Alumnos y Porristas

May 23, 2011




Hello Family.

This week was much better than the previous one. The principal reason being that I now have a new companion, Elder Cawley. He's really quiet, extremely quiet but cool enough we get along pretty well. Also with Elder Green gone we can now try to do different things in the area, the results of which are showing. The area has been pretty dead lately but this week we've been focusing more on finding new people to teach, we picked up a few new investigators this week and we've done some other adventurous activities.

So... With our favorite family of nutcases,. we had a long discussion about commitments and priorities. They admitted that they hadn't been that great lately and we recommitted to the whole thing. Rosa said she wouldn't be able to make it to church this week but next week she could. Irma could make it to church but she didn't want to because it starts at 9:00. What followed was pretty funny. One of Irma's daughters comes in and says that they don't need to go to church on sunday because the world was going to end on saturday. Now we had heard this from some other people previously last week. Apparently someone somewhere that it says in the bible that the world was to end on may 21st at 3:00 or perhaps 6:00, and it's been spreading around. We just laughed but they all were actually concerned about it. We told them that it was extremely unlikely, if not impossible for two reasons. First, that Jesus said that nobody, not even himself, knows when that's going to be. Only God the Father knows. And Second that there are certain events that need to pass before such a thing happens. We told them a little bit about what the book of Revelations says (which is odd since most people try to use that book against us, this was one of the few occasions I've had actually using it to prove one of our points). We told them a bit about what is supposed to happen with Armageddon and the two prophets being slain in Jerusalem as they are defending the Jews. And we said that obviously none of that has happened yet so therefore unless all of that happens on within the next day then the world was not going to end on saturday. Now by this point we had wandered far off the subject of commitments, baptism, priorities, and going to church. Luckily though an opportunity came up to help them realize some of the things that they need to be doing. I said: "Okay let's suppose for a moment that world is indeed going to end on saturday. We used that to point out that life is short and the time to repent, be baptized, and go back to church is now. Now is the time to focus on important things. Work and other stuff is important but the things of God are even more important, so they should reorganize their priorities a little bit and put God as #1. Meaning that they needed to read the chapters we leave them to read, pray, and go to church and stop giving us lame excuses for not doing this things. So it went pretty well, and since then we've been calling them every single night reminding them to do their homework, and to go to church on sunday. Well sunday came and Irma and one of her daughters actually showed up! A half hour late but they came none-the-less. It was the first time she's come in like 7 years. I was surprised.

I think that's about all of the interesting things that happened this week. On saturday we had a soccer game with our ward and the other spanish ward that shares our chapel. not too many people came, even though we announced it a month ago and have announced every sunday since. But we had a good 20 or so people come and we played for most of saturday evening. It was great to take a break from the monotony of driving around and finding people not home or knocking doors. Just a couple of hours of playing soccer in the park. It was great. The other elders had some investigators come too and they got to know some people and see that the mormons aren't as boring as they had always thought.

Well that's about everything. The pictures are the following: 1) The Granados family and Rubiel, they left to Mexico, they were originally going to leave in June but something happened, we're not sure what and we didn't really want to know the details but for whatever reason someone threatened to kill them all, and I guess it was serious enough that they decided to leave a month early. Hno. Granados is not in the picture, he left to Colorado but he and his wife were sealed in the Temple just a few weeks ago. The mom and the kids; Irais, Ana, and Eric. Left for Veracruz and the Hno. is going to go down there and join them in a couple months. Rubiel just lives there with them, so we got a picture with them the night before they left.

The rest of the pictures are of with Hna. Silva making tamales. She was making Tamales one night and I asked if she could show me how to make one. So I made one. It's really not that hard, I don't know why they always make such a big fuss about making tamales, my companion and I concluded that they fuss about how time comsuming it is because every time they make tamales they make like 50 million of them.

Yup, so that's all for today. I hope you all have great week.

-- Elder Rice