my English scriptures and my Spanish Preach My Gospel and other material.  But I have felt that now that I can read and understand in Spanish, and that I have not learned to speak as well as I should, I have decided to finish the Book of Mormon one last time in English and then put them in my luggage until I come home, so if I have free time (which doesn`t happen a lot) I start to read. Right now I am in Mormon 3 and I will probably finish in the next few days. Then I will be studying completely in Spanish.

It might sound like something hard but I can read and understand it just fine. It`s just Isaiah that`s particularly hard. Like for example, I came across this word, I don`t remember right now what the word was, but when I looked it up in the dictionary, well I had no Idea what it meant in English so I had to look it up in my English dictionary. But as for the rest of the scriptures it`s not so hard. 

Well in my attempts to read whenever I could I decided to bring along my pocket sized Book of Mormon (which just about all my companions have been trying to get their hands on and which is really hard to get a hold of here in Mexico) and well we were looking for a reference (una Alma) that someone gave us, but we couldn`t find it so we were asking around to see if anyone knew him and we came across someone that didn`t speak Spanish (or he was just messing with us) well he was born in Colorado (which is Spanish for faded red) and he is Catolico (Catholic) and was married to a testigo de jehovar (Jehovah's Witness) but then got divorced. When he was 6 he went to one of our churches for about four years and had many other experiences with religion, so I asked him if he heard about the Book of Mormon and he said he did but not much, so I told him the story of Lehi and his family and then offered him a Spanish Book of Mormon, then he asked if I had one in English, so without thinking about it I pulled out my pocket sized one and handed it to him. It had to have been the Holy Ghost that told me to do it because afterwards I thought about what I just did. I gave him my pocket sized Book of Mormon with markings in it. So I hope it does some good. 

Well that`s basically what happened this week.

!Les amo¡ y ¡animo!

Elder Durrant

E-mail 02/17/2014

Wow this week has been amazing!  Well we finally got two for sure investigators but it just so happens that they are both teachers, so they don´t have much time, but we are working on it. :)  The other thing that happened this week is we had a Stake Conference (here they have two every year) and there was a Seventy there, Elder Villaloboz (I believe that´s how he spells it) it´s like saying wolf valley.  He was very strong with his words and very direct.  If you want an idea of what it was like, read Alma 5, that´s just about how direct he was.  It was pretty awesome to listen to him.  We had a Priesthood Meeting Saturday and a General Meeting that night and a General Meeting Sunday.  There was very few people during the Priesthood, double for the Saturday General and a lot during the Sunday.  They had nice messages I liked a lot of them, but then Elder Villaloboz got up and told them right off the bat that they weren´t there for the Saturday meetings and that they should have been, that as members we should be where we should be, when we should be there.  Then he related the story of Abraham and Isaac, when he went to sacrifice his son and how we are all of the blessings, because Abraham was faithful and that the angel arrived just in time to stop him from sacrificing his son.  Then he said, can you imagine if the angel arrived just a little bit late.  Something else that he said was that the biggest mistake of a young man is to not go on a mission.  There is a problem here with a lot of young men who won´t go on a mission.  He also talked about true conversion, well first he asked people to raise there hand if they where converts and then if they were born in the covenant, and then he asked for those that were truly converted.  Well a few hands went up and then he asked if they were willing to stay in the church if they went through the hardest things in their lives and a bunch of other things.  After he said that, the hands start to lower little by little.  There was so much that he talked about in the three different meetings and was very direct about it all, there was no if, ands, or buts about it.  So well that is the big thing that happened this week.

Les Amo

Elder Durrant

Oh and I forgot, there was two baptism after the Sunday meeting of investigators of mine when I was in Rio Grande, so it was nice to see them, and the other members from Rio Grande.

E-mail 02/10/2014

Wow this week has been full of work.  Well this area hasn`t progressed in a long time and it is supper tough to get into the houses to teach, we are starting to find new people to teach and a few of them seem very promising.  The investigators that they were teaching before I got here, still haven`t let us teach them, it`s been three weeks of "oh we don`t have time right now, come back later" so we are working on getting more investigators, but it`s not going as well as I would like.  But things are getting better, just slowly. 

Something I forgot to mention the last cambio (change) we got a bunch of American sisters here in Mexico, which is weird because I thought Mexico was closed to American sisters.  But one of them is in my district and well she has been sick almost every week and this week she was so sick that she was in her bed for three days, so she will be going home this week :(   It made me think how short the time here really is, and that we should really take advantage of it.

Oh and we went to the mine here in Fresnillo again, I don`t remember if I said anything last time, but yes there is an active mine here.  The majority of people here work there, and they have a section for tours and a small zoo outside, it`s pretty awesome.

There`s a tiger there, but it wasn`t as active as it was the last time, last time it was jumping against the window.

¡Les amo!   (I love you!)

Elder Durrant

E-mail 02/03/2014

¡¿Cómo están?!   (How are you!)

Wow their has been so much this week that I don´t even remember what happened but I will do my best to remember for you guys. Let´s see here, we are working on finding people to teach, we have been asking references whenever we can and contacting people in the streets (or wherever it´ll be), and we have been trying to get some more members involved in the work.  Oh and my companion convinced me to get up and bear my testimony. I prefer to let the members have the time, but it was good. I have been working on getting a better accent (yes mom that means when I get home it´ll be even harder for you to understand me).  My companion says that I am getting better. I am working on memorizing the articles of faith in Spanish, (yea I know it´s about time I did that).  Well I hope you don´t get mad at me because of the short email.  Their were some big things that happened this week; it´s just that they're personal to other people and I don´t feel like I should share them.  The work moves forward; we are trying to get this area and Ward to have more baptisms but that´s about it.  We haven´t been able to teach much this week , just a lot of searching.

There was something funny that happened this week; so the word "mande" is a polite way of saying "what did you say?" and it sounds like the English word "Monday."  So my comp asked me what is "Lunes" in English, so I said "Monday," so he asked me again, and I said "Monday," so he asked me again. We went about five times and he got a little frustrated with me, so I explained to him that the word "mande" in Spanish sounds the same as the English word "Monday" and that "Monday" really was "Lunes" in English. I thought you might get a kick out of that one.

 

¡Les Amo!  (Love them!)

Elder Durrant