The Gospel Blesses Families

Oye quates!

It’s good to hear from you guys! Dad, I’m pretty impressed by the yard work you did. It reminds me of an example that I used in our district meeting this week. We talked about how in a harvest it’s better to use a harvesting machine rather than a lousy sickle and compared it to the work we do by ourselves and our work combined with the members.

This week was awesome, but in a different way haha. Tuesday was our first full day and I remember being super excited for our first full day to get out and kick some butt in the new area. Well...I think we might have contacted over 20 people that day and not one of them wanted anything to do with us or our message. There are a lot of churches here and a lot of very deep Catholic roots. In the mission this zone is known as the "zona de castigo", or the punishment zone, because nobody gets baptized here. I realized pretty quickly that Elder Comfort was going to need lots of help with his Spanish since he is a brand new missionary, and I felt a little overwhelmed by all of this. I thought a lot about that talk that I sent you guys and I’ve been trying to have the faith to make things happen. So, we approached things from a different direction. We started visiting all of the members that live in our area and to get them excited about doing missionary work. Many of them were shocked that we were even visiting them and lots of them are working with people that will eventually be referrals. I’ve had to have extra patience and humility this week, giving Elder Comfort opportunities to learn and teach, and it’s awesome to see how much he’s grown in just this week.

Wednesday we had a meeting in Managua and it was kinda weird seeing all the office elders and President and his wife. I missed them a lot and it seems like I left the office so long ago.

There are a bunch of other people living where we do and there is a family there that we’ve started talking to a lot. Since day one I’ve felt the need to share the gospel with them and this week little miracles have happened. The other day I was talking to Marcela, the wife, and she got to talking about marriage and families and stuff. She explained how she feels like she can never find true happiness in her family as tears welled up in her eyes. It felt good to bear my testimony of how the gospel blesses our families and to be able to talk about my family and the blessings we’ve received. As we were walking out last night her husband called us back and asked us for a pamphlet. We have an appt. with them tomorrow morning. I think I was sent here to baptize that family :)

Yesterday was pretty funny. We have one of those automatic pianos in our chapel where if you just touch the keys it plays the hymns. Well, Elder Comfort doesn’t know anything about playing piano but he can touch the keys with a decent rhythm (or so I thought). We couldn’t help but laugh as the members sang about 4 seconds ahead or behind the piano. I’m really starting to love this area, even with its difficulties, and I don’t even want to think about leaving it yet haha. Don’t worry, I’ll keep going strong and yes, time is going way to fast. Love you guys a bunch!

Love,

Elder Ward