Bostesa

July 12, 2010

Hello Family.

This week was yet another slow week, at least the World Cup is finally over, maybe we'll be able to teach people now and maybe the members will actually start coming to Church. It's been raining quite a bit as well but we haven't seen any flooding of any kind. We're pretty sure that our area is getting closed down. Kind of a shame since it was just opened but, it's not just because of the lack of work but also because the Branch itself is moving to a new building! It was originally supposed to go down to a chapel somewhere near the Houston Temple. But that's not going to work so they're thinking about renting a building somewhere in Tomball, TX. Which is the "city" just south of where I am in Magnolia. Who knows what will happen, all we have to go on are rumors and things. So hopefully in a couple of weeks I will be in a new area. I'm getting real tired of being out in the sticks. I want to go down south within Houston itself, somewhere where there are actually lots of hispanics. Where I am right now is pretty much straight out of King of the Hill. In fact I was just telling Adam in an e-mail that if you want to try and catch of glimpse of what my mission has been like just combine King of the Hill with Nacho Libre.

So, once again this week was slow, lots of tracting and little teaching, yet it was a great week as we've witnessed a couple of miracles. The first involves an investigator who lives with a less active family. We tried to teach him last transfer but he had absolutely no interest whatsoever, the sincere testimonies from us and the family simply bounced off of him. So we thought out of the box and came up with a new tactic. We decided to start a family scripture study with them. We go over every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday night and read one chapter from the Book Of Mormon and discuss it a little bit. We started in 1 Nephi chapter 1 and are going through the story of Nephi. And wow it's worked out great, if I've learned anything on my mission recently it's that I've realized more fully the power of the Book of Mormon. This guy is getting way into it now, into the story and the gospel principles found in the stories are sinking in. I have high hopes for him.

The second miracle consists of a less active woman who is an "under-the-radar" member. She's been inactive the last few years of her life. We found her last transfer and she told us of her miraculous conversion story of how some missionaries knocked on her door just before she was going to commit suicide. She expressed her desire to return to church. We invited her to chruch and set up a return appointment. We never saw nor heard from her again for another 2 months until we got a call from her wanting us to come back over. We went over and she told us how her father was about to kick her and her three small children out of his house, she has no job and nowhere to go. Her father gave her a week. She asked us if we knew anywhere she could go. We invited her to church to meet the members who might know of places. Then we emphasized that far more important was her spiritual well being, we told her that the Lord wants to help her, all she has to do is ask and do his will. We challenged her to pray and read the Book of Mormon on a daily basis, she agreed. We went by her two days later and she had read despite not being able to understand what she read, never-the-less she said she felt an inner peace while reading the book. We challenged her to keep reading and to come to church the very next day, we had a member who would pick her up. She agreed, the next morning we got a call from her and she told us that she had run into a friend of her mother who she had not seen for a decade or so. This friend offered her to live in a trailer she owned, free of charge until she got some income going. She was beside herself with excitement and gratitude, as I was on the phone with her I could not help but feel overawed, she had asked the Lord in prayer for somewhere to go and read the Book of Mormon and the very next day she had somewhere to go. It was amazing and I am humbled and grateful that I was able to be the Lord's messenger and to relate to her what he requires of us.

That was an excerpt from my weekly e-mail to President Hansen this morning, that would be why it's sounds a little more "spiritual" than what I usually e-mail to y'all. But yeah, it was really neat seeing stuff like that. We may not have baptized many people here but we have brought quite a few lost sheep back into the fold.

The pictures are of a tiny, tiny frog we found one day while it was raining. And of a big, big spider that we also found. The locals call it a "Yo-Yo Spider" and supposedly they are perfectly harmless, what they do is they put in their hands, close their hands around it. Let it sit in there for a while while it makes a web then you open your hands and fling it out and it'll bounce back. So like a sort of paddle ball action, just bouncing this spider in and out of your hands. We didn't know any of this when we caught it. We caught it as we were helping one of the other Elder's investigators clean out this nasty trailer. It was a scary process catching that thing, it was hanging in this huge web. But we got and took pictures and videos of it before we threw it in a fire-ant hill and watched it get devoured. Still, even if it supposedly harmless I don't think I'd touch that thing. Okay well that's enough for today. Hope you all have a good week, peace....

-- Elder Rice