Hey fam,
The feeling at the end of the mission is really weird. I feel like the days crawl by. This is also due to the fact that we´re doing a lot of finding activities right now and those aren´t the most exciting things ever. But at the same time I feel like the weeks are flying by. Just two more of them and we´ll be seeing and talking with each other face to face, no more of this email stuff that we´ve had to do for the last two years haha. by the way I love your emails, I´m just sick of writing them! This week was actually a really great one in the end. We struggled really bad finding throughout the first four days of the week, and to complicate things we weren´t able to see Mariela or Jorge all week long due to their work and Jorge going out of town Thursday, and getting home on Sunday. That left us with only one really good investigator that we could teach every other day. That´s just a downer looking at your agenda at the beginning of the day and just seeing blank space, and having to think so so hard of how we can effectively fill that day full of investigators, finding, and teaching opportunities without any set appointments. The hardest part is that I, being the trainer, am 100% responsible for how our plans are made and carried out. Sometimes it´s hard. So like I said throughout the first 4 days we saw little to no success. We were considering an emergency fast on Saturday, when the heavens smiled upon us! We were able to find 4 new investigators and teach about 4 to 5 lessons! We were both so relieved and felt so blessed that our prayers and our beggings (i was begging every prayer for success haha) were answered.
We looked up some of the people´s addresses that we had already contacted to see if we could find anyone again and begin teaching them. We went first to look for a kid named Nicolas. He was really cool with us and we talked for a little while about sports, he plays rugby, and he told us that we could come back. When we went back, we talked with his sister and she let us in. We were first just teaching her, Kata, and her little sister, Valentina. Then Nicolas and his friend walked in. They were all really attentive and asked a lot of good questions. Later on in the lesson two more of Nicolas´ friends showed up, so by the end of the lesson we were teaching 7 people. Nicolas, his sisters, and one of his friends, Gonzalo, were the most interested and we have return appointments to teach them all today so hopefully everything goes well there. After that we went and knocked some doors and found a woman named Edith. She let us in and barely 10 seconds passed before she was in tears explaining to us how lonely she is and how much she misses her family, her son died when he was 20 and her mother died 4 years ago. Besides those two people she only had one other person with whom she had contact and that´s her daughter. She now has been living for 4 years alone, with only an occasional visit from her daugher and her grandson for company. I´ve never felt so bad for somebody, and we both felt the spirit strongly as we talked about the reality of Christ´s atonement and His resurrection and the fact that if we live the gospel we can have an eternal family. She ended the lesson with a big grin on her face and invited us to come back. We both left there feeling so grateful for the knowledge that we have about the gospel and the knowledge that we truly can live together as a family forever. I love this gospel and can´t stop giving thanks to God for being born into this church and having the family that I have. This message made Edith smile and that´s what it´s all about, bringing happiness to a world that is getting lost in sin and sadness. We have high hopes for her.
The baptisms that we had planned for this week didn´t work out becuase Mariela was working so much that we weren´t able to teach her. We´re planning to have two baptismal services this weekend, with both Mariela´s. One is good to go, already passed her interview and loves everything we teach. Pray for us that we can find the other Mariela, who also has a great testimony (she read to 3 Nephi in 3 weeks) but it´s just been so hard to find and teach her. She only needs a few more teachings, her baptismal interview, and then she´ll be ready to go for this Sunday. Jorge kind of worries us cuz he has very little support from his family, and has a lot of ties to the Catholic church, but little by little is gaining a testimony of his own and knows that the teachings that we´ve given him are true. Pray that he can read the book of mormon, so that his testimony is strengthened and he can take that step of faith to be baptized.
Thanks for all your emails and love and support and I wanted to give a shout out to BYU for their 14-13 win over Ole Miss!! President Humphrey and I talked about it for a while on Sunday cuz he came to our Stake Conference. He´s a great guy and I love him and his wife.
love you all tons,
Tanner